Aliyah’s Experience

This blog contains spoilers for the Star Wars films, please read at your own risk.

I get it, I’m late to the party. I would say I come from a Star Wars household, at least my dad and my brothers love it, but when I was younger I never got the hype. Maybe I was too young, maybe I thought it was a “boy thing”, maybe I just didn’t want to watch the dang movies, okay? But, one day, after I ran threw all the movies on Netflix and a lot of the series on Hulu, I went on Disney plus and saw that Star Wars had a whole section to itself. So, I clicked on the tab, saw everything that it had to offer, looked up which movie to watch first and started watching Star Wars.

This is the order I watched the movies:

Episode IV: A New Hope

Episode V: The Empire Strikes Back

Episode VI: Return of the Jedi

Episode I: The Phantom Menace

Episode II: Attack of the Clones

Episode III: Revenge of the Sith

Episode VII: The Force Awakens

Episode VIII: The Last Jedi

Episode IX: The Rise of Skywalker

Yes, I watched the movies in the order of the release date and I wouldn’t change a thing. Granted, I had my dad and big brother (Star Wars experts) to speed dial anytime I had questions. But, if I were going to recommend an order to watch it in, it would be the release date order. Now, lets talk about it (we aren’t going to be discussing anything, I just need to get my feelings out, so thanks for reading). 

First, let me tell you that my top two favorite movies of all the Star Wars movies would have to be Episode III: Revenge of the Sith (obviously) and Episode IX: The Rise of Skywalker. Yeah, yeah, yeah, I could sit here all day and write about all the other episodes and those episodes had some very key parts in them, but if I’m just talking about how the movies made me feel… episodes III and IX had me HEART BROKEN! 

The little girl in me saw what the Star Wars saga was going to be from the beginning: a love story. We all saw what happened to Anakin and Padme. I know that much more goes into it, but Anakin loved Padme so much that he truly thought the only way to save her from death was to turn to the dark-side. We all knew that Palpatine was manipulating Anakin and using his mothers death against him, but love can be blind. Also, Anakin knew he was special, everyone was telling him that he was going to save the galaxy, but he felt like he couldn’t trust anyone. I just couldn’t imagine what he was going through. Trying to live up to everyones expectations as a jedi, living in secret, and battling inner demons no one can truly help him with. I don’t know if any of us could be strong enough to hold out as long as he did. Even though I would like to say I would have never gone over to the dark side like Anakin, I would of. And poor Padme. She was probably just as scared as Anakin in some ways. Imagine being so madly in love and expecting a baby with your amazing jedi husband that is going to save the galaxy one day and then the very next day you don’t even recognize who you married. Yeah, people change but damn that’s a lot of change in one day. Imagine how torn up she was: one part of her heart belonged to the republic, a system she truly believed in and spent years serving; and then the other part of her heart belong to her husband, the good, the bad, and everything in between. Her heart was so broken that she died! Wow. That was a lot to unpack. 

So yeah, I wasn’t okay after Episode III: Revenge of the Sith. That broke my own heart in a way. But, I knew there was more to come, there had to be another love story, right? So, I go through all the other movies, go through all the emotions and truly soak in the experience we call Star Wars. And then I get to the very final movie, Episode IX: The Rise of Skywalker. I didn’t know what anger and sadness was before the ending of this movie. I could have lived with an ending like this: Palpatine (which how the hell is he still alive) kills Kylo Ren, (who I like to call Ben Solo since he’s not evil anymore) right before Rey kills Palpatine and saves the galaxy. Rey saves the galaxy, but it was too much for her to do so she ends up dying too. See, that ending I can live with, maybe not a very happy ending but I would have closed my MacBook, pondered over it, and in the end accepted it. BUT NO. That’s not how the movie ended. Ben Solo wasn’t dead. He climbed his broken self up wherever Palpatine threw him, walked over to a pretty dead Rey, healed her up, basically revived her, they have a really passionate kiss, then, BOOM, Ben Solo goes into the force. WHAT?! Excuse me! No, no, no, that is not the love story, fairy tale I had in mind. Right when I saw them kiss I could already see them getting married like Anakin and Padme, maybe starting a little jedi school and having little jedi babies, but then BEN DIES! Oh, he deserved better than that. Didn’t we already have enough heart break when Padme died? And two seconds before that Princess Leia went into the force, so I was already hurting. Ugh, I don’t think I will ever get over this. I’m angry, I’m heart broken, I’m actively hurting.