We had the machette order, the good old fashioned order of release, chronological order and now Vanity Fair have come up with a brand new one – the Rey order. Why is this a viable option? Read on…
In trying to devise a new watch order for Star Wars, I kept thinking of my six-year-old daughter’s reaction to the ending of The Force Awakens, when Rey finally comes face-to-face with a world-weary Luke Skywalker in exile. “Look!” she declared in the hushed movie theater. “It’s…Obi-Wan Kenobi!”
We had watched the original trilogy together already, but I realized in that moment that she had no sense at all that these films were decades old. Sure, Han Solo and Leia Organa probably looked a little grayer around the edges to her—but the most dramatic and noticeable change was in Luke, who was unrecognizable to her. She strained to comprehend the brash young hero from Return of the Jedi as this forlorn, gray-bearded man in a brown cloak. In many ways, that’s the entire point of the scene, as The Last Jedi would emphasize: Rey also struggled to see the legend of Luke Skywalker in the man standing before her.
I began to think that might be the key to a new Star Wars movie watch order. Call it “Rey Order”—starting with 2015’s The Force Awakens, and using that as the foundation for exploring (or revisiting) the other live-action stories in the franchise.
Instead of priming new viewers with the entire history of the galaxy before launching into the most recent sequel trilogy, why not enter the story as Rey does, with only a vague grasp of what came before? (Kids start absorbing Star Wars info through osmosis at birth, so no one really begins entirely cold.)
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