Star Wars Day 2025

In observance of May the 4th, this is my own personal recommended/definitive watch order of the Star Wars films if you're somehow still uninitiated or know someone who is. This is movies only, no TV shows, no videogames, no novels, just theatrical films so you can manage your watch time easier.

Revenge of the Sith
Rogue One
A New Hope
Empire Strikes Back
Return of the Jedi
The Force Awakens
The Last Jedi

Honorable Mentions/Qualifiers:
Jury's still out on Rise of Skywalker. I like it a little better every time I see it, but not by very much, and I haven't forgiven it for how angry it made me the first time. I'll leave you to guess the moment when I had to bite my tongue to keep myself from yelling "Bullshit!" at the screen and ruin everyone else's theater outing. The Han Solo film is in a similar standing; The first time I saw it, I was not impressed, but upon a rewatch some time later, I enjoyed it a lot more. Overall, though, while it never made me angry like Rise, I find it a very uneven movie. Basically, all the scenes with Han and Chewie are great. The rest of the film is a rather bland and uninspired heist movie. I've always had mixed feelings about Ron Howard as a director. Visuals aren't his strong suit and I think he trusts his actors a little too much at times, not really pushing the best performances out of them. In the best scenarios, you get someone seasoned like Tom Hanks in front of his camera, and you're in for a good time. In the worst, you put him in charge of some relative unknowns who haven't found their voices, and it's clear he prefers a hands-off approach with little to fall back on. This leads to actors looking a tad lost on screen, which at least is on brand for a young, fish-out-of-water Han Solo.

As for the two prequel films I left off the order, I should point out I'm actually something of a Phantom Menace apologist. However, at this point in the franchise's lifespan and with everything else we've been given to spend our time with, I'm okay with saying you can skip that one. Before Rise, Attack of the Clones was the one Star Wars film I actively disliked. Even then, I once made a list of 5 things I liked about it. I don't quite remember what they are anymore (I don't even think I ended up posting it to Tumblr which I originally wrote it for). Also, fun fact about Attack of the Clones: this was the first Star Wars movie to not be filmed on traditional 35mm film. It was shot on high definition digital video... and unfortunately, you could tell. I still remember when I saw it in the theater the first time, there was a fairly dark scene with Obi-Wan and Anakin on opposite sides of the screen talking, and you could see compression artifacts in the dark space between them. It was practically a checkerboard pattern of deep purples and dark grays, with each square as big as the actors' heads. Roger Ebert made a similar observation in his review, so I know my experience was not unique. Fortunately, the technology behind the transition from analog film to digital video, especially in projection, has gotten a lot better. It was certainly no longer an issue by the time we got to Revenge of the Sith.

Speaking of clones, I'm also not bothering to include the animated Clone Wars film, as that was really more like a pilot for the TV series that just happened to get a theatrical run. Thanks to a modest budget of less than 10 million dollars, it was able to make a fair bit of money at the box office, though still stands as the lowest grossing Star Wars movie at just shy of 70 million. For comparison, Solo made a little under 400 million dollars against a budget of 330 million and that was considered enough of a failure to get the Obi-Wan movie scrapped and reworked into a miniseries on Disney+. As a rule, studios tend to take about half of the gross (and budgets don't include expenses like marketing and promotion), so, depending on who you ask, Solo is the first Star Wars movie to lose money. The Mandalorian & Grogu is set to release next year in theaters. It will be interesting to see how it fares.

While this has been primarily a watch order list, I'll touch briefly on ranking the Star Wars films, most favorite to least favorite. I'm not going to give the full rundown; as I've said, jury's out on a few of them and it's sometimes hard to qualify what's a "least liked" and what warrants an "actively disliked". In any case, it would be a tier list, rather than assigning each movie a unique ranking number. For example, I love Last Jedi and Rogue One. I love them equally, and it's for exact opposite reasons. One honors the past, the other looks towards the future, and I simply could never put one above or below the other. It wouldn't be fair. On a similar note, although A New Hope is not my favorite, I'd either have to leave it off the list entirely or put it right at the top purely on principle. Just as I respect Last Jedi for taking risks and Rogue One for sticking to what it knows, I respect A New Hope for taking that first step, walking so the rest could run. If I woke up tomorrow to find all the other Star Wars media apart from A New Hope had been erased from existence, I'd be very sad... for about twenty minutes, and then I'd sit and watch it for the umpteenth time and all would feel right with the world again.

May The Force be with you.

A Random Anecdote About Perspective

Once upon a time, when the Syfy Channel could spell, they had a show called Trailer Park. As the name implies, they showed old sci-fi and horror movie trailers, typically from the 1950's and 60's. At the end of each episode they'd have some commentary from one of a rotation of guest speakers. His job was to offer a sobering perspective or witty insight into what we'd just seen on the show. I think it was an episode about apocalyptic movies where he offered this little story about a physicist giving a lecture on the sun. 

My memory is a little fuzzy, but here's the best I can do at retelling it. 

A physicist was giving a lecture on the makeup of the sun. At one point, he explained that in 5 billion years, the sun would expand to a red giant, possibly consuming the earth in the process, if not at least making life intolerable for whatever would survive. He was interrupted by someone in the audience who seemed rather panicked when they asked, "How soon!?" Thinking he'd maybe given out the wrong number, he restated, "5 billion years." The audience member breathed a sigh of relief and explained, "I'm sorry, I thought you said 5 MILLION years." 

A Wrinkle in Time

A Wrinkle in Time was far, far better than I thought it would be. Between a literal life-changing stage play I saw as a kid to an almost painfully humdrum TV movie, I went in thinking this could go either direction (awesome or boring) if not disappoint and simply be bad. It's another case of the trailers not quite doing the film its justice. They tend to focus on the bigger names in the cast (Oprah Winfrey, Chris Pine, Mindy Kaling), who aren't even the leads. I can understand that from a marketing perspective, but it's a double-edged sword; most moviegoers these days can sniff out a film that plays it safe from a mile off. There's a saying in cooking that the first bite is with the eye, and trailers are the first bite of a movie. It doesn't help that as much as I like the book, A Wrinkle in Time is better known for its off-beat approach to sci-fi and quirky-yet-relatable characters than its actual plot. Taken on its own rather than part of a larger series of cosmic-fantasy reality-benders, it's a fairly straightforward Fish-Out-of-Water/Who Am I/Hero's Journey sort of affair. Again, that's not a bad thing, not as a starting point and certainly not if you've got a good cast to make you invested. That's the real strength of this movie; the main cast is awesome. This is probably the best ensemble of child actors I've seen since Ender's Game. You are genuinely invested in their plights, which are further hit home by the visuals. The book didn't dwell too much on its visuals, as it shouldn't, so it didn't garner a lot of expectations on this front, and by this point we're so saturated in fantastic imagery it's hard to stand out. Somehow, though, this film achieves it. It's not so out there that it's distracting, like its trying to buoy the rest of the movie, but it's still very inventive.

Only two things truly bug me about this movie, one's a nitpick that's in no way a dealbreaker, and the other's more of a question. Firstly, Aunt Beast is mentioned once and seen for all of 3 seconds. It's a somewhat creative look, but easily the weakest piece of art direction in the film. The stage play had furry starfish the actors could shift around inside to operate different limbs, emphasizing their non-humanoid form. Here, we have mammoths with spider-legs, seen way off in the distance... in a haze... before swiftly moving on to the next scene. Like I said, not a dealbreaker, and if the Ixchell had simply been omitted, I wouldn't have even cared. Speaking of omissions, notably absent are the twins. The Murry family is only Meg and Charles-Wallace. Granted, they didn't have a big role in the book, but they were important later in Many Waters. What I'm wondering now is if Disney is going to go ahead and make the other Time Quartet books (Quintet? An Acceptable Time is canon...ish? I'm spoiled on numbered spines, what's wrong with me?) are they just going to have the current collection of kids carry on and rewrite the plot to them, or are they somehow going to find a way to introduce the twins later, maybe as visiting cousins? The Time Quartet In Five Parts (?) was essentially Young Adult fiction before the great Hunger-Potter Explosion, when publishers didn't market these much outside of school book fairs, and the authors tended to play pretty fast and loose with overarching structures and deadlines. My point is the cynic in me fully expects Disney to try and do for the Time Quintaret as a franchise, but it doesn't look like they're taking any steps to do that, and while part of me is okay with that, it's a very odd strategy for The House Walt Built between Marvel and Star Wars. It's like I want more but I'm afraid to ask, if that makes sense.

Annihilation

Got back from Annihilation earlier this evening. It was about what I expected, definitely on the brainier side of the sci-fi spectrum, not quite as cerebral as Arrival or Contact, but no roller coaster. Still, for as densely complex as the film could be, it being on the same level as the likes of Solaris or Under the Skin does give you a fairly strong sense of what you're in for . That is, there are so few examples of this particular type of harder (dare I say "challenging"?) sci-over-fi-fare out there and almost fewer sources to draw upon that its niche feels like its digging itself deeper rather than branching out. What's worse is that following this very narrow pattern of "Thinking Man's Sci-fi" through mainstream Hollywood makes any deviation from the other entries stick out like a sore thumb and almost appear as clumsy juxtapositions or afterthoughts. 
Arrival dealt with issues of communication, language, philosophy, and cultural bias to tell a reality-bending yarn about cause and effect. Annihilation tackles issues of identity by exploring a somewhat obscure region of the uncanny valley. I mentioned Solaris, in which an alien consciousness tries to answer the messages its picking up from a space station by creating these "approximations" or "estimates" of what it thinks would be good answers to these questions, often with unintentionally violent results. Annihilation looks at the same dynamic through what amounts to full-fledged body horror. Most of the time, it's subtle, even artful in places. Other times, the existential terror of questioning what we do or don't consider familiar gives way to an outright shock and awe gorefest. These scenes are few and far between, with only one that had me looking away from the screen, but they overall felt hollow and superficial, even juvenile on some levels. I'm no prude, mind, but with the way these scenes were framed by the rest, I have all suspicions that this movie could have gotten away with a solid PG-13 rating than trying to reach for R by the skin of its teeth and reaching for the low-hanging fruit of sensationalism. 
For the purposes of review, this is overall my strongest criticism, and I'll never pretend it's at all elevated above nitpicking. I only bring it up because it did so well to make my skin crawl that when it changed gears to merely making me sick to my stomach, I felt insulted on what I can only describe as an intellectually masochistic level (I'M HERE TO LOSE MY MIND, NOT MY LUNCH, DAMMIT!). 
If I had to stretch for a bigger issue with the film, it's got more to do with the aforementioned sub-genre serving as the source than anything that unfolds on screen, and that's the characterization. I've found with the more cerebral sci-fi is that their writers are definitely more deeply in love with their plots than their players. Arthur C. Clarke suffers from this immensely. As much as I love 2001 and Childhood's End for their unforgettable plots, his characters are barely memorable, borderline inconsequential (which you could argue is part of the point, challenging our inflated sense of significance and all that), or even tacky in places. The cast is all fine, it's their characters who are a bit flat and one-note. I suppose it's to help make them easier to project onto or identify with or at least not overshadow or distract from the plot, but I feel like this prioritizing of events over individuals works better for a novel than a movie, since the craft of acting itself is meant to engage your empathy rather than your intellect (it is, after all, the oldest special effect). What even calls this relationship of players and plots into sharp question is when those occasional spots of pure carnage for carnage's sake turns our "audience avatars" into cannon fodder. Annihilation gives you so little to invest in when it comes to characters that when it takes them away, you wonder why it bothered. It makes what should have been a big reveal or harrowing conflict or moral dilemma lose just enough impact to feel like a missed opportunity. You love it for challenging you, and hate it when it pulls punches. 
To its credit, there's more hard knocks than soft blows. There are times when the movie is frighteningly beautiful. Last Jedi and Black Panther celebrated color, Annihilation makes it something to fear. Most movies overuse lens flare, Annihilation makes it matter. That's brilliant. 

The Last Guardians of the Orville's Trek (OUTDATED)

Douglas Adams spent virtually his whole life trying to push science fiction comedy into the mainstream. Drawing primarily on the absurdist works of Kurt Vonnegut and Stanislaw Lem, Adams took the edge off such hard satire and social commentary for something seemingly more light-hearted and overall softer in tone. That's not to say he was unsophisticated or less compelling or somehow tarnished those who pointed out the shortcomings of the human condition within the scope of speculative fiction. He still had the same borderline misanthropic, cynical DNA of Pirx the Pilot or Player Piano, but added a distinctly English flavor of self-deprecation one might call Happy-Go-Lucky or even Quixotic. 

When he worked on Doctor Who, future writer Steven Moffat said of his tenure that his contributions were worthless, that his humor and comic sensibility were of such esoteric genius replicating it would be impossible. 

Sadly, I don't think he's wrong. Science fiction and comedy is a delicate balance that you're either going to get very right or very wrong, and what few times you get it right are usually going to get a tad samey after some time. It's the very definition of niche, with the appeal leaning rather heavily on novelty and rarity. Historically, the most successful examples of Sci-Fi-Com apart from Adams' own Hitchhiker series have been Men in Black and Red Dwarf. In fact, MIB is partially responsible for kickstarting many more lucrative talks about getting Hitchhiker made into a feature film. Previous attempts were frequently stalled at the pitch level with many a stuffy executive insisting that science fiction and comedy didn't mix, that if they did someone would have succeeded at it by then. Along comes MIB, and suddenly sci-fi can be funny after all, laughing all the way to the bank. 

As a die-hard Hitchhiker fan, hardcore Smeghead, longtime Whovian, and whatever MIB fans are called, as well as a fan of Stansilaw Lem (haven't gotten to Vonnegut yet), you'd think I'd be really cool with the success of light-hearted humorous sci-fi options like Guardians of the Galaxy. However, as much as I like Guardians, certainly Guardians 2, I think I may well have reached my point of saturation. Even while watching Volume 2, I began letting out audible groans at the many recurring instances of what, if I had to coin a term, I'd call Deflated Melodrama. It starts with someone saying a line that's very melodramatic, almost Shakespearean, and the next line is a shrugging dismissal. In The Long Dark Tea Time of The Soul, quite possibly my favorite Adams book, certainly that's not part of the Hitchhiker cycle, the God of Thunder Thor himself declares in a loud booming voice that he shall meet his father Odin in the Halls of Valhalla, to which a minor character asks, "Again?" Put simply, this is the dead horse that Guardians 2 kicks into the ground for two hours. It was funny the first time because it came out of nowhere and was repeated maybe only one other time in the remainder of the book. I stopped counting how many times Marvel's manic merry misfits made their mark on this martyred muse of a mare. 

Seth MacFarlane's new show The Orville is coming to FOX, an absurdist parody of Star Trek that looks and feels to be one part Red Dwarf and one part Galaxy Quest. For the record, I liked Galaxy Quest. It came out in 1999, a full year after Star Trek: Insurrection made it pretty clear that First Contact was bottled lightning and the Star Trek franchise as a whole was beginning to fade from favor with even its most ardent fans. It essentially said what we were all thinking at the time. I bring it up because I can't help but feel like the same thing is happening with The Orville. 

Although the J. J. Abrams/Bad Robot reboot of Star Trek has been successful, it hasn't been successful enough for Paramount to reinstate it as the company's crown jewel. For my viewing pleasure, I think the series is just fine, each film getting incrementally better than the last, especially with Beyond. Hell, I wish Beyond had been the first, instead of faffing about establishing the canon with Number One (pun intended) and giving fans a pandering tribute they never asked for with Into Darkness. As such, there's considerable debate as to whether or not there will be a fourth film, whether or not that will be the final chapter in the Abrams timeline, and if the cast wants to commit to that many future installments. 

Then there's the TV show... the one that's been cancelled now. I've never seen a grander, hotter mess than this spectacle of entertainment-by-committee versus social media outrage culture. A wise man once described the Falklands War as two bald men fighting over a comb, and I don't feel like that's too far off from what's happened now. No one wanted the show that Paramount wanted to sell, but no one necessarily agreed with the Social Justice Warrior outcries. Sure, setting the series in line with the original (Enterprise, Classic, Next Generation, DS9, Voyager....) would have been as welcomed as a female, non-white captain (staying faithful to Gene Roddenberry's super-centrist, egalitarian ideologues), but not only was the proprietary streaming service eye-rolling, the last-minute ground-up overhaul of everything from the setting to the ship and alien designs to the cast being more, er, "washed out" reeked of the studio playing it safe in the laziest possible manner known to them, which ironically is what causes franchises like this to stifle in the first place and lose footing to streaming services like Netflix and Hulu. Social media mobs may have had good points about racism and sexism dominating mainstream entertainment, if only passive-aggressively, but I don't share their basis for that point of view. That is, I didn't care what race or gender the captain and crew were, I cared about having something different that still paid tribute to the original. A safe bet to Paramount, systemic racism to others, and lazy repetition to me. Yeah, Picard is probably my favorite captain out of Archer, Kirk, Sisko, and Janeway, but I don't want him to be the gold standard against which all other candidates are judged. It's like all the actors who have played the Doctor; I like Tom Baker, but I like the others as well and all for different reasons (even Matt Smith and Colin Baker). The last thing I ever want to say about a Doctor is how much like (insert any other Doctor here) they are. It's the same for Star Trek. I want different starship captains to captain their ships among the stars differently. Challenge my expectations, for pity's sake (feel free to make your own joke about spaceships and the word "Challenge" if you want some sort of parallelism like the sentence about captains... I don't feel like pushing that boundary just yet). Maybe I won't like the new direction, but I don't want someone else missing out on what they make like for the sake of my placation. 

YouTuber Armoured Skeptic can explain all of what happened with Star Trek Discovery better than I can:

So, here we are. A Star Trek series has been cancelled, but a Galaxy Quest-like parody is getting the greenlight. Will I watch it? I don't know, probably not. It looks well-made and I don't doubt it will be funny, but barring any exceeding of expectations within the first few episodes, I don't see myself staying invested. Even then, nothing really makes me want to check it out in the first place. It's offering to scratch an itch I don't have. Instead, I think maybe I'll fill up my Kindle with some Vonnegut, and finish Pirx the Pilot. I also realize I've never actually read the first Dirk Gently book, and I'm rather mad at myself for that. 

You know that guy who really likes (insert band from 1960-1985 here) and says all current music is bullcrap? If I end up becoming as much for science fiction comedy, swearing that it all never got much better than Red Dwarf before returning to my reading of The Cyberiad... I'm completely and totally okay with that. 

UPDATE: I guess it's not cancelled, after all. (shrugs before returning to reading Memoirs Found In A Bathtub)

An Eternity Measured

My entry for the Sci-Fi London 2014 48-hour storytelling competition. Late Friday evening, I was messaged with the following prompts to build the story around: 

"Title: AN ETERNITY MEASURED
Line: As far as I'm concerned you're 31 with a mental age of... Probably 12.
Theme: What if people could reproduce asexually?"

This is the result. It was a challenge, but immensely fun to work on.

Her eyes scanned the topmost shelf of the bookcase, empty save for three black books, each with a Roman numeral on its spine. The rest of the room was far less reserved and enigmatic. The walls were practically covered with black-framed photos of their gracious host shaking hands with various past presidents and other select world leaders. A few more were on some of the other shelves, propped up against photo albums and scrapbooks. The other shelves contained all various manner of mementos, most of them toys. Some she found quaint, even endearing, such as a rusty metal pickup truck, the kind her own grandfather likely would have had passed down to him. Others, though, struck her a bit less flattering, such as a diorama of a semi-nude slave girl chained to a pillar, the base bearing an undeniably barbarian-sounding name in gold foil. The circle of Mardis Gras beads around it didn't help. It was even starting to turn her stomach a bit. She wondered if those little black books up top were full of numbers arranged according to cute little pet names instead of real ones. She took a sip of her wine and tried to tell herself she was only projecting. 
It was late in the evening and the party had quieted down, apart from the occasional fit of raucous laughter from her boyfriend, having made it his mission to match each of her sips with a full glass. She took another sip and pinched the bridge of her nose as she heard footsteps from the stairwell, expecting it to be him. Another laugh from downstairs told her it wasn't. 
"Impressed?" it was their host, a man who'd cheated death three times thanks to modern science. She said nothing. Her boyfriend was convinced meeting this man would lead to some high-tier networking, thanks to all those famous and powerful people he'd met in his multiple lifetimes. She tried to inform him gently that simply knowing someone wasn't the same as having someone's ear or a direct line up a chain of command, but it was no use. "I'd ask if you'd like to see my etchings, but I don't think your guy would approve. He says that's how you met. Surprised he knows that routine, young as he is." It was the last straw. She hated that story. It wasn't true. He only told it to get a rise out of her, and now it was being used as an icebreaker to get in good with someone whose only claim to fame was being one of a dozen successful cloning experiments. 

"As far as I'm concerned, you're 31 with a mental age of... Probably 12." She shot him a dirty look. She didn't care anymore; she wanted to leave. If it meant offending the host, so be it. 
"Sticks and stones may break my bones, but passive-aggressive quantifications of my emotional maturity make head feel no good, then all better." Considering she was expecting him to go for the obvious and make some snooty remark about how, once upon a time, having a childhood was a mark of distinction and class, that he went the mocking manchild route was something of a relief. She tried to hold back a smile, but gave in, a small chuckle coming with it. Looking down into her wine glass, she waved her free hand around, trying to think of where to start and how to phrase an apology. He cut her off, "I'm sorry. I'm not very good at entertaining. I'm more used to being a guest. Even then, I'm lucky if one joke or story clicks." 
She motioned to the diorama and beads with her glass, "If you want to try for two, I'm sure the story behind this is hilarious." He looked a little embarrassed, giving an "aw, shucks" sort of smile. 
"They're only technically mine. Old Mister Zero knew the guy who drew those comics when he was about half my age." he said, reaching up and taking down the first book, holding it as a preacher holds up a bible, putting his other hand to his heart and donning a comical Irish accent, "I was a different person back then, poppet." He replaced it and took down the second, this time only pinching its corner between his thumb and forefinger, waving it side-to-side, "You don't want to know what this guy was into." he put it back and took the third one down, flipping through a few pages. "This one's a work in progress." She could see they were simple notebooks, informal journals, and realized the reason for the shelf space. 

"Old Mister Zero? Not number one?" she nodded to the shelf. 

"He was ninety when he submitted his original material. Died about a year later. No memoirs."

"No family?" She asked, knowing the answer, and the awkward reason for it. 

He turned toward the pictures on the wall, turning the notebook over in his hands, "Clones are perfect copies, flaws and all. You need good genes to pass on. Luckily, he was the kind of guy insurance companies loved; no pre-existing conditions. No heart problems, no cancer, no diabetes... extraordinary by being ordinary. Almost a perfect specimen." He saw her blush a little, but gave a comforting smile before going on, "One hundred total candidates passed. Only half were successful, and only about a dozen of us have carried on. Number four will put me in the top three after I'm gone."

"What happened to them, the ones who didn't carry on?" She asked. 

"They decided to solve the birth rate problem the old-fashioned way, settling down and having families."

"I'm sorry," she said, feeling she'd put him on the spot. 

"I'm not. It's win-win, really. They get normal lives, and guys like me get their appearance gigs." He looked around at all the photos, sighing, "Of course, talk shows and garden parties can't pay bills forever. My stand up career clearly isn't going to take off, though I think my Irish accent's getting better." 
"So, what are you going to do to fill the book, besides your Father Ted impression?" 
He thought for a moment, "I've heard etching has become kind of a lost art."