There's Shades of Surprise Yet

With Thanksgiving and its trips past, it seemed as good a time as any to start watching the six Star Wars movies, which I figure viewing once a year isn't too much (although I would like to find the time to watch other movies as well...) As I was thinking ahead to that, rumours there'd be another trailer for The Force Awakens with however little more information than "look! Stormtroopers!" added solidified into fact, but by that point I'd already got things under way with The Phantom Menace.

For several years, I'd held back from watching that movie for fear something inside me would come loose and I'd agree with the boundless condemnation. After being lucky and brave enough to find a nucleus of other fans willing to be positive towards all the Star Wars movies, I started watching it again, and now as I watch it my willingness to suppose some people can disagree with it pretty much evaporates and I just wonder how hard they have to work at their negativity. However, I suppose I was contemplating one thought that had happened to me just a little while ago.

In contemplating how one mainspring of the movies is Palpatine exploiting the desires of others to get what he wants, all of a sudden I was thinking a bit of how Qui-Gon uses Watto's cupidity to get not just the hyperdrive parts his money's not good enough for but also Anakin's freedom. I've become interested in considerations of Qui-Gon "a Jedi who should have lived" even as I resist proclamations that Obi-Wan is "the ideal Jedi"; seeing a similarity between him and the "central bad guy" was, perhaps, a bit unsettling. At the same time, I suspect too much a deal can be made of "moral equivalence." Something that might even be called "subtlety" in suggesting that even "the best" isn't "perfect" doesn't seem that bad, though.