Or rather, I've decided. When we watched Return of the Jedi back in April, we came to a fork in the road. We could either go back and examine the origins of Darth Vader -- boooring -- or we could follow the characters we had just been watching, in what my older son said was the first Star Wars movie he felt really enthusiastic about, to see what happens to them 30 years later.
Easy choice.
A thing that made it easier? When we were at Disneyland last month, my younger son cajoled us into buying him a "cinema quality" version of the Resistance fighter pilot helmet that's seen in the sequel trilogy. (Not thinking how we would transport it back to Australia, which involved some creative packing.) That purchase was based solely on the excellent ride Rise of the Resistance -- which I had hoped to write about here, but I think the moment has passed -- and not on having actually seen these helmets in action in a movie.
Time to change that.
Funnily enough, an argument did come along for The Phantom Menace, from an unexpected source. My older son had a birthday ten days ago, and we ended up getting him a Star Wars game for his Nintendo Switch. As the one who purchased it, I thought "Well, that pod race game must have better graphics than I would have guessed, if they bothered to make a version of it for the Switch." Nope, but he seemed to enjoy it well enough anyway. Maybe not so much that he needed to match up his gaming experiences to something that happened in a movie.
So embracing the new rather than the old -- the new in this case being much better -- Star Wars: The Force Awakens was, indeed, my fourth of Sunday's five-movie Australian Father's Day movie marathon, projected on the garage wall. (I won't write about this marathon as its own post, but may touch on it in my next couple.) It was the first time all day I'd invited my family in to join me. And yes, five is a rather modest total for a full day in the garage -- unless you consider that I also watched two hours of baseball, and one of the movies was three hours and 43 minutes long. More on that in upcoming posts.
We had delivery pizza and some treats later on, and the kids were very interactive with the movie, hailing the first on-screen arrival of Kylo Ren, as well as various returning characters. At a break in the action at one point, the recently turned 12-year-old said that Finn was his favorite character. A strong choice, I thought, given John Boyega's funny and charismatic line deliveries that I appreciate more with each viewing. (This is my sixth of The Force Awakens -- in only seven years. That's a lot. However, it's my first in nearly three years, easily my longest Awakens drought. And it's not quite so much when you consider that the first two were both in the theater, just a week apart. Plus the previous two were both as a lead-up to the release of the next movie in the series. Okay end parenthesis now.)
I was waiting to see how they would react to [SPOILER ALERT - ha ha] the death of Han Solo. Having not lived with this character for nearly 40 years of their lives, they didn't say much about it. When I specifically asked them about it after the movie, the older one said, "Well, someone dies in each one of these movies." He's got a point there, though to me, Han Solo is not just "someone."
I think the younger one, though he didn't say it as such, may have been a bit more shocked by the idea that a boy would kill his own father -- even a boy as clearly disturbed as Ben Solo. I think they were both surprised to see the identity of Kylo Ren when he took off his helmet -- my older son said "That's not what I expected him to look like" -- which confronted them with the idea not of some incomprehensible evil, but of a young man who's lost his way. We don't get that sort of humanity from Darth Vader until the final minutes of Return of the Jedi -- and then, I suppose, for three more movies in the prequels.
Since it was late and past their bedtime when we finished, I didn't have a chance to talk to the younger one about fathers and sons and how they don't usually kill each other. I guess at least it wasn't the father killing the son, so he could sleep well enough. He probably knows he won't ever try to kill me ... I hope.
If it weren't 10 o'clock and completely inappropriate for them to watch it, they could have stayed on and watched Robert Zemeckis' Beowulf with me. (Clearly my appetite to see this was whetted by writing about Zemeckis in this post.) But before we get into that, I thought it was worth a word on how Zemeckis improved on the "uncanny valley" from The Polar Express, which I wrote about in that same post.
In the first few shots, I was worried. A lot of herky jerky movements, a lot of dead eyes. But it only took a few minutes for me to be reminded of what making a movie this way, instead of with real actors, gave you in terms of storytelling advantages. Just as it did in 2007, that moment when we pull out from the Hrothgar's castle -- following the path of a bird carrying a rat, all the way to where the sounds are reverberating in Grendel's head in the distant forest -- brought me into the film's good graces and kept me there. And despite a few jerks of the herky variety and a few eyes that are not focused on anything in particular, the overwhelming impression of Beowulf is of a movie whose technical and storytelling innovations are worth celebrating.
(Side note: Was Beowulf a model for the Thor movies? Not only are Odin and Ragnarok name-checked here, but the mo-cap version of Ray Winstone looks a lot like Chris Hemsworth would eventually look as Thor. Plus, Anthony Hopkins is in both.)
Anyway, if my sons, particularly my younger son, had watched Beowulf, they would have seen a very disturbed creature on a murderous rampage -- not unlike Kylo Ren -- who consciously spares his own father. You'd argue that Grendel would be less able to distinguish relatives from strangers, given that he doesn't spend any time with his father the king, and that he's not a lot more than a deformed id. For whatever else he is, Ren is extremely intelligent, and has a chance to take premeditated actions despite his proclivity for tantrums.
Because he didn't see it, I'll be sure to tell my younger son that don't worry, the crazy, 14-foot-tall deformed creature who tears a bunch of Vikings limb from limb decided to spare his father in a similar scenario.
As for the prequels ... well, we can get to them one day if the kids are ever interested in a history lesson.
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