Five-Week Saga
Nov. 16th, 2025 06:36 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
krpalmerWatching my way through “the six-movie Star Wars saga” every year does feel extravagant whenever I remember all the other movies I have ready to hand but don’t find the time for in other weekends. These saga journeys have been possible ever since Revenge of the Sith came out on DVD (which seems to have been the factor placing them in the fall), so I suppose I’ve more than made up for those personal wilderness years when I was half-convinced that to confront any of the Star Wars movie in any form would snap my desperate resolve and reduce me to the same savage complaints as “everyone else.” What saved me there was at last looking a little deeper into the online presence of one fanfic writer who’d seemed able to be positive about the then-incomplete-in-the-middle whole thing, too late to see what I knew from some later allusions to as a critique of “Zahn’s Thrawn novels” but not too late to join a little community of other positive fans. (I’d discovered that writer through happening to look into the columns then on fanfiction.net, and I’d been pointed to that site by other MSTing authors recommending it as an inexhaustible source of outrageous “bot fodder,” so I suppose Mystery Science Theater 3000 played a certain role in saving my own Star Wars positivity...)
In any case, so far as “switching things around” this year went, I had been thinking about the theatrical re-release of Revenge of the Sith earlier this year. I was a little tempted to “continue in numerical order” but “watch in production order,” but I suppose certain recent comments noted about production order amounting to “a cyclical history” didn’t quite appeal. (Regardless of whether a big deal is made about “a thousand generations,” “what we all heard first,” or new interpretations of “a thousand years” are pondered, I’m not all that interested in seeing the saga as a shrug that every generation manages some small accomplishment in its youth and then falls from grace...) I also went so far as to wonder if it was time at last to take a full look at the “videos made from old film scans” I’d tracked down not that many years ago, but the sense back then they hadn’t been loaded down with quite the same sanctimoniousness attached to “fan reconstructions” still seemed to have faded. I stuck with my Blu-Ray set.
Last year I’d been able to watch through that set in six days, although having the time to manage that through having broken a hip doesn’t seem like the sort of thing to recommend. I supposed that this year I’d have to resort to watching through the set in six weeks. Taking a Friday off work to have my car serviced, though, turned into managing to see Attack of the Clones and Revenge of the Sith in two days and completed the saga in a mere five weeks.
All in all the experience remained quite enjoyable, but I might have wondered a bit as to what more I could say about it until I began to dwell a bit on an unacknowledged anniversary. It may be twenty years since “the six-movie Star Wars saga” concluded, but it’s also been ten since a big deal was made of it picking up again under new management. The problem there was that after the realisation George Lucas wasn’t being consulted in even an “idea guy” capacity, the sense the upcoming visuals would be nothing more than elaborations on “the original designs,” and the insinuations from the movie-makers that things were being “done right” most of all through the ostentatious use of on-set construction, the ecstatic critical response left me with the exact same petty resentment of “roundly praised special effects movies” that I’d had to deal with about fifteen years before.
After all of that’s been said, I can still suppose my single viewing to date of The Force Awakens had packed a sense something about the movie felt sort of relentless without any of it quite feeling like overt “prequel-targeted hostility.” That feeling might only have lasted for a few hours, though, until I was struggling with the sense that loving fondness for “those good old designs on-set and snappy dialogue” didn’t extend to the actual characters from back then. “The movies were better when we used our imagination to fill in the backstory!” doesn’t quite work for me; in this case, the original movies seemed that and I had a few thoughts of “being expected to fill in between the closing celebration of The Phantom Menace and ‘Episode IV’s’ opening crawl with no promise of anything else.”
While this disillusionment preceded that of a lot of other people who were more exercised over “what had come before” now being ignored again in The Last Jedi, perhaps what helped me in the end was having already had “a complete story” in my mind. Having been exposed to “fandom in the late 1990s,” I do wonder to what extent those who made a big deal of denying the existence of the prequels altogether were in fact altogether satisfied with “the original trilogy.” Still, I am conscious that as there always seem risks to my initial admissions here in mixed company, there seem risks to these later admissions too.
In any case, so far as “switching things around” this year went, I had been thinking about the theatrical re-release of Revenge of the Sith earlier this year. I was a little tempted to “continue in numerical order” but “watch in production order,” but I suppose certain recent comments noted about production order amounting to “a cyclical history” didn’t quite appeal. (Regardless of whether a big deal is made about “a thousand generations,” “what we all heard first,” or new interpretations of “a thousand years” are pondered, I’m not all that interested in seeing the saga as a shrug that every generation manages some small accomplishment in its youth and then falls from grace...) I also went so far as to wonder if it was time at last to take a full look at the “videos made from old film scans” I’d tracked down not that many years ago, but the sense back then they hadn’t been loaded down with quite the same sanctimoniousness attached to “fan reconstructions” still seemed to have faded. I stuck with my Blu-Ray set.
Last year I’d been able to watch through that set in six days, although having the time to manage that through having broken a hip doesn’t seem like the sort of thing to recommend. I supposed that this year I’d have to resort to watching through the set in six weeks. Taking a Friday off work to have my car serviced, though, turned into managing to see Attack of the Clones and Revenge of the Sith in two days and completed the saga in a mere five weeks.
All in all the experience remained quite enjoyable, but I might have wondered a bit as to what more I could say about it until I began to dwell a bit on an unacknowledged anniversary. It may be twenty years since “the six-movie Star Wars saga” concluded, but it’s also been ten since a big deal was made of it picking up again under new management. The problem there was that after the realisation George Lucas wasn’t being consulted in even an “idea guy” capacity, the sense the upcoming visuals would be nothing more than elaborations on “the original designs,” and the insinuations from the movie-makers that things were being “done right” most of all through the ostentatious use of on-set construction, the ecstatic critical response left me with the exact same petty resentment of “roundly praised special effects movies” that I’d had to deal with about fifteen years before.
After all of that’s been said, I can still suppose my single viewing to date of The Force Awakens had packed a sense something about the movie felt sort of relentless without any of it quite feeling like overt “prequel-targeted hostility.” That feeling might only have lasted for a few hours, though, until I was struggling with the sense that loving fondness for “those good old designs on-set and snappy dialogue” didn’t extend to the actual characters from back then. “The movies were better when we used our imagination to fill in the backstory!” doesn’t quite work for me; in this case, the original movies seemed that and I had a few thoughts of “being expected to fill in between the closing celebration of The Phantom Menace and ‘Episode IV’s’ opening crawl with no promise of anything else.”
While this disillusionment preceded that of a lot of other people who were more exercised over “what had come before” now being ignored again in The Last Jedi, perhaps what helped me in the end was having already had “a complete story” in my mind. Having been exposed to “fandom in the late 1990s,” I do wonder to what extent those who made a big deal of denying the existence of the prequels altogether were in fact altogether satisfied with “the original trilogy.” Still, I am conscious that as there always seem risks to my initial admissions here in mixed company, there seem risks to these later admissions too.