• The Good Stuff

    I Love Star Wars

    I love Star Wars. All of it.

    I have tried and failed to sum up my thoughts about the series as a whole this morning, in advance of seeing The Rise of Skywalker tomorrow. I have seen every Star Wars movie in the theater since 1977, when I saw A New Hope shortly before my seventh birthday. Like Cassian Andor, “I have been in this fight since I was six years old.” And I have loved them all. Even the ones that I didn’t always like so much, I found something in them to love.

    I’ve stayed off social media this week, to avoid spoilers for the new movie. I’m even trying to avoid seeing headlines for the reviews that I will not be reading until after I see the movie. But honestly, I don’t care what a single other person has to say about it. And the experience of recent years has shown that when it comes to Star Wars movies our individual responses can be wildly subjective. There are people who hate my favorite Star Wars movie with a white hot passion, while I love it unreservedly and refuse to recognize that it has any possible flaws. There are other people who will passionately defend as the best in the series a movie that I enjoy to a point but think has marked flaws. And I think that is perfectly okay.

    The point is that for many of us Star Wars has become far more than just a series of films. Through the books, and comics, and role playing games, and video games, and TV spinoffs, and theme park rides, and on and on, and on… It’s become an outsized part of our lives. Sure, it’s a fantasy about space wizards with laser swords that is intended for children, but Star Wars is still real and it matters in profound ways.

    There has always been talk about Star Wars being a “modern mythology,” and I think that is true. It’s the closest thing to a religion for many of us (and the often rancorous disagreements between fans do resemble doctrinal disputes in a lot of ways). The moral lessons that Star Wars teaches still resonate today, and the new movies continue to provide lessons that we very much need.

    I’ll be seeing The Rise of Skywalker tomorrow morning on my own, and then again on Saturday with the family, and by then I’ll probably have gotten back onto social media, and taken a look at a few reviews. But in many ways I feel like the only opinion that will matter to me is that of the six year old me that lives in my head and has been waiting for this movie for more than 42 years, and I strongly suspect that he’s going to like the movie just fine…

  • The Good Stuff

    Star Wars: Resistance Reborn

    I have been on a serious Star Wars kick the last few weeks. I’ve been absolutely loving The Mandalorian on Disney+, and Jedi: Fallen Order is one of my favorite video games in years, and probably the best Star Wars game I’ve ever played. I’ve been rewatching all of the films (in in-universe chronological order) in advance of the end of the Skywalker saga, as well as starting rewatches of both Clone Wars and Rebels (along with teaching myself to read Aurebesh, which is something I’ve been meaning to do for ages). And I’ve been inspired to go back and revisit stuff that I might have overlooked. For example, after learning that the Fallen Order video game had a lot of connections to the second volume of Marvel’s Darth Vader comic from 2017, I realized that the series had gone on for more issues than I realized and I hadn’t finished reading the whole thing the first time around. With scripts by Charles Soule and art by Giuseppe Camuncoli, the 25-issue long run ended up being one of my favorite Star Wars stories of recent memory, with the final issue being absolutely staggeringly good. (And now I’m rereading the first volume by Kieron Gillen and Salvador Larroca, which is every bit as good as I remembered.)

    I’ve also been working my way through the various prose tie-in novels in the “Journey to Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker” line in the run-up to the new flick, and last night finished reading Rebecca Roanhorse’s Resistance Reborn. The novel picks up shortly after the events of The Last Jedi, with the few surviving members of the Resistance fleeing from the First Order onboard the Millennium Falcon in a desperate search for new allies and safe harbor. The story is very well constructed, and I feel like Roanhorse does a spectacular job of capturing the voices and personalities of the various characters. And one of the things I enjoyed most about reading it was seeing characters that I had first encountered in video games (Battlefront II, to be precise), comics (primarily Poe Dameron, again by Charles Soule), and even other novels (Chuck Wendig’s Aftermath trilogy and Claudia Grey’s Bloodline, in particular) interacting with characters from the films. It made that world seem even more like a cohesive whole, and I was left feeling like any one of these characters could appear in The Rise of Skywalker and fit in perfectly with the live action cast.

    If you’ve ever enjoyed a Star Wars prose novel, I strongly recommend checking out Resistance Reborn. It’s an extremely enjoyable read, and left me even more excited to see The Rise of Skywalker in a few weeks than I was already.