That Bad, Huh?

Okay, folks, here we are at the fourth entry in my reverse-order rewatch of the eleven Star Wars movies: Return of the Jedi. To give a little context, 16-year-old me left the theater in 1983 extremely disappointed with this one on opening day. Luke and Leia are siblings? Darth Vader is a weird-looking bald guy under his mask, in heavy pancake makeup? Han Solo basically does nothing right in the entire movie? Teddy bears? Are you fucking kidding me -- teddy bears?!?

In the years since then, I've come to consider Luke's moment of triumph in this film to be one of the greatest scenes in movie history. And the line, "I am a Jedi, like my father before me," may be my favorite piece of dialogue in any movie ever. But wow, do I still squirm at some of the stuff in this film.

So how is it as a follow-on to the next three episodes in the saga?

Let me tell you, maybe it's just me, but I don't think ROTJ benefits from being viewed directly after The Force Awakens and the other two Disney sequels. And it's not just that virtually every aspect of filmmaking advanced so significantly in the 30 years between the end of the OT and the debut of the ST. The plain fact is, the Disney films are simply better structured than this one is, and all three of the OT leads put in better, more nuanced performances in the later movies than they did in ROTJ -- and were given better dialogue to deliver as well.

Whew. Well, with that said, here are some interesting things I noticed or had reconfirmed this time around.

• When Artoo and Threepio are approaching Jabba's palace, Threepio keeps going on about how scared Artoo would be if he'd heard half the things Threepio has about Jabba. Artoo's response is a series of  quivering, trembling bleeps that I always previously considered a kind of dumb attempt to make Artoo seem skittish and easily spooked by Threepio's greater knowledge. But this time I realized that actually, Artoo knows tons more about Jabba than Threepio. He remembers everything that happened on Tatooine in The Phantom Menace, as well as everything that happened with the Hutts during the Clone Wars series. He's not scared by what Threepio says -- he's mocking him with those beeps. He's basically saying, "Oh no! I'm so frightened, Threepio! What ever will we do???" Threepio is the one who's terrified, and although he tries to get Artoo to agree with him, the astromech has complete faith in Luke's plan from start to finish.
• Rogue One Mon Mothma greatly improves ROTJ Mon Mothma, whom I used to find absolutely insipid.
• With the revelations in the sequels about Leia's Jedi powers, the fact that she has memories of her mother and Luke does not kind of implies that her Force abilities are inherently greater than Luke's. I used to hate the fact that Revenge of the Sith committed the apparent continuity error of having Padmé die without Leia meeting her. Now I think the implications of that are pretty damn awesome.
• Andy Serkis' performance as Snoke in the Throne Room sequence of TLJ is fantastically reminiscent of Ian McDiarmid's Palpatine delivering the same sorts of taunts to Luke at the end of ROTJ.
• Force Ghost Hayden Christensen > Force Ghost Sebastian Shaw. I never felt even a remote connection to the spectral Anakin Skywalker showing up at the end next to Obi-Wan and Yoda,  because I had no investment in Shaw's one-scene portrayal of Anakin before his death. Putting Hayden in the final scene instead does a couple of things for me: first, it brings a much greater sense of resolution relative to the prequels, and second, Anakin's visible youth is a bit of a poke at Old Ben and Yoda, who are now eternally locked in their aged, proven-wrong forms, while Anakin has returned to his true self.

Next up ... The Empire Strikes Back!

The Belonging You Seek Is Not Behind You ... It Is Ahead

Third up in my reverse chronological order viewing of all 11 Star Wars movies: The Force Awakens!

I think I actually noticed more things that sit differently in TFA, after The Rise of Skywalker, than struck me in The Last Jedi. Here are a few of them:

• When BB8 tells Rey that where he comes from is classified, Rey says, "Me too. Big secret." It's a cute, flippant remark on her part -- but now we know that it's also completely true in a huge way.
• The scene where Snoke tells Ren, "There has been an awakening" is made even more similar to the Vader/Palpatine scene in Empire Strikes back by the knowledge that Palpatine was behind Snoke all along. Both have the holo-projected master looking down on the apprentice and warning of a new enemy arising.
• When Finn tells Rey, "I was ashamed of what I was," his resolve to be better than his past is setting her up for finding her own resolve against her origins two movies down the road.
• There's a fresh and dark second meaning to Maz's line, "Whoever you were waiting for on Jakku, they're never coming back. But there's someone who still could."
• When Starkiller Base destroys the Hosnian system, Finn is the first one we see turning to look at the sky. He does so because he hears screams of shock and terror ... but we don't actually see anyone around him screaming or wailing. We do hear almost identical cries on Hosnian Prime as the people there see the blast burning through their atmosphere. Was anyone at Maz's place actually screaming at the lightshow in the sky? Or did Finn hear the people of Hosnian Prime through the Force? Is it possible that when he shouts at Rey in TROS, "I never told you --" the end of the sentence might have been, "-- I felt the destruction of the Republic through the Force"?
• In light of the TROS scene between Ben and Han, a lot of Leia's dialogue sounds eerily prescient: "Luke is a Jedi. You're his father." And, "If you see our son, bring him home." I always previously interpreted those lines as kind of wishful thinking on Leia's part, and thought she kind of screwed Han over by encouraging him to try something that ended up getting him killed. But now we know how that last touch he gave his son, before falling off the bridge, stayed with Ben and really did end up bringing him home.
• Leia's Jedi training also puts a different light on a number of things, like her choice to say, "There's still light in him" rather than "There's still good in him." Likewise, a lot of fuss was made over the fact that Leia didn't acknowledge Chewie when the Falcon returned after Han's death. But we now know that Leia sensed who Rey was almost from the start and knew how critical it was to give her that sense of belonging that she always craved.
• When Rey has Kylo all but beaten in their lightsaber duel and is circling him like a predator, there's something in her movements that hits me as very similar to the scene in ROTS when Palpatine admits to Anakin that he's a Sith, and circles around him trying to sink his lure.

Closing thought: I have no idea how people to this very day insist that TFA is just a beat-for-beat imitation of A New Hope. I mean, the Falcon Flies Again sequence alone is absolute peak Star Wars, and there's nothing in Episode IV that remotely lines up with the duel in the snowy forest at the end -- much less the Rathtar sequence (which I love and will never understand the hatred for). This is a damn good Star Wars film, and I honestly think it's made even better by both TLJ and TROS.

There's Nothing You Can Say To Change My Mind

Well, my reverse-order rewatch of The Last Jedi was way overdue, but I finally got to it tonight. I wish I hadn't delayed so long; part of the idea behind an endeavor like this is to have the films benefit from close juxtaposition. But things have been weird lately, and a couple of nagging worries made me less enthusiastic about watching TLJ than I wanted to be. One, of course, was the exhaustingly intense squabbling in the fandom over TLJ being better than TROS or TROS being better than TLJ. There's been so much ugly strife over these films, and I didn't want it at the forefront of my thoughts as I watched. Another bit of anxiety was the possibility that rewatching TLJ would bring down my opinion of TROS ... or that having liked TROS so much would lower my appreciation of TLJ.

But after watching TROS a few weeks back and watching TLJ tonight, I can safely say, people who hold one of the two up as a masterpiece while trashing the other are kind of full of it. Either they're both great filmmaking, or neither one is. Both of them have lots of dumb things in them, and both of them have amazing scenes and performances and a terrific underlying spirit.

I'm going to go with both of them being great, and please don't bother trying to debate me on that.

Anyway, some thoughts on TLJ in the context of TROS:

Knowing that Leia completed her Jedi training years ago makes her Force abilities in The Last Jedi really leap out. When Kylo Ren is shooting up the cruiser and swinging around to target the bridge, the intercutting of their faces and the interaction of their expressions couldn't be more obviously a Force connection. When Leia uses the Force to fly back into the ship after the bridge gets blown out, it's clearly something she intended to do, not just an instinctive activation of latent power. When Luke arrives at the end, gives her Han's golden dice, and kisses her forehead, she totally knows that he's not really there.

Next, what's likely a very unpopular opinion: Rose Tico is just okay in this movie. Kelly Marie Tran's performance is fine but unexceptional, and the character has no developmental arc of her own to speak of. She's a foil and a catalyst for Finn's growth story, she has some endearing qualities, and she's admirable for being a very ordinary person demonstrating heroism. But while I really wish TROS had given us more of the scenes they supposedly filmed between her and Leia at the base, the people who expected Episode IX to put her on equal footing with the main three characters obviously had a whole different experience of her in this movie that I did. If TLJ had been bold enough to actually have Finn die flying into the battering ram cannon, I would have been fine with her becoming the third leg of a trio in the final movie. As it is, though, TROS really needed to showcase the relationship between Rey, Finn, and Poe, because they'd never been together prior to that. So I'm fine with her not tagging along to Pasaana and elsewhere.

Another possibly contentious admission: this viewing confirmed my opinion that people are simply off-base when they say TROS retconned TLJ or demeaned and insulted it. This movie starts off with Luke tossing away his father's lightsaber, but it ends with him deliberately choosing to appear on Crait with that same saber. We're expressly shown that he has changed his thinking in radical ways over the course of the film. He spends most of the movie insisting that Kylo is beyond redemption, then tells Leia at the end that, "No one's ever really gone," in response to her saying that her son is truly lost. He literally does exactly what he said he wouldn't do by walking out with a laser sword to face down the whole first order and be the inspiring hero Rey asked him to be at the start. So in TROS, when he talks about having been wrong, he's only stating out loud the things we see him acting upon at the end of TLJ.

Likewise, the next film doesn't run down Admiral Holdo or write off the Holdo Maneuver as a fluke. It establishes very plainly that people are aware of Holdo's heroic sacrifice and want to be like her. It even shows a Holdo Maneuver having worked over Endor at the close of the movie. The fact that Poe thinks it can't be reliably duplicated isn't a diss -- it's a testament to how well Holdo timed her lightspeed jump and how well she piloted the ship.

So ... how did The Last Jedi hold up in the context of The Rise of Skywalker? Well, the fact is, the unexpected death of Snoke ought to rank right up there with "I am your Father" as one of the great cinematic shockers in science fiction. The confrontation between Luke and Kylo on Crait is similarly right up there with some of the best moments in all of Star Wars. And the reveal that Luke is still back on Ahch-To is frankly genius-level stuff. I saw TLJ nine or ten times in the theater, and that revelation audibly blew people's minds over and over.

It's a heck of a film.

He Went Completely the Other Way

I've decided to try a Star Wars viewing order I don't think I've ever heard anyone talk about. Now that The Rise of Skywalker is on Disney+, I'm going to make my way through all eleven films in reverse chronological order: IX, VIII, VII, VI, V, IV, Rogue 1, Solo, III, II, I. Whatever interesting insights or observations occur to me, I'll blog as I go along.

First up, The Rise of Skywalker!

Let me say, for all the fuss about Finn never saying what it was that he meant to tell Rey, I think it's become pretty obvious he was going to tell her about finding his connection to the Force. Right from the first sequence of TROS that he's in, he's getting feelings and intuitions about things that haven't happened yet or are happening elsewhere. I don't think I paid any mind to it while in the theater (six times), but when he says, "I was just thinking that," in response to Poe's suggestion that they boulder the TIE fighters, it's not just because he's in tune with Poe and they're both strategizing -- it's because he's in touch with the Force and getting impressions of his surroundings or of impending possibilities.

I'll also say that from a purely filmic perspective, Rose Tico is actually in this movie a lot for someone who isn't playing a major plot role. I think she has more screen time than Hux, who was downgraded from one of the principal villains in the first two films to a bit part in this one. And of course, Captain Phasma didn't come back at all. Now, there's probably someone out there right now ranting at the computer screen about how JJ Abrams and Chris Terrio made a horrible mistake in choosing not to give her a major plot role, but (a) I believe it when they say she originally had a much larger part, but that many of her lines were cut because they were scenes with Leia where the CGI wasn't working the way they wanted, and (b) it's actually really hard to give large numbers of characters significant plot roles in the course of a film. Yeah, yeah, you've seen it lots of times, but that doesn't make it easy. And when you're plotting a story, you inevitably make choices about where your focus will be. For TROS, the filmmakers chose to leave Captain Phasma out, cut Hux off at the knees, have Maz Kanata appear without showing any of her plucky personality, put Luke in only a single scene, and separate Rose from the big three characters so that the audience would have an important character back at the base to play against the hodgepodge of repurposed Leia footage. This isn't some kind of crime against humanity; Yoda played an enormous role in the middle installment of the OT, and then had almost nothing to do in Return of the Jedi. Count Dooku was the main villain of Episode II and gets only a single scene in Return of the Sith. Boba Fett was hyped like crazy for Empire and sparked a fan base that has spent 40 years waiting for him to have a major film role, but literally got thrown down a hole in ROTJ. All three of those disappointed me, as did Rose's small role in TROS. The tradeoff is, we got to see our three main characters interacting a ton in this film, unimpeded by any need to establish Rose's place in what would then be a quartet instead of a trio. And for people who thought Rose was merely okay in TLJ, that was probably a much bigger payoff. People need to stop treating straightforward story choices like personal affronts to their very being. You can be disappointed without screaming that the screenwriters need to rot in hell for all eternity.

Okay, getting off that particular soap box and maybe onto another one ... like the prequels, TROS is a movie that does a huge amount of storytelling through implication, putting its trust in the viewer to connect the dots. Kylo Ren is the Supreme Leader, and from the conference room scene, we know he can pretty much do whatever he wants. He's clearly chosen to elevate General Pryce over Hux, yet keeps Hux around just for the purpose of rubbing his nose in his fall from near-greatness. None of these three characters has a single line of dialogue explaining that motivation or describing Pryce being put in charge or Hux being functionally demoted. But by playing the characters off one another in the way that they do, the filmmakers tell us plainly what has happened in the year since Kylo took over.

The same thing occurs when Rey calls Leia "master." That one word makes it clear that Leia hasn't just been helping Rey train because she's the leader of the Resistance and tangentially knows stuff about the Jedi from her brother. She's taken her on as a padawan, which validates the way Leia saves herself from the bridge explosion in TLJ. That wasn't just a fluke or an instinctual use of the Force; it was the action of a powerful Force user who fully knows what she's doing -- to the extent of comfortably taking on the role of master to an apprentice. It also explains why Leia goes up to Rey and hugs her when she gets off the Falcon at the end of The Force Awakens. The two of them have never met, but Leia knows there's already an important bond there because of Han, and because of their Force connection.

When Rey watches the children laughing at puppets in the desert of Pasaana, we're being told that she recognizes and appreciates their freedom to be children, despite living in a physically harsh environment similar to the one where she grew up. Also on Pasaana: when Kylo steals Rey's necklace, the camera stays on her while she's thinking through the implications of him taking it. She doesn't tell us or her friends that she knows the necklace will let Kylo figure out where they are; we know her thought process without any dialogue at all.

The whole movie is full of that kind of stuff. This is JJ's famous "mystery box" technique, which he gets criticized for all the time because people think it's an empty trick rather than a thoughtful method of storytelling. By showing us something that provides us the opportunity to fill in the blanks ourselves, he's able to squeeze a much greater amount of story into the film and keep it moving at a much faster pace, because the characters don't need to tell each other and the audience every little thing. Not only that, but since we're filling it in ourselves, it becomes more meaningful to us and involves us more deeply than if we were led through it by the hand with dialogue.

There's lots more I could say about this movie, but I'll leave it here for now. For one thing, I think it's very likely that rewatching The Last Jedi next, even more connections within TROS will come bubbling up for me.

Overall: The Rise of Skywalker is a tremendously fun movie that ties together all three of the sequel films as well as the saga itself. We start with Palpatine and with Anakin being foretold as the one who would bring balance to the Force, and we end with Palpatine and with Anakin telling Rey that she can return things to balance too.

I Guess I Was Wrong. There Was No Danger At All.

Okay, so I’m going through the movies in a slow-mo marathon of one every couple of weeks in the runup to Episode IX, and tonight I watched Attack of the Clones.

I always go into it worrying that somehow, I’ll finally see what the naysayers see and the film will let me down. But nope, every time it’s miles above I and III, and above most of ROTJ (though of course it can’t touch “I am a Jedi, like my father before me”).

Not only are the colors and landscapes and music just gorgeous from an aesthetic point of view, and not only does the movie deliver the thematic heart of the entire prequel trilogy, but it's rip-roaring fun from beginning to end, with only a few hiccups along the way.

I have a vivid recollection of being in the theater on opening night and seeing Obi-Wan jump through that window without a second's hesitation and deciding right then and there that, unlike The Phantom Menace, this was damn well a Star Wars movie. 

So here's a list of some of the things I love about Star Wars Episode II.

The big silver flying wing approaching Coruscant from the bottom up, rolling over to re-orient itself, gliding across the clouds and then down and through their misty obscurity. Absolutely beautiful, with terrific, moody music accompanying it.

Mace Windu patronizingly telling Senator Amidala that Count Dooku couldn't possibly be behind the assassination attempt on her because Dooku used to be a Jedi, so it simply wasn't in his character. The Jedi are meant to be putzes in the prequel trilogy, which a bafflingly large number of fans manage to overlook or deliberately ignore, and Windu's mansplaining here really hammers the point home.

Virtually every line Ian McDiarmid speaks.

Small echoes of Jake Lloyd in Hayden Christensen's performance as Anakin. One might argue that they're simply both failing as actors in the same stilted way, while speaking lines that Lucas wrote in the same stilted way, but the fact is, if you listen closely, their dialogue and delivery is extremely consistent. The way Anakin interrupts Padme on Naboo when she says he's just a Padawan learner harkens right back to his "I'm a person, and my name is Anakin," line when she calls him a slave in Episode I.

Jar Jar's dramatically reduced yet much more important role. He is still annoying, but he's there for a clear purpose, which we finally see when he plays the patsy by making the motion to give Palpatine emergency powers.

Anakin's rebellious insistence that "Investigation is implied in our mandate," and the awkward discomfort his argument with Obi-Wan engenders in everyone else in the room. The fact is, he's right. But Obi-Wan is being too by-the-book and too I'm-your-teacher to see or admit it.

The speeder chase. Sure, parts of it are cheesy, but it's a sustained sequence of the Jedi being absolutely amazing, doing the things they're good at, full of great kinetics, wild sound effects, and multiple holy-crap-did-he-really-just-do-that? moments.

Obi-Wan's gentle chastisement of Anakin when he catches up to him outside the club. He truly feels like a patient mentor here.

Anakin's shift from "Who hired you? Tell us," to "Tell us NOW," and the look of hopeful respect Obi-Wan gives him in between the two lines.

Jango Fett.

The scene of Padme packing, where she very reasonably defends Obi-Wan's actions as a mentor in response to Anakin's teen surliness. A lot of people find Anakin too immature and creepy in this scene, but that's pretty much the whole point. And Padme deals with his immaturity perfectly ... up until his gaze unsettles her.

Yoda bemoaning the fact that even some of the older, more experienced Jedi have become too sure of themselves. He's going down the hall with Obi-Wan and Mace Windu, who nod knowingly at his wisdom -- and all three of them fail to realize that they're the ones he's really talking about. The irony is absolutely savage.

Dexter Jettster, the four-armed diner owner. He's so amiable and Obi-Wan is so clearly delighted by him as a friend. It's also clear that he has more than a touch of unsavoriness in his backstory, and that presages Ben's ability to negotiate the scum and villainy of the cantina in Episode IV.

"Aggresive negotiations."

Anakin's dislike of sand, which tons of people seem to think is dumb because it comes out of nowhere and is basically a dude saying, "I don't like that" in response to his crush's description of something she enjoyed. But his clumsiness at romance is totally believable given his upbringing, and the sand line is a clear call-back to his childhood and his formative identity as someone who fixed things in an environment that was constantly breaking them.

"I'd be much too frightened to tease a senator." The whole scene where Anakin and Padme debate the merits of the Republic's version of democracy just exudes the influence Palpatine's guidance has had on Anakin and foreshadows Anakin's eventual role in the dictatorship of the Empire. Yet he segues into genuine charm and humor when the object of his affection becomes concerned at the things he's saying, and deflects her worries like a true pupil of the manipulative Chancellor.

Obi-Wan inspecting the troops on Kamino. Despite a lot of weirdness and awkwardness in his dialogue with the Kaminoans, this moment is a chilling harbinger of the stormtrooper legions we know it will eventually give rise to.

The verbal duel between Obi and Jango in the Fetts' quarters. I find the feigned politeness and tension between these two endlessly entertaining, and the dialogue here is really good.

Hayden's performance during the fireplace scene on Naboo, and to a lesser extent, Natalie Portman's as well. There's a lot of truly cringe-worthy dialogue here, but Hayden delivers it like a trooper, and for the most part, Natalie does too. If the writing had been just a little bit sharper (well, maybe a lot sharper), this would have been an amazing scene.

The actual duel between Obi and Jango on the landing pad. Exciting, great music, great use of weather as both a visual backdrop and an integral part of the fight itself.

The return of Watto. Honestly, I find his scene in this film one of the best performances by a CGI character in any live-action film I know of. He's a terrible person in the way a lot of ordinary people are terrible, and yet his genuine affection for Ani and the squalor into which he has fallen bring out an unavoidable sympathy in me.

Cliegg Lars. This dude is Tatooine wrapped up in a nutshell.

The shadow-puppet imagery as Anakin prepares to go after his mother, where we see the shape of Darth Vader's helmet cast by Anakin's hair.

Anakin's "Duel of the Fates" ride through the sunset Tatooine desert. Not the greatest green-screened sequence, I'll totally admit. But it's visually stunning nonetheless, and the re-use of "Duel of the Fates" at this critical juncture in Anakin's life is a fantastic piece of musical storytelling.

Freakin' seismic charges in space. I swear, the delayed explosion sound is probably the single dumbest piece of physics in any movie ever, but it's so awesome in combination with the visuals that I love it twice as much.

The reversed Pieta image in Shmi Skywalker's death scene. It's flipped left-to-right from Michaelangelo's statue and flips mother and son as well, and it foreshadows Anakin's fall to darkness instead of a resurrection, and it's just not the kind of fine-arts allusion you expect to find in a Star Wars film.

Every word Christopher Lee says.

The garage scene where Anakin reveals his slaughter of the sandpeople. Hayden Christensen is fantastic here. You could also argue that there's a subtle critique of Padme's background as part of a colonizer culture in her willingness to tolerate her boyfriend's murder of indigenous people, right down to the children.

That incredible arena sequence and its transition to the Battle of Geonosis. These are both vast, ingeniously conceived and executed action scenes, full of eye-popping architecture, creatures, and tech designs. I could probably write a whole blog post about all the things I love from each one of them.

Obi-Wan bringing Anakin to his senses by asking what Padme would do if she were in his place. It's another bravura scene for Hayden, and here Ewan MacGregor is at a similar emotional peak.

Badass Yoda. People have weirdly mixed reactions to this, but I didn't hear anything mixed in the theater I was in on opening night. The crowd went wild. I loved it then, and I will always love it.

Dumbass Yoda. I mean, what the hell, Yoda? Don't you remember the part where, oh, an hour and a half ago, you were telling Obi and Mace what a shame it was that even the older, more experienced Jedi were getting too sure of themselves? And now you're going to just keep toying with your old Padawan Dooku and taunting him while Obi-Wan and Anakin are lying injured on the floor? This is the ultimate payoff for the earlier scene, and the cruelest commentary on the fallibility of the Jedi.

Dooku's solar sail spaceship. Another makes-no-sense torturing of the laws of physics, but it's beautiful anyway.

"Begun, the Clone War has." The first full-throated appearance of the Imperial March ringing out through the literal sunset of the Republic, with the vast machinery of conquest on full display while poor Bail Antilles is able to do nothing more than ineffectually clench his fist against a balustrade -- this is one of the most vivid and meaningful scenes of the whole saga for me.

The musical modulation from the Love Theme to the closing-credits theme. I find this a very close second place to the credit transition in The Empire Strikes Back. The juxtaposition of melancholy romance and rousing symphonic triumph nails the ending of the film for me.

So, no, not even close to a let-down, even after 17 years worth of viewings.

I Promise To Return And To Finish What I Started ...

Yikes. I just realized that I haven't posted here since before The Last Jedi came out!

Maybe I can get back in the swing of things with The Mandalorian and The Rise of Skywalker coming out ...

Burn the First Order Down!

The Last Jedi is getting close, so I decided to get started on my pre-Episode-8 marathon. Last time around, I watched everything in chronological order. This time, I decided to try the fabled "Machete" order (4, 5, 2, 3, 6), except that I'm a completist, so I'll put The Phantom Menace in there after Empire Strikes Back, and I decided I'd begin with Rogue One. Having taken the day off today, I put R1 in the Blu-ray player and got started.

Despite the weirdness of CGI Tarkin and the awful weirdness/weird awfulness of CGI Leia, I think Rogue One is the best-made Star Wars film, and this viewing did nothing to change that opinion. It's the only SW movie to pay major attention to the way external lighting conditions affect the interior illumination aboard spaceships, for instance -- one of many touches that make it such a visually beautiful and immersive film.

What I was really eager to see, though, was how it affected my viewing of A New Hope ... so eager, in fact, that since I had the day off, I put in Episode IV after little more than a lunch break.

Two things worried me, going into the experience. First, would the modern cinematic sophistication of Rogue One make the original film look really cheesy in comparison? And second, would the action-packed, drama-packed, emotion-packed war movie make Star Wars seem too slow and too popcorn-fluffy?

But I settled in and tried to put myself in the mindset of some total neophyte who had somehow watched Rogue One as its own movie and was now watching Star Wars: A New Hope as a sequel that just happened to have been made 40 years earlier.

A great deal of surprising entertainment ensued!

To start with, Imaginary-Star-Wars-Newbie Herb appreciated the 20th Century Fox fanfare reminding him that he was about to watch a really old movie. Reign in those special-effects expectations, Imaginary-Star-Wars-Newbie Herb! Then the "A long time ago..." screen popped up and made me feel like, "Oh, look! Total continuity!"

Main Title Theme, logo, and screen crawl: these piled on the expectations of a hugely different tone and approach than Rogue One. The decision to avoid a crawl in Rogue One turns the ANH crawl into a distinguishing element that completely resets the viewer's mood. Everything described in the text is familiar from the "previous" film, but couched so differently that it eases you into the film and prevents the 40-year jump in filmic technique from being too jarring. Plus, we find out the name of the creepy CGI chick from the end of R1.

And then, Bam! The Star Destroyer pursues the fleeing Rebel Alliance ship across the screen with really chintzy laser blasts and explosions, but surprisingly good ship visuals. Inside the ship, we see those two robots who showed up in the rebel base last movie for no apparent reason, and it turns out now they're going to be important.

Let me tell you, the moment Leia puts that data disk into Artoo becomes stunning in light of Rogue One. Before, the disk was just some flimsy little data-transfer device of no real significance -- all the meaning of the scene was bound up in Leia and Artoo interacting. This time, that disk was the thing everybody in the last movie died to get hold of. Suddenly, instead of being our cute robot hero being given a mission by the movie's female lead, what we see is the transfer of the most important thing in the galaxy to this little droid who doesn't even speak a human language.

What follows is a long sequence of seemingly low-key adventures (compared to the action of R1), but with the slow pace turned on its head by the knowledge that no one in the whole first half of the movie has any idea how important this information is! (Except Artoo, and he can't tell anyone.) Owen ordering Luke to take the droids into town and have their memories erased changes from a curmudgeonly uncle trying to stave off trouble into a horrifying command that would render Jyn and Cassian's deaths meaningless.

I read and heard a lot of people saying that Darth Vader's display of power at the end of R1 was inconsistent with and would undercut the drama of his actions in Episode IV. But for me, it had the opposite effect. R1 Vader does a lot of Force-lifting and throwing, but he really doesn't move any quicker than ANH Vader. And the opening of ANH shows us that Vader behaves very differently when a situation is under complete control than he did when in the middle of a pitched space battle. The 1977 Darth Vader basically served as Tarkin's henchman for most of the movie. But within the context of Rogue One, we can now see that he stands behind Tarkin not because he's a lackey, but because the two of them have very firmly established spheres of authority, and Vader is totally comfortable letting Tarkin run the bureaucratic part of the Death Star's activities.

Another cool thing about Episode IV as a direct sequel to Rogue One is the sophisticated slow build about the Jedi. In Rogue One, we hear them mentioned as figures revered by Chirrut and Baze -- and Chirrut mentions that khyber crystals power the Jedi's "lightsabers." Having this in mind when Obi-Wan reveals that he was "once a Jedi knight, like your father" creates a far greater sense of things coming together than that line does in the original film alone. This dude is one of the guys Chirrut and Baze looked up to ... and not only that, but this Luke kid who wouldn't last two seconds in a fight with Jyn or Cassian is the son of another of those guys! Seeing the lightsaber turn on for the first time becomes a fulfillment of the anticipation set up by Chirrut's reverence for the Jedi in R1.

This viewing also marked the first time I could really see Obi-Wan through Owen's eyes. Thanks to the willful isolationism of Saw Gerrera, meeting this "strange old hermit" lent a lot more credence to Owen's line, "That wizard's just a crazy old man." Saw and Obi-Wan have both sought refuge in desolate wastelands. Both of them are aging and unkempt. Obi-Wan's still in one piece, but he looks even older than Saw, and he moves like an old man as well. And the look in the Jedi's eyes when he tells Luke, "You must learn the ways of the Force, if you're to come with me to Alderaan," has a clear echo of Saw's unhinged fanaticism.

Which brings us to Luke's response that "It's all so far away." By virtue of the completely different pace, and the total naiveté of our young farmboy hero compared to the protagonists of Rogue One, this line finally feels entirely real, not just the excuse of someone who's not ready to take up the hero's mantle. What we've seen in ANH to this point really is whole worlds away from what we saw in Rogue One. Luke isn't just attempting another teenage dodge here -- he's genuinely reacting to information and events that are alien to him.

Other fun elements of Episode IV as a Rogue One sequel:

• The Easter egg of seeing those two guys who bumped into Jyn in Jeddha City again.
• The idea that ISWN Herb would have been surprised to realize that Red Leader and Gold Leader from Rogue One were actually in the 1977 film.
• The worry that "Red Five" was not necessarily an auspicious call-sign for Luke to be given.
• The extraordinary continuity of technological design, like the Imperial plug-in sockets that both Artoo and K2SO use, and the Scarif tower interfaces compared to the tractor-beam controls.
• The subtle return of that blue milk from the Erso farm.

There was more, but that's probably enough for now.

On to Episode V ... !