MrVilliam, 1 year ago

I tried something new a few weeks ago to kick off an update machete order that I thought worked surprisingly well. I started with the start of act 3 of Rogue One. Going into that blind, not knowing the characters or what specifically they were trying to accomplish, seeing some blind monk guy walk and act by faith instead of sight to do something at a console, they sacrifice all to beam some kind of signal, and then this towering menace in all black just shows up and slaughters a bunch of dudes… It perfectly leads into IV and enhances it without the time commitment or pacing issues of watching all of Rogue One. I love Mads but we really just don’t need to even see him for the important bits of the story. Vader becomes even more mysterious and threatening this way, the “plans” in IV are given more weight and don’t just seem like a macguffin to give the empire a reason to give chase, and Luke becomes relatively more of an unlikely hero because he’s just a kid caught in the middle of a star war.

I’m not gonna say that Rogue One is bad, but for watching the entire saga it feels like a slog to watch the whole thing. As somebody who considers IV to be a 10/10 masterpiece, (especially for 1977 before anything like this existed, and before George Lucas changed shit for no reason,) I gotta know which half of IV is the half that sparks joy for you. Maybe my favorite moment in the entire franchise is when Luke storms out and looks at the twin sunset, yearning to leave his small and inconsequential life, John Williams’ score swelling into the frustrated sobbing that only a teenager trapped in a small town with a small life could truly understand. It’s his Disney princess moment.