Month: April 2021

Stop me if you’ve heard this one but a long time ago in a galaxy far, far away…

I’ve been watching the Star Wars films. Or re-watching rather, since I’ve seen them all before. Especially the first one. By 1982, even in the pre-video era I’d managed to see it half a dozen times – although I will admit that all these years later (and at the risk of going a bit Barbara Dickson) I don’t recall the dates and places of the six occasions.

I’ve casually referred to “the first one” but that can be open to interpretation. Just as everybody knows (s)he’s not actually called Doctor Who even if they’re never watched a single episode, everyone seems to knows there’s something odd about the numbering of the Star Wars films. Should they be watched in the same order in which they were made, starting with 1977’s Chapter IV? Or in chapter order, beginning with the 1999-2005 trilogy, and then going back to the seventies…?

It’s such a knotty problem that this time around I’ve abandoned numbers altogether, in favour of alphabetical order. And the resulting sequence, I have to say, is pleasingly neat. Granted it only works if you refer to the original film as A New Hope, which naturally I’ve spent forty years stubbornly refusing to do – but with that sacrifice made, the result is three sets of three films, each of which consists of one each from the original, prequel, and sequel trilogies. If you see what I mean.

OK, this is what I mean:

Attack of the Clones (prequel)

Empire Strikes Back, The (original)

Force Awakens, The (sequel)

Followed by:-

Last Jedi, The (sequel)

New Hope, A (Original, The)

Phantom Menace, The (prequel)

And rounding things off nicely, the last batch contains the final film from each trilogy AND in release order. Namely:

Return of the Jedi (1983)

Revenge of the Sith (2005)

Rise of Skywalker, The (2019)

It wouldn’t be entirely unfair to describe the Star Wars movie series as one hugely enjoyable film followed by an even better sequel followed by seven failed attempts to be that good again. More charitably (or maybe I’m just easily pleased) there’s only two stinkers in my book, the worst of which is Attack of the Clones – so it’s quite good to have got that one out of the way first, after which there are six whole films before the other turkey waddles into view.

Revenge of the Sith (the aforementioned (other) turkey) is fairly awful but has the edge over Attack of the Clones, which commits the even worse sin of being, in large part, dull. True, that’s damning Revenge with faint praise but frankly it’s no more than it deserves.

Which is a shame, because somewhere there’s a much better version of that film. With the evil Galactic Empire and the iconic Darth Vader of the original trilogy being born, it’s crying out to be a nerve-wracking, heart-wrenching, “the lamps are going out all over Europe” sort of a movie.

Then there’s Padme, female lead of the two previous films, who gets to do little more than look upset and die in childbirth. Surely it would have given her more agency, and the film some much-needed tension, to have her fleeing with her children, desperate to escape the gathering evil before the borders close. (I realise suddenly that I’m basically suggesting George Lucas should have ripped off the last half-hour of The Sound of Music.)

Even the semi-mythical fight beside a volcano between Darth Vader and Obi-Wan Kenobi, which we’d been imagining since the late-seventies, is presented as a ludicrous, cartoony sequence that goes on way too long and provides nothing more substantial than some employment for a team of CGI artists.

But never mind about all that. At the moment I’m five films in, and luxuriating in the afterglow of Star W— of A New Hope. So there’s another couple of belters yet before I need to worry about Revenge of the Sith. That’s in the future.

Or at least, as much in the future as “a long time ago in a galaxy far, far away” can be…