I'm pretty excited for Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker. But it's an abstract excitement based on almost no imagery from the movie. I've (mostly) kept up my same strategy as for the last two movies in this saga, where I avoided trailers. I'd have been 100% successful in that effort except that an ad came on while I was watching an on-demand version of Survivor, of all shows, last night, and I did not turn my eyes away from it.I'll even be preparing for it by re-watching The Force Awakens and The Last Jedi in the two nights leading up to it. I'm devoting Monday and Tuesday nights of that week to my fifth (!) viewing of Episode VII and my modest third viewing of Episode VIII, before I am among the first in the world to access Episode IX Wednesday night at midnight.
Unfortunately, I don't really have anyone to share this momentous occasion with, at least not locally.
I did watch The Last Jedi with two "mates," two years ago, but only one of them was really geeked for the midnight showing while the other one went along with a skeptical look in his eye, and ultimately regretted his decision. Barring last-minute plans, I doubt we'll be doing that again.
But I'm not bemoaning the lack of physical companionship in watching this movie, as I only watch maybe one out of every 40 movies I see in the theater with another person. (Adult movies, that is -- my kids join me more frequently for movies aimed at them.) As a film critic as well as a person who can't regularly see movies with his wife because of babysitting considerations, I usually go alone. And don't think twice about it, if I ever did.
No, what's really giving me a mild case of the blues is that I won't have been able to share any part of this Star Wars experience with the people whose excitement would nourish me the most: my kids.
When Star Wars restarted in 2015, it was a few years too early to really be appropriate for my kids. My older son was only five and a couple months then, my younger son almost two. Now granted, I was not even four yet when I saw the original Star Wars in the theater, but those were different times.
I guess I hoped that as they got a little older, my kids would catch up with the Star Wars series and might watch either The Last Jedi or The Rise of Skywalker in the theater with me. Fast forward a few years, and the older is now a couple months past his ninth birthday, the younger one nearly six.
These midnight screenings have become a fun tradition for me, but I'd trade them without a thought if it meant getting to share the experience with my kids, even if we had to wait three days after opening to see it on the weekend. How sweet that period of excitement and anticipation would be, as we all wondered what would become of Rey, Finn, Kylo Ren and the rest.
Something went wrong somewhere along the way.
In the same Christmas season that The Last Jedi came out, we watched the original Star Wars with the kids, and they liked it. The plan was to watch one movie each Christmas season, which would have only brought us to Return of the Jedi this year. But I could have stepped up the pace if they were really loving it, and we could have whipped through the prequels (if need be) as well as the last two new movies in order to prepare for Rise of Skywalker.
Instead, the pace went in the other direction. No one seemed to show much enthusiasm for The Empire Strikes Back last year, so it simply never got watched.
That lack of enthusiasm has continued. When I mention Star Wars to the older one, he tells me he's not really sure if he likes it. Even though Star Wars as a worldwide phenomenon is as strong as ever -- just look at how The Mandalorian has dominated social media, without me unfortunately -- it's apparently not something that his friends talk about very much. Which is not to say he would suddenly becomes obsessed if his friends were talking about it, but it sure would help.
If the older one's not interested, I'm not sure if it even helps for me to get the younger one interested. Especially as I secretly still think some of the stuff in these movies would be too intense for him. (I couldn't handle Han Solo getting a lightsaber through the stomach at age 42, so I don't have any idea how he'd react at age 5.)
Funny thing is, when I came home from the library with my rented copies of The Force Awakens and The Last Jedi on Thursday (I don't have Disney+ yet, as alluded to above), I squelched an opportunity to pique their interests. I usually place library rentals on a bookshelf near our TV, for all to see. But in this case I stored them in our bedroom, where the kids don't spend very much time.
See, I didn't want them to suddenly get interested in Star Wars and ask to see these two movies before they'd seen the others. In my ideal world, I even want to submit them to the prequels before these movies. Same order as the order I saw them, in an ideal world.
So at this point I am going it alone, even without my wife, who will undoubtedly see this movie in the theater but does not express very much ongoing interest about it.
The good news -- if you want to call it good news -- is that Disney is not nearly done delivering Star Wars to us.
I may not be able to finish the Skywalker storyline with my children, but maybe that's okay, since I didn't start it with them either. Maybe the real goal will be to meet whatever new characters Star Wars gives us next, together, and go on that adventure from start to finish, with the same emotional journey. I can't remember who's responsible for the next installment of Star Wars movies at the moment -- I know both Rian Johnson and the Game of Thrones creators are out -- but whoever it is, there's some hope it will be allowed to be new and fresh, something we can discover simultaneously, without carrying in the baggage of our own personal Star Wars histories or lack thereof, without excessive fan service and baby Yodas.
So having just shed my "mild blues" about things I can no longer undo, maybe now I'm free to just concentrate on the end of my own emotional journey -- a journey that began back in 1977.
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