This is MJ. Welcome to my fully operational Star Wars podcast.
Join me as I take my next leg on the journey to Ahsoka.
This time I'm talking about Star Wars Episode IV, A New Hope.
If you didn't know, if you haven't been following along,
I'm watching the films in order, like they should be, because they tell a single story.
The prequel trilogy is the tragic fall of, or the rise and fall really of Anakin Skywalker,
and the sequel trilogy, well, or I guess the original trilogy is what it really is.
We'll talk about what that is after we talk about Return of the Jedi.
So Star Wars Episode IV, A New Hope, that's what I'm discussing right now.
And I have to say, it's either a level of genius, madness, or just fan obsessive
compulsion or familiarity that makes me feel like A New Hope feels so much like Star Wars
from the context of starting with the Phantom Menace.
And what I mean is, you get to see the echoing and the rhyming of things from the first three movies
in this fourth movie, and I know it's a little preposterous for me to talk about it,
as if Lucas planned this out properly, because he didn't.
And I'm just going to break character for a minute here.
As much as I don't like the sequel trilogy, and I think The Last Jedi is the best of the three movies,
and I think it's legitimately a good movie, even if it's not the movie you wanted,
I think it's a good movie, and it has guts, and it has vision and direction, and it's going someplace.
Again, you may not like it, but I feel like Rian Johnson was Lucasian in how he chose to
do things his own way and make big, bold choices.
Slow and low is unforgivable, though.
Slow and low is absolutely unforgivable.
That's the worst thing in that movie.
Anyway, so, yeah, I'm not a contrarian.
I just, I think I'm a careful watcher of movies, and I think I pay attention to Star Wars,
and understand Star Wars enough to know that, again, while you may not appreciate what he did,
I think Johnson was kind of in line with some of Lucas's vision as far as being bold and being
willing to take risks and make moves that other people wouldn't make.
Who else would have made Anakin start off as a nine-year-old slave boy?
Who else would have had a time-year time skip where his infatuation with Padme turned into
a cringe-fest romance?
Who else would have had the last movie in the trilogy start with the ending of The Clone Wars
and have Dooku reduced to a handless man on his knees who gets his head cut off
like Anakin was playing Chucky from Child's Play with the Giant Scissors,
scissoring off his head with two lightsabers, and then proceed to have that same awesome,
super edgy, super dark, super cool, super tough Darth Vader who everybody had known for,
I don't know, 20 plus years, and have him be a fool and a creep who's willing to
massacre literal children.
I mean, he basically turned Anakin into a school shooter so that he would get enough
dark side points in order to have the dark side power to save his unborn child and Padme.
A complete moral failure, a completely morally repugnant individual.
And yet, in doing all that crazy stuff, Lucas put me in a position where I have warm feelings
in my heart about Anakin because I got to see him go through all these different stages.
I got to see him go through this process.
I got to see the lure of the dark side tempt him and make him do illogical things that
just didn't make any sense and didn't, you know, ironically, tragically, didn't result
in him meeting the end goal that he wanted to, the very things that he was willing to
sacrifice and give up for, for he ended up losing because of him sacrificing and giving up
everything, throwing himself, throwing his soul, throwing his heart, throwing his morals away.
And that brings me to a big contrast.
And ironically, Luke does not appear for like the first 25 or 30 minutes of the movie.
We start off with Anakin's other child, Leia, and she's on the Tantive IV putting the Death
Star plans in R2-D2.
Of course, R2-D2 and C-3PO are familiar to us as Star Wars fans, as viewers of the Star Wars
saga, the Skywalker saga in this, in this mode going 1 through 6.
We know 3PO and R2 so well.
They've done such great things.
They've had such great moments with each other and with the rest of the cast of Star Wars
that seeing this, you know, bunheaded brunette, you know, putting plans into
R2-D2 and commanding him to help her in her royal mission, it feels very familiar.
It feels like it echoes later, like it is an unintentional echo of what happened in
the Phantom Menace until a lesser extent, Attack of the Clones.
And then when we finally, you know, we get to see the bickering between R2 and 3PO, which
wasn't a major part of the prequels.
It's in the Clone Wars a lot and it's definitely in the original trilogy, but it's not so much
in the prequel trilogy.
But we get to see it here.
We get to see the rapport that they have and, you know, we hear name drops like Bail, Organa,
and, you know, we know Leia's an Organa, so she's, you know, ostensibly his daughter.
But then when we get to Tatooine, we get to see that while Luke is not a slave, not a
literal slave, he's not a slave for the chip in his arm or body that'll blow him up if
he tries to run away, he is trapped on Tatooine.
He's trapped being a moisture farmer.
He's trapped with Owen Lars, who we met previously.
And it's just, it's really interesting how it all feels so cozy and so familiar and so
much like this is the well-worn universe that it is and that it's become, that it's turned
out to be.
And I don't know, it's amazing.
You know, I've seen A New Hope so many times and I've seen the prequels so many times.
And it almost feels like the more I watch them, the more they blend together and the
more they work.
Obi-Wan looks way too old to have been Ewan McGregor in Revenge of the Sith and now be
Alec Guinness in A New Hope, but it works.
And something about Alec Guinness' performance, it makes him feel like a haunted war veteran
who's harboring all these secrets.
And the way that Lucas went back and retroactively changed the continuity and backfilled the
backstory by making the prequels, it feels like when he says that Anakin was a great
pilot and a great friend and he was this great Jedi that Obi-Wan had all these adventures
with and that Vader was a pupil of his who turned to evil and betrayed and murdered
Anakin and hunted down the rest of the Jedi.
It feels like all those things are true and it feels like all those things blend in with,
like it feels like Alec Guinness is acting as if he's Obi-Wan, having memories of Order
66 and of Anakin in the prequels and even throughout the Clone Wars, if you're crazy
enough like me to have watched so much of that.
And it's remarkable how well made the movie is.
I don't know, it's really interesting.
You know, Vader gives the line on the Death Star, I sense a presence, presence that I
haven't felt since and he trails off.
One of my favorite Japanese writers of Tokusatsu is Toshiki Inoue and he does a lot of crazy
stuff in his writing, but something that I observed as I was looking at his writing
very closely about a year ago, I never finished a certain show, I need to go back and finish
it, I want to go back and finish it, but I haven't allowed myself to yet.
But anyway, in this show, which is a Super Sentai, which is what Power Rangers is based
off of, he writes this strange universe, it's a near earth, it's a near human universe,
but it has all these crazy supernatural elements in it.
And the way he writes the human relationships and the interactions between people and the
magic, they all balance out, the magic of Super Sentai I mean, they all balance out in this
really interesting way where it's, you kind of assume that, okay, these are people, they're
human beings, they wear, you know, they wear pants.
You know, they dress vaguely like us, except for, you know, kind of spacey with robes and
whatever, they have special funky costumes, but they're basically human.
So basic human rules and logic and norms apply to them.
But then he sprinkles in these things, and I'm speaking of Lucas and Inoue now, he sprinkles
in these things where they're not normal humans, they're often this strange land far away and
displaced from us in time and culture.
And we just accept certain things as a given, we accept things that are presented or said
as a given.
We accept the Clone Wars, we accept, you know, the fact that droids aren't welcome in a bar
for some reason.
We accept all these things because they're given to us and they're shown to us and they're
accepted by the characters that we're watching.
And that combination basically makes us as the audience suggestible and open to anything
that the author, that the writer, the director wants to put forth to us.
So this implication that Vader gives that he hasn't seen Obi-Wan since, or hasn't
since this present sense, and then you determine that it's, oh, it's the last time that he
and Obi-Wan met.
There was probably a fateful battle between the two and we don't really know.
And then later on you get the follow up of when I left you, I was but the student, now
I am the master, only a master of evil, Dov.
Those interactions frame our perception of this world that we have such limited context
of.
We get to see this world, this lived in galaxy exploding with story potential and possibilities
and rabbit trails to go down, which the EU has done to great extent and fan theorizing
has done to a great extent as well.
And we just are able to draw these conclusions from what's being presented to us in this
world because, well, if he's saying that and he's a person, then it's reasonable to assume
this, even though it's not necessarily reasonable.
We didn't know about, I still haven't watched Kenobi because I just wasn't really interested
in it because, well, I like John Jackson Miller's Kenobi better.
How do I know that if I haven't seen the show?
I've heard enough people complain about the show that I'm pretty sure I would, I
prefer John Jackson Miller's, John Jackson Miller's Kenobi book, which is fabulous,
absolutely fabulous to the Kenobi series.
I may watch it someday.
I may not, who knows?
But my point is, you know, I'm familiar with Star Wars, both as a fan who's seen these
things a bunch of times and also just somebody who's been watching these things, you know,
within rapid succession of each other as I'm going through getting ready to jump into this,
you know, new, hopefully amazing Star Wars adventure in Ahsoka.
And I don't know, it's just remarkable to me how it blends together.
And I almost think it only blends together so well because George Lucas and his collaborators
bottled lightning in making Star Wars episode four, A New Hope.
They made it so good.
It's still a well-crafted movie.
And like, I don't know if these are Marshal Lucas cuts with Obi-Wan or with
Al Ginnis' performance or what they are.
But something in his performance, something in the way Mark Hamill reacts to him, something
in the vagaries of the dialogue and how it leaves itself open to interpretation, all
of these things blend together.
You know, the fact that it was shot on, you know, widescreen 35 millimeter film, like
all of these things and the beautiful paintings done by, oh, what's his name?
I can't, the concept artist.
He did paintings of matte paintings on glass for the different effects too.
Ralph McCrory, right?
Anyway, all of these things blend together in such a magical way that it really makes
it feel as if episode four, five and six could have come after episodes one, two and three.
And while they have different looks to them, it almost feels like it's intentional.
Well, these movies look like this because they represent the Gilded Age or whatever.
And these episodes look like this because they represent, you know, Soviet Russia or
the Soviet Union as it's in its decay and before it falls apart and before the whatever,
before it falls apart.
I'm not good enough at history to name out specific things and not sound like a jerk.
So I won't do that.
So anyway, it's just remarkable to me that somehow these things knit together.
And again, Obi-Wan, Elegant, this is way too old unless he just looks really old.
And he doesn't say he's too old.
And we know the man is not beyond bending the truth.
So he could be saying to look, I'm too old for this because I need you to take over.
I need you to be in a position to take over whether that's because he's got messages
from Qui-Gon or he's just got a vibe from the force or because he feels like he's too
old for this stuff.
He's too old for this stuff.
I don't know.
It creates this awesome blend.
And I'm kind of floored by like what an amazing movie episode four is in and of itself.
And then the way that it blends and picks up from where Revenge of the Sith left off,
it just it impresses me all the more.
And really, you know, the whole prequel tells you where that left off.
So I found it remarkable that like you have out in space on the Tantri before then you
have you have the tent before the Death Star as a set or location.
You have Tatooine as a location.
You have, I guess, on the Millennium Falcon in space, a location and you have a little
bit of where was the Messiah temple?
Yavin, you have a little bit of Yavin for as a set or a location.
There's really only like four broad locations in this movie.
And yet it feels like a huge sprawling adventure that goes far.
It goes a lot of places and it's shocking that that's so.
Oh, more echoes of the past.
So, you know, Obi-Wan talks about Anakin being a great pilot and knowing these movies already
knowing spoilers, if you're unaware that Anakin is Vader, that he becomes Vader,
seeing Vader go out and lead from the front and take two, you know, sensibly really good
TIE fighters with him, TIE fighter pilots with him to go fight in the trenches and get
his hands dirty.
It feels so much like Anakin.
And before it just made Vader seem like, oh, he's this, you know, scary guy who, you know,
has this magical force thing like when you originally saw it.
And I guess he's a good pilot because of the force.
And then having all of Anakin's backstory, it makes it feel like there are echoes of
Anakin Skywalker in Darth Vader, that there's certain things that are true of him that don't
let go that he wants to lead from the front, that he wants to be in the thick of things,
that he wants to be doing his duty, that he wants to be being that hero that he somehow
sees himself as in this, you know, from this twisted perspective, this twisted point of view.
And he wants to go out there and defend the lives of the millions or however many hundreds
of thousands of people are on the giant space station that is the Death Star.
And he wants to protect the peace, justice and order that he has brought to his galaxy,
you know, with his hands so soaked in the blood of the innocent.
And it's just it's kind of chilling to watch it in that perspective and like seeing him
in that TIE fighter.
And it feels so much like the Jedi starfighter that was in Revenge of the Sith that he was
flying around in towards the end there.
It's just it's just remarkable how much he feels like it could be the same guy, like the same guy.
There's the core of the same guy in that suit.
And I'll just spill it now.
I think the prequel trilogy is the fall, the rise and fall, the tragic fall of Anakin Skywalker,
the tragedy of Anakin Skywalker.
And the original trilogy is like the redemption of Darth Vader, the redemption of Anakin Skywalker
through his children.
And I'm pretty sure Lucas has said that in interviews and stuff.
And I'm just echoing that now.
But I really do feel like it.
I really feel Anakin invader and it's sad.
And it makes it a little sadder and a little sweet seeing the echoes of Padme in Luke and
the echoes of Anakin in Leia.
I really feel like she's her father's daughter and he's his mother's son.
Luke's more diplomatic.
He's more gentle.
He's more caring.
He's more earnest and sincere.
And Leia is more hard edged and got a short temper and is willing to do whatever she has to.
Whereas I feel, you know, Padme did what she had to, but I feel like she was a lot more
straight laced than Anakin ever was.
And I feel like that's kind of reversed in The Twins.
And I know it's just so odd to see that.
It's so interesting to see that.
And it's like it hurts knowing that Anakin grew up as a slave on Tatooine and seeing
that Luke has grown up enslaved to the war's homestead in a way on Tatooine.
He's bound there by duty and by family and by these bonds that he can't seem to break.
And then the death of Owen and Beru frees him and sets him on this journey where he can
become a Jedi like his father before him.
His father who he didn't know.
His father who he wants to be like his father who he wishes to measure up to.
And it's just so sad.
It's such a sad, tragic, bittersweet start to the adventure.
And then, I don't know, it's interesting because you have Leia losing her mother and father
and all her people on Alderaan as well.
And those were her parents.
She knew she was adopted.
But of course, this isn't stuff we get in the movie.
I'm carrying all this baggage with me from the EU and other places and other movies.
But it just, again, the movie stands on its own without all these things.
And it's just amazing how much richer of an experience it is knowing all these different
things.
And I really like that.
I feel like the Ahsoka shows probably, hopefully it'll be the same way that it'll be good on
its own if you haven't seen Ahsoka in anything else.
But if you've seen her in Rebels and in Mando and, was she in Book of Boba Fett?
I can't remember.
I think she was in an episode.
But if you've seen her in all these other things like I have, then we'll be able to
carry those things with us into the experience of watching her show.
And hopefully, besides, like I said, besides all those things being brought forward with
it, it's just a good show in its own right.
And it feels good to an audience that's getting exposed to her for the first time in her story.
So anyway, that's all I have to say.
I like A New Hope.
I think it's a really good movie and I love how it fits in the rest of the context of
the other movies.
So with that, that's all I have to say.
This is MJ signing out.
I hope you people take care of yourselves until next time.
I hope you enjoyed that.
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