images from @dvdmenus@bluesky.social
Saw the Star Wars re-release, and this may be one of the only products where I'm apparently and shockingly blinded by nostalgia. Even at its worst, I can't think of it as boring. I watched it so many times as a kid because it was one of the DVDs we owned, and so many weird little moments and lines were surprisingly baked on my brain when they came up.
But the other part of it is just how saturated with this movie I am even as an adult. So much of the prequels is memed on, and now Jar Jar wraps around to being hilarious to me just from the absurdity of it all. Why does Quigon even bring him into the town on Tatooine?! No one's choices make sense. The wooden performances are all so surreal, how does that even happen? But also so many lines and choices are so funny in how weird they are.
After the movie, we chatted about various other media, my roommate kept going "is this even better than Phantom Menace?" and for several examples I had to say that, at the end of the day, this movie is more imaginative than a LOT of things. The script is awful, the direction is awful, and story is bizarre at best and lame at worst, but I definitely can't say it's a boring movie.
(And to be clear, this isn't "prequels are good actually" vibes, it's actually utterly ridiculous to me that I walked out of that theater perfectly happy to have watched an incredibly stupid movie, it is truly news to me how much this thing is baked into my neurons beyond full reproach.)