THE NEW ROGUE AWAKENS

It’s not a Star Wars Story it’s a prequel. And don’t let anyone tell you otherwise.

It doesn’t get much more ‘pre’ than having a creepily rejuvenated Princess Leia stood clutching a floppy disc and mouthing a large proportion of the first instalment’s title at you. Perhaps that's what a Star Wars Story is: a cruelly curtailed prequel in which anyone with aspirations to appear in the follow-up gets vaporised on a beach.

Rogue One, like all the worse kinds of prequels, obsesses with answering questions that no one has asked.

Want to know why it was so easy to blow up the Death Star? 

No.

No really, do you want to know why it was so easy to blow up the death star?

No, I really don’t.

Okay then. You interested in how those rebels got hold of those plans? 

No.

Actually I’m more interested to know why a basic wireframe graphic heralding from the age of Atari won’t fit on a USB stick. Or hasn’t the Empire got round to inventing those yet? Preferring instead to pour its tech budget into jaw droppingly elegant shuttle craft to whisk it’s bad guys around the galaxy. And a pointlessly spacious apartment built over flowing lava to contain its arch villain’s disabled shower unit.

KILLING TIME

Passing gallstones hurts, but passing time hurts more. Especially if you’re eleven and waiting to play Star Wars Battlefront on your brand new Xbox One.

First the box needs updating. Cue two hour wait with mid-strength teary tantrum. But we get there ahead of time, and suddenly there’s hope. The Microsoft account works. Good. The Xbox profile copies across. Good good. We get out the new game - on a good old disc God bless it. No more of this interminable downloading nonsense. 

But guess what, it turns out the game isn’t finished. The bloke who was supposed to have finished it must have nipped out for a vape and left it on his workbench where the bloke who was supposed to put it in a case and take it to Amazon mistakenly put it in a case and took it to Amazon.

SPACE SHODDITY

Posted 12th February 2016:

Big week for Space.

Turns out Einstein was right after all (note to self: never doubt anyone called Einstein) and gravitational waves exist.  The thing is that they always had to exist because of his theory of relativity. It’s just that now they do. Thank God.

So how did we finally find them? Well, we invented a machine that can detect things that are so small, and happen so quickly, that until recently we were happy to conclude they weren’t there at all. Things less than a thousandth the diameter of an atomic nucleus apparently. Now I’m no expert (despite having the Guardian App on my iphone) but I’m guessing that’s pretty small.  Small to the point of not really mattering.  

WHOSE STAR WARS?

Posted 22nd December 2015:

It’s here, it's with us.  And a strange calm settles over the world of Star Wars super fandom. The people who I thought would feel most strongly, who would rave at its brilliance or spit bile at its loathsomeness, don’t know what to make of it.  It’s not that they don’t like it, they do.  It’s not that it doesn’t live up to their expectations.  Because they didn’t really know what to expect.  They just don’t know. 

PANTONE 291

Posted 4th November 2015:

Astonishing revelation.  Having carefully pre-watched the prequels in preparation for the release of Star Wars Episode VII, it turns out the kids, by their own admission, don’t give a toss about Anakin Skywalker. Nor any of the other minuscule characters that scuttle against the gargantuan backdrops. Apart, that is, from Obi-Wan in Episode III. He’s cool.  

HAN SOLO

Last night I watched The Empire Strikes Back with the kids. 

And I felt a forgotten anxiety reawaken from long ago. A huge and bewildering fretfulness from a wet night in Bradford in 1980. For the previous three years the Star Wars characters had sustained my imagination, the templates for countless games and flights of fancy, more real than any earth-bound contemporaries. But sat in the Odeon that night with my two older sisters, I witnessed them falling apart.

I saw the princess putting more energy into avoiding Han’s flirtatious advances than the swarms of tie fighters pursuing them through the asteroids. I saw Luke fail miserably to complete his Jedi training, and then I saw him lose a hand. But worst, I saw Han shipped off to God knows where, frozen in a block of carbonite. And as the closing scenes played out, it became horribly apparent they weren’t going to get him back before the end. And at that moment, 1983 seemed an eternity away.

Since then my family, like the imperial star fleet, has dispersed across the galaxy. Me and my sisters have gone our separate ways and grown apart. My father is dead. I no longer live in Yorkshire and the people who populated my youth have faded into the past.

And I wonder whether the significance of Empire was that it was was a taste of things to come. Because perhaps the first person I ever lost, was Han Solo.



More thoughts on Star Wars: Whose Star Wars?   Pantone 291   Space Shoddity

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