Six-Day Saga
Nov. 30th, 2024 05:43 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
krpalmerWhile the waning months of autumn have been my habitual time to indulge in watching through my Blu-Rays of the Star Wars movies, my parents staying over during my recovery from a broken hip made me a little self-conscious about what I had on TV. (It did happen, anyway, that I spent some weeks of recovery at our family home so that my parents could head to appointments of their own, and there I did happen to see bits of The Empire Strikes Back and Return of the Jedi on TV, which my parents had tuned into first...) At last, though, I was by myself again during a last week before my planned return to work, and that made me decide to head through the saga in six days instead of six weekends. (There have been a few times where I managed to watch six movies in the space of a regular weekend, but in more recent years that’s come to feel a bit too time-consuming.)
After having been to the special theatrical screening of The Phantom Menace in the spring only to be left wondering whether the movie had been shown in the right aspect ratio and aware the theatre lights had washed out the corners of the screen during space and other dark scenes, I decided to not “go straight back to the movie” even after a number of months, resorting instead to the “flashback order” I’ve tried in past years that “fills in the backstory” after The Empire Strikes Back. For all that this just might bring to mind how that movie had also been “there from the start” for me whereas I was at least somewhat aware of Return of the Jedi arriving, I have to admit that strict “numerical order” has become ever more agreeable for me, insistences on what makes “the best initial explanation of the concepts starting from absolute scratch” ever more distant and hypothetical. I did wonder a bit about diminishing the potential catharsis of “the Rebels succeed at last in destroying the Death Star” without three previous movies presenting a fall from general and personal grace. The thought did come to me about having first seen Rogue One amid other concerns for the future, but that movie being the single “Disney Space Movie” I watched a second time led to certain thoughts about its everybody-dies conclusion amounting not just to “sometimes sacrifice is unavoidable” but bumping up against “heroes making things up as they go along” and “what a story ought to be if it wants to hold its now grown-up first audience” amounting to “not quite fitting together in the end” (if not “having to go from movies to more economical novels.”) As ever, I suppose, six weeks (or even six days) is enough for me to deal with.
After having been to the special theatrical screening of The Phantom Menace in the spring only to be left wondering whether the movie had been shown in the right aspect ratio and aware the theatre lights had washed out the corners of the screen during space and other dark scenes, I decided to not “go straight back to the movie” even after a number of months, resorting instead to the “flashback order” I’ve tried in past years that “fills in the backstory” after The Empire Strikes Back. For all that this just might bring to mind how that movie had also been “there from the start” for me whereas I was at least somewhat aware of Return of the Jedi arriving, I have to admit that strict “numerical order” has become ever more agreeable for me, insistences on what makes “the best initial explanation of the concepts starting from absolute scratch” ever more distant and hypothetical. I did wonder a bit about diminishing the potential catharsis of “the Rebels succeed at last in destroying the Death Star” without three previous movies presenting a fall from general and personal grace. The thought did come to me about having first seen Rogue One amid other concerns for the future, but that movie being the single “Disney Space Movie” I watched a second time led to certain thoughts about its everybody-dies conclusion amounting not just to “sometimes sacrifice is unavoidable” but bumping up against “heroes making things up as they go along” and “what a story ought to be if it wants to hold its now grown-up first audience” amounting to “not quite fitting together in the end” (if not “having to go from movies to more economical novels.”) As ever, I suppose, six weeks (or even six days) is enough for me to deal with.