Watching My Son Watching "Star Wars"

Disclaimer:  This week's blog contains spoilers for Star Wars:  Revenge of the Sith, so if you haven't seen it and still want to see it, then what are you waiting for?  The film was released nine years ago.

My son realizes he is different than his peers.  His classmates have called him "weird", "strange", ect.  It is hard to explain to other ten-year-olds that your brain processes things differently than other people, especially when it is difficult to understand that yourself.  My son high functioning Autism, which basically means that he is uncomfortable in many social situations, overtly shy, but mostly he becomes fixated on a topic and cannot shut it off in his brain and sometimes repeats things multiple times.  Last year, my son schooled me on the Marvel heroes, learned about all of them and their villain counterparts.  Now, if you ask me who Armin Zola is, I know the answer because my son spoke non-stop about him for weeks.

Although my house is filled with all things Star Wars related, my son never showed much interest in it until this past Spring, when Star Wars: The Clone Wars came out on Netflix.  He had seen many of the episodes before, but with he and his Dad watching them all in order, he really got hooked.  It is his favorite show of late, and he was recently watched "The Phantom Menace" and "Attack of the Clones", he especially prefers Darth Maul and the light saber duels.

For weeks now, he has been begging me to watch "Revenge of the Sith" with him.  The Prequels are not my favorites, so I had been blowing him off until yesterday when he took a stand and called me a "liar" for telling him I would watch it with him and then blowing him off for the upteenth time.  He was right.  I was a liar. So in order to make things right, I grabbed the DVD and we went to the bedroom to watch.

As I was attempting to find the DVD remote, my son looked at the cover and asked, "Who are those two fighting on the front?", but before I could answer he had figured it out, "I don't want to see Obi-Wan and Anakin fight Mom, that will make me sad."  I told him that the scene where where Anakin goes to the Jedi Temple to kill the Younglings makes me sad, so we agreed to skip over those parts.  So, the movie started and my son starts his own commentary over the movie, which can get kind of distracting at times, because he likes to add scenes and dialogue that are not in the movie, so after a while, I was not really watching the movie, but was watching him watching the movie.  Some of his insights were rather interesting and at times humorous.  For example, when Mace Windu takes three other Jedi with him to arrest Supreme Chancellor  Palpatine, Palpatine kills three of them almost instantly.  My son laughed and said to me, "At least Kit Fisto (the green one) lasted a few seconds more than the other two, apparently they didn't know how to use their light sabers."  Later on, when Order 66 was issued, he screamed when one of the Jedi was killed, "Nooo!  Anyone, but Plo Koon!" When I saw this movie originally, most of the Jedi who were hunted down and killed were seen for a few seconds, so their deaths really did not have much impact, but my son had seen Star Wars:  The Clone Wars first, which gave many of these Jedi a back story and Plo Koon had a huge role on the series, so these scenes really meant much more to him because they were characters he had come to know and love instead of just some random Jedi getting killed.

 

Plo Koon's death hit my son hard.

We became so engrossed in watching the film, that we ended up not skipping over the parts we originally agreed to.  My son watched the final battle between Anakin and Obi Wan, it made him sad to see it, and it broke his heart when Anakin became Darth Vader, but he found hope in Luke and Leia being born, and I found new insight into a movie I originally thought was lackluster until I saw it through the eyes of my son.

Until next time, I am,
Sci-Fi Fan FL