Star Wars: The Saber Order

(There are going to be spoilers for the Star Wars movies ahead. Please be wary of that before you go reading my gushing.)

I could put any image here, so here's Max Rebo, the
most rad synth-playing blue elephant in the Outer Rim.

So, holy shit. There's a new Star Wars movie coming out next month. So that's something interesting. Not only that, but some of my tabletop RPG pals are planning to run a Star Wars campaign in the near future. That should be fun too! Before we talk about... what we're going to talk about, here's my history with Star Wars. My brother was there for the original scene, in the 80's. He had the toys, the books, the et cetera et cetera. I, being a good... gosh, 14 years younger, was not around for that scene. I was born 2 years after Return Of The Jedi. No, I got into Star Wars in 1995, at the absolute last time to get into it before Everything Was Ruined Forever according to fandom. I watched the originals, I loved the originals, and in September 1997 for my 12th birthday I got the Star Wars Trilogy Special Edition on VHS. That set's still in my basement, and I've seen the Special Editions a bunch of times since then. They're fine, mostly. Emblematic of George Lucas's "endless tinkerer" and "all of the CGI, all of it" approach that would become synonymous with him soon, but fine all the same. Really, there's only one Special Edition change that I take great offense to, and it ain't Greedo shot bleedin' first. No, that change would be the addition of "Jedi Rocks" in Return Of The Jedi, and replacing a rad 80's sleazy alien synthpop song with... soul ballads from CGI cartoons. Or something. Hell, ROTJ manages to somehow break even with me because I like the new ending song better than Yub Nub or whatever the fuck. Anyway. A few years after that came the Star Wars trilogy that my generation got; the prequel films. Of which I only got to see one on the big screen. And that one was The Phantom Menace, even! Christ. I did like it when I was 14, and I did like the other movies at 17 and 20. I mean, well... they're okay I guess. I know a lot of people are re-analyzing The Phantom Menace specifically because of that fucking "Jar Jar is evil" theory that's floating around, but even a few years before that we had Red Letter Media's sublime and thorough takedown of the entire prequel trilogy.

Of course, there's more than one way to enjoy your Star Wars saga. Around the same time as the RLM reviews came a radical new way to watch the movies: The Machete Order. So named because it cuts an entire movie from the six-part saga, but also because it rearranges things. The short version of the Machete Order experience is as follows: You watch Episodes 4 and 5, just as you would if you were doing an original trilogy re-watch. At the end of The Empire Strikes Back, after Darth Vader's shocking reveal, you jump back in time to treat Episodes 2 and 3 of the prequel trilogy as an extended flashback, giving you the backstory to the fall of the Old Republic, the rise of the Empire, and Anakin Skywalker becoming Darth Vader. With the knowledge of how shit got bad, you jump to the conclusion of the series with Return Of The Jedi, and with Revenge Of The Sith fresh on your mind all of the added parallels become stronger and the emotional core of the finale is better served. The other reason for viewing the movies in this order is to preserve a bunch of the major twists... specifically that Darth Vader is Luke's father, and that Luke and Leia are siblings. Also that Chancellor Palpatine is actually Darth Sidious, the Emperor. It's a method suggested for first-time viewers, either people who never got into Star Wars before or kids discovering the series for the very first time. As for the reason why Episode 1 is cut from this order? Surprisingly, it isn't just "Episode 1 sucks" like you think it might be. Rather, the reason for skipping it is its irrelevance. According to the Machete Order, everyone introduced in Episode 1 is either killed/removed, not overly important to the plot, or gets established better in a later episode. The opening crawl of Episode 2, and indeed most of the opening moments, establish just about everything a first-time viewer needs to know, creating only a mild bit of confusion that the Machete Order guy admits to.

Now we come to my friend Joe. Joe likes Star Wars a lot. He came up with a modified version of the Machete Order recently, and dubbed it "The Saber Order". The Saber Order goes even further with its prequel trilogy surgery, and the "extended flashback" between The Empire Strikes Back and Return Of The Jedi is now just one movie; Revenge Of The Sith. With Star Wars on my mind, and a burning desire to rewatch the films anyway, I agreed to test Joe's Saber Order out for him. The question was such: Would Revenge Of The Sith work on its own as the story of how Anakin fell and the Empire rose to power? Would skipping Attack Of The Clones create any confusion in trying to watch Episode 3? So it was that I fired up the original 1977 film, and went to it. Well, there was nothing really different for the first two films. It's the same as just watching the original trilogy. Good movie experiences were had, FUNNNNNY JOKES were made, and I engaged in a little critical nitpicking, the kind you just do when you've seen something twenty times before. Finally, on Friday, it was time. I popped my Revenge Of The Sith DVD in, and was interested to see just how well this shit would actually work. There were one or two things I could think of that might throw off a first-time viewer, but I went with it. Spoilers: it works. By god, it works! If nothing else, Revenge Of The Sith is really good at establishing shit for you, and just about anything it doesn't establish can be written off as backstory fluff. Here are a few things that work really well in Saber Order, that either I or Joe noticed.

1) The opening crawl.

Well, shit, this helps explain a lot of what's going on. Just from this little bit of text at the intro, you get a sense of the story so far and its major players. From it alone, I took away the following:

-The "Republic" is at war with a bunch of separatists led by a Sith Lord named Count Dooku.
-The separatists also have a droid army, led by a General Grievous.
-General Grievous has kidnapped Chancellor Palpatine of the Republic and is trying to get away with him.
-Two Jedi Knights are on a mission to rescue Chancellor Palpatine.

That does give you a lot! From there, you get all out war in the opening space battle. Anakin and Obi-Wan show up (more on their relationship in a second) and you can pretty much visually tell who Obi-Wan is because you know what old Obi-Wan looks like from the other movies. Admittedly it does take a while before they call Anakin by name, but you do get his full name within 20 minutes. They face off against Count Dooku and General Grievous in this 30-minute opening bit, and reference is made to a previous encounter with Count Dooku. That might make him feel like he came out of nowhere, but if you watch all the movies in order, Grievous also comes out of nowhere unless you watched the 2D Clone Wars cartoon. Reference to clones is made fairly quick into the movie, so a savvy viewer will pick up on the mentions of the Clone Wars from Episode 4. There's one thing that might possibly confuse, but we'll get to that later on.


2) Anakin and Obi-Wan's friendship.

I think the main reason Joe was eager to trim Episode 2 from the Machete Order was how it handled Anakin and his relation to other major characters. This is ground well-walked by Red Letter Media, but there's a dissonance between Obi-Wan's reminiscence of Anakin as a great pilot and a good friend with their relationship in Episode 2. Obi-Wan seems to see Anakin in that movie as more of a bratty teenager he has to babysit, who's constantly back-talking him and getting himself into trouble. Anakin, on the other hand, sees Obi-Wan as limiting and controlling his Jedi powers, and he's constantly shit-talking Obi-Wan behind the guy's back. He's a seething ball of teenage hormones and rage, and he's honestly not the most relatable character. Come the opening of Episode 3, and most of that is gone. On casual viewing, Anakin and Obi-Wan seem like good friends, with Anakin being just a little impulsive but not an ass about it. We see that he's a good pilot, and he's clearly good friends with Obi-Wan. Hell, in their last real conversation as friends, Obi-Wan admits that Anakin is better than he is at Jedi stuff. Anakin does get upset at how the Jedi treat him in this movie, but he never really gets upset at Obi-Wan; it feels more like him venting his frustrations to an old and trusted friend. Which makes what is to come all the more sad, of course.

3) Anakin and Padme's romance.

Look, I'm sorry. Episode 2's romance plot with Anakin and Padme was garbage. Joe's right to cut it out. Granted, that doesn't really save much since there's still cringeworthy romance dialogue in Revenge Of The Sith, but not as much. More to the point, by skipping that awkward romance and moving straight to "oh they're married", it makes things work better... in a sense. There's still momentary confusion in Padme's first scene, because someone unfamiliar with Episode 2's "Jedi aren't allowed to love" edict will be wondering why in the world Anakin has a secret senator lover. This is patched over with dialogue from Padme worrying about getting kicked out of the senate/Anakin getting kicked out of the Jedi if they find out they're having a baby, but there's still that bit of confusion from not having seen Episode 2. Otherwise, as normal.

4) Chancellor Palpatine.

Ah, Sheev. What a guy. Well, first off, Joe's Saber Order removes the inconsistency of the Jedi suddenly not trusting Palpatine as far as they can throw him; now it just always seemed that way. Anakin and Palpatine's relationship is served better; Palpatine seems like another friendly mentor character to Anakin, kind of like Obi-Wan is. It gives this strange sort of tension, and it's only added when Palpatine starts behaving awfully a lot like a Sith Lord. We don't really know the Emperor is named Palpatine in the original trilogy, but someone would catch on pretty damn quick; the opera scene at the latest. Either way, he suckers Anakin in with his little "save people from dying" thing (which, Anakin's premonitions parallel quite nicely with Luke's about Cloud City, and both of them do foolish and impetuous things in order to save the people they care about) and the kid goes bad and gets put in a robot suit.

Things that don't make sense

There are a few. Just about everything brought up in Revenge Of The Sith is explained... but one has to keep in mind all of the different versions of Star Wars out there. I did this with the original original trilogy, sans changes, because I've seen the Special Editions a shitload of times and I like the variety. There are two changes I can think of that would confuse, and the first is Boba Fett. The prequels have the Clone Army all being clones of Boba Fett's dad, so for the Special Edition DVDs George bothered to redub all of Boba Fett's lines in The Empire Strikes Back with that guy. (If I was the dude who originally did Boba's voice I'd be pissed off.) That's fine if you saw Attack Of The Clones, but I could see a new viewer watching the official DVDs/Blu-Rays wondering why in the everloving fuck the clones had Boba Fett's voice. Similarly, they might wonder why the hell R2D2 and C3PO are here... though in the prequels we got no explanation for R2 being there all along, and 3PO's introduction is cut out of the Machete Order anyway.

The other very minor thing is the celebration scene. There's a shot of Naboo added for the DVDs. Saber Order never shows the planet Naboo, so one might wonder where the hell this is... though at that point the movie's basically over so it doesn't really matter, I guess. Other than that, Saber Order works. It really and honestly works, and it leaves a certain level of ambiguity to the prequel trilogy that makes one think it was sort of redundant, really. We didn't need to see the clones being made, or the Trade Federation scheme, or podracing or any of that. Turns out all you need is Episode 3 and an attentive ear for dialogue. Huh. Thanks, Joe.

Give Saber Order a shot for yourself. See how it works. As for me, I'm going to build a Star Wars tabletop character. Maybe a small alien blue elephant Jedi...