How big a fanboy am I?<\/p>\n
Big enough that I sat through an entire hour of The O.C.<\/i> just so I wouldn’t miss the premiere of the new full-length Revenge of the Sith<\/i> trailer.<\/p>\n
Big enough that the hair rose up on my arms during said trailer and didn’t settle back down for a good three minutes after it was over.<\/p>\n
Big enough that May 19th suddenly seems like an eternity away.<\/p>\n
I’ve been fooled by trailers before. The Phantom Menace<\/i> had a kick-ass trailer (“Every saga has a beginning…”); Attack of the Clones<\/i> had a kick-ass trailer (“I will raise a Grand Army of the Republic…”). Both films ultimately let me down. This time… well, like I said, I’ve been fooled before. I so want the sixth and final Star Wars<\/i> film to be the prequel I always dreamed of, the one that my eight-year-old imagination conjured up from the vaguest handful of ideas gleaned from a brief and fluffy magazine interview with The Great Flanneled One. I am trying to prepare myself for yet another disappointment. I am reminding myself that George Lucas isn’t the man he used to be and I am not the child I once was. I am struggling not to get carried away with enthusiasm like I did during the Dark Year, 1999. But it’s tough. I watched that trailer tonight and I found myself buying into it completely. I didn’t think one single element of it looked potentially cringe-inducing. I’m even daring to think that maybe, just maybe, Uncle George is going to redeem himself with this one.<\/p>\n
The sight of Anakin Skywalker leading an army of clonetroopers, of Emperor Palpatine drawing a lightsaber against Jedi Master Windu, of giant starships exchanging broadsides like sea-going galleons and interior shots of explosions tearing through their gun-decks, made me pump my fist with testerone-laden glee. The glimpse of the Tantive IV<\/i>‘s familiar engine-cluster arcing toward a beautiful green world and of R2 in a fighter socket and 3PO in his polished glory made me smile with fond nostalgia. And the sound of Padme’s sobs and Obi-Wan’s anguished cry, “You were the chosen one!” as his student and friend attacks him broke my heart.<\/p>\n
(If you caught the reference to the Tantive IV<\/i>, congratulations. You’re as big a fanboy as me. If you don’t know, it’s the rebel ship seen at the beginning of the original Star Wars<\/i>, the one Princess Leia is “racing home” aboard. Technically, it’s the official transport of the Royal House of Alderaan.)<\/p>\n
Going purely off this three-minute advertisement, it looks to me like this is the film George has been waiting to make all along, the true back-story that he started putting down on legal pads around 1975. Maybe Episodes I and II were weak because he had the fewest notes for them. Maybe Revenge of the Sith<\/i> is the only prequel he really needed to make, the only one he really wanted to make.<\/p>\n
Maybe I’m just a big sucker setting myself up to knocked down again, a compulsive gambler who doesn’t know better than to keep going back to the three-card-monte dealer on the corner. Maybe. We’ll see in just about two months. But I’ll tell you this much: after tonight, I’m feeling happier to call myself a Star Wars<\/i> fan than I have in years.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
How big a fanboy am I? Big enough that I sat through an entire hour of The O.C. just so I wouldn’t miss the premiere of the new full-length Revenge of the Sith trailer. Big enough that the hair rose up on my arms during said trailer and didn’t settle back down for a good […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[22],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-197","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-star-wars"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.jasonbennion.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/197","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.jasonbennion.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.jasonbennion.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.jasonbennion.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.jasonbennion.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=197"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.jasonbennion.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/197\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.jasonbennion.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=197"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.jasonbennion.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=197"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.jasonbennion.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=197"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}