![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
starladyI saw this with my family at 19:00 on Christmas Eve, and the screening was almost totally full--not the experience we had with our last Christmas Eve movie several years ago, when we saw Harry Potter 7.1.
My dear sibling had said going in that the movie was basically high-quality fanfic, and I think that is a pretty accurate assessment. But high-quality fanfic is really good fanfic, and I liked the movie a lot. (Is it better than Return of the Jedi? No. FIGHT ME.) Star Wars is in many ways just the last major media property to enter that phase where people who grew up as fans are now in charge, and J.J. Abrams, whose work I have previously mostly loathed, did a bangup job with this one. I still have a soft spot a mile wide for the good parts of the old EU, and that's okay--as far as I'm concerned, everything after Episode VI is equally people extending the stories; it's just that some of them were movies, and others weren't.
And you know, I still am not sure I have words for how satisfying it was at the end to see Rey climb those steps and find Luke there on that island, in his grey robes, or the fact that I never thought I'd see that opening crawl in theaters again. The feeling of history repeating is appropriate for Star Wars; the story iterates as the Force keeps trying to get things right down the generations. The student becomes the teacher; the old mentor is cut down by the dark side; the first apprentice fails, but the second redeems it all. And who knows? Maybe now that this remix movie showed the world that Star Wars is good again, they'll feel free to do some totally different things in VIII and IX.
In the meantime, I'm going to start watching The Clone Wars and Rebels on Netflix, and I started reading Martha Wells' tie-in novel Razor's Edge on my second plane flight. Merry Christmas to all who celebrate, and may the Force be with you.
My dear sibling had said going in that the movie was basically high-quality fanfic, and I think that is a pretty accurate assessment. But high-quality fanfic is really good fanfic, and I liked the movie a lot. (Is it better than Return of the Jedi? No. FIGHT ME.) Star Wars is in many ways just the last major media property to enter that phase where people who grew up as fans are now in charge, and J.J. Abrams, whose work I have previously mostly loathed, did a bangup job with this one. I still have a soft spot a mile wide for the good parts of the old EU, and that's okay--as far as I'm concerned, everything after Episode VI is equally people extending the stories; it's just that some of them were movies, and others weren't.
And you know, I still am not sure I have words for how satisfying it was at the end to see Rey climb those steps and find Luke there on that island, in his grey robes, or the fact that I never thought I'd see that opening crawl in theaters again. The feeling of history repeating is appropriate for Star Wars; the story iterates as the Force keeps trying to get things right down the generations. The student becomes the teacher; the old mentor is cut down by the dark side; the first apprentice fails, but the second redeems it all. And who knows? Maybe now that this remix movie showed the world that Star Wars is good again, they'll feel free to do some totally different things in VIII and IX.
In the meantime, I'm going to start watching The Clone Wars and Rebels on Netflix, and I started reading Martha Wells' tie-in novel Razor's Edge on my second plane flight. Merry Christmas to all who celebrate, and may the Force be with you.