Friday, June 13, 2008

I Found the Answers in Bad Movies

Maybe it was my huge disappointment at the hands of Indiana Jones, but I decided to go back and watch a couple of the Star Wars movies, just to see if they were as bad. They couldn't have been, could they? Or is it really just me? Do I hate everything?

Well, the Phantom Menace is still pretty lame, and I still believe Hayden Christensen is a terrible actor, and the dialogue is pretty awful at times. But when I got to Return of the Jedi, I came to a pretty positive realization. I was watching the "special edition" DVD's, which featured the new scenes at the end showing the galactic-wide celebration of the fall of the Empire, and I think that they really cap off the whole story now that we've seen how it all went down. I realized that, taken as a whole (one story, as opposed to six individual movies), it's really not that bad. It may be a case of the whole being greater than the sum of its parts, and maybe that's what George was going for all along. The individual movies are far from perfect, obviously, but the story itself, the story of Luke Skywalker rising from the obscurity of shooting wamp rats or whatever they were called and taking down an entire empire, is actually kind of okay.

So, there it is. I don't hate everything. I don't hate everything from my childhood, or even every movie. I'm not nearly as bad off as I thought. I still like Return of the Jedi. Even with the Muppets.

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