Welcome to Respawning’s new regular feature, Club Articles! These articles have been created as a way of all us guys getting together every Monday, Wednesday and Saturday, and generally waffling on about whatever takes our fancy!
Psst. It’s me Josef, and I’ve broken into the site to make things Star Wars themed all week. So this week I wanted to pose the question to my fellow writers: What are your fondest Star Wars memories and what are your expectations for The Last Jedi?
Josef
My fondest memory is actually quite a recent one, well if you count 2015 as recent. But it was going to see The Force Awakens at midnight for the first time with a group of friends. There was so much passion and excitement in the air before we went in and it felt like every reaction and laugh was shared among everyone there. It was a magical moment to be seeing the first Star Wars in nearly 10 years and have it not be complete garbage.
As for The Last Jedi, I expect it to answer a lot of the questions TFA asked us. However it’s also going to build up to the end of the trilogy which has to be beyond exciting. I want to see a lot of Luke being bad-ass as well as a well deserved lightsaber fight at the end. Something raw and powerful similar to the one at the end of Return. That’s on my wish-list now I just have to wait for two days before I lay my eyes on it!
James
Star Wars is one of those things that I can’t actually recall when it was that I first saw it or heard of it, it just feels like its always been around me. As a kid of course I was obsessed with the original three films, watching them endlessly on my old VHS player. My fondest memories of Star Wars though probably come more from the enjoyment I got out of the action figures. With these toys I like many other kids around the world (and some adults, no judgement here) was able to create my own adventures and make my own worlds. George Lucas does get a bad rap for the prequel films which yes aren’t perfect, but I think we should remember that this vast universe and lore started with him, and it is an impressive creation that is now everyone’s.
I try not to build too much hype for myself going into films, I got my fingers burnt with Prometheus only to be horribly let down after I became dead set on the idea that Ridley Scott + Alien can only ever turn out good. So with that I’m being cautious going into The Last Jedi, however that hasn’t dampened my excitement for seeing the Midnight showing. Rian Johnson is a brilliant filmmaker (I highly recommend checking out Brick and Looper if you haven’t already) so I have no doubt that on a filmmaking level this will be impressive. My biggest hopes for The Last Jedi is that it shows that it is its own thing. Force Awakens, although an enjoyable film, was a fan service indebted heavily to the nostalgia and love people have for A New Hope. Now that it’s been established that the series is back and more popular than ever, I hope they spread their wings a bit and go on their own path.
Joe
In terms of my best Star Wars-related memory, I’ll always remember my first time seeing Star Wars II – Attack of the Clones in my local cinema; since I was still rather young at this point (I was around 5 years old; no idea how my Dad managed to get me into the cinema…) the film, whilst being arguably the best in the first trilogy, was one of the most technologically advanced films I’d seen for my age; so much so that for around a year or two I had a giant cardboard promo cut-out of Yoda and Anakin + Obi Wan that my Dad had managed to get for free from a local video store (Back when Blockbuster was a thing)…
As for my expectations for The Last Jedi, I’m really hoping for something dramatic and unexpected to come out of left-field – I’ve read a few theories that Luke’ll be taunted towards the dark side, and that Kylo & Rey would have to form some sort of temporary alliance to take the legendary Jedi down; however, seeing how unlikely this theory is, I’d totally be expecting a heck of a lot more development on Supreme Leader Snoke, and Kylo’s slow descent into further anger / madness; he’s already been seen as a temperamental, sporadic and obsessed with the memory of Anakin, but to see him face his uncle, the legendary Luke Skywalker, the polar opposite of Anakin and all that Kylo holds dear will be extremely interesting from a symbolic and thematic direction.
Will
You guys are stupid. You’re forgetting the best Star Wars property that ever existed.
Yee Boy, that’s what I’m talking about.
Some people were introduced to Star Wars by the original trilogy. Others, by the prequels, and now some may even have the Disneyverse be their entry point. Not me, though. I discovered Star Wars through a Lego game on the PS2.
I played this game over and over and over and over until I was blue in the thumbs, fluent in wookish, and had been declared legally dead. My brother enjoyed it, too- but his tiny pre-school couldn’t quite grasp the artistic mastery that was a plastic stormtrooper chilling in the hot-tub in his underpants. Perfection.
Lego Star Wars was the tits, yo.