Am I too old to be going through a Star Wars thing?

Amazeballs album - Dark Side of the Death Star

I very recently watched a Star Wars flick again and now I'm freshly obsessed. Which was a goal in fact because next week I am going to the Galaxy's Edge, Disneyland's brand spanking new land made of stormtroopers and death stars, which are the prettiest most sparkly stars around.

The new land is called Batuu. It's a remote outpost planet on the edge of the galaxy and is the last stop before you hit wild space. I'm fairly certain none of this is based on rigorous study and experiment and is solely Disney Physics but that's okay because they had me at the first sod of dirt that was turned.

I'm hoping the Disney Imagineers have managed to evoke The Force, because I quite like the idea of getting what I want in life simply by concentrating hard enough. How lovely. I'll have All The Things, please.

Surprisingly, many people have not even seen one scene of the most cultic, iconic cinematic cashcows there has ever been. I know; I've polled all of the people.  I imagine I am one of the first bloggers in history to blog about Star Wars but anyway.

First the people who have never witnessed the greatness, Star Wars stars a couple of robots, a big furry bear thing, men who wear too much beige, an annoying lady with a retro Princess Leia hairdo, armed men in all-white outfits wearing tap shoes, and a cape-wearing lunatic, but we all have our foibles.

While the fanatics debate the intracacies of hyperspace travel, the exact measurements of the Death Star, and the main themes running through the series, for example, the power of knowledge and the inability to control your destiny and how awesome and powerful you are if you are the Dark Side leader, a few key questions that never get answered keep rattling around in my head:

• Why do storm troopers wear tap shoes?

• There is practically no responsible use of lightsabres.  Someone could get seriously hurt.

• Every single malfunction on the Millenium Falcon can easily be fixed with a blowtorch.

• None of the windows on any of the space fleet seem to be double-glazed.  Who builds a space thingy without even blinds or curtains to keep out the intergalactic chill?  Who?  I wonder if Richard Branson has thought of curtains for his flying harem of galactic Virgins.

• There is far too much work involved to become a Jedi Knight.

• Yoda would have had another 200 years in him if Luke had stopped hassling him with endless inane questions.

• I love Harrison Ford.

• I want one of those doors that slide open at lightning speed.  The first movie was filmed in the 70's, so why aren't quickarse speedy doors mainstream forty years later?

Mortal Engines - my remote control

The other night I had big plans. BIG PLANS. I was going to hire a DVD (Mortal Engines) and go home and watch it! I wish you could have seen my super excited face. So I ventured to the local Hoyts Kiosk – OLD SKOOL!, where a non-human machine thing dispensed the DVD into my hand in a cold, hard business transaction; just the way I like it.

Mortal Engines was released in early 2019, and I missed it at the cinema, and I’m up to the last book of the Mortal Engines Quartet by Philip Reeve, so have been mega keen to see the series come to life.

Anyway, anyway, my Mac is the one made of Air and thus does not allow things to be stuck in it, so I headed to my DVD player, which I haven’t activated since 1908, and the ‘child safety lock mode’ was on, with no remote to be seen for many, many miles. 

I turned my lounge upside down looking for that damned thing, getting more and more frustrated, the way you do when the world Zuckerberg created helps to turn you into an inpatient, demanding jerk who can’t just ‘be in the moment’ with a lost remote.

My lost remote is all very hilarious actually in this context, because the main character’s job in Mortal Engines is as an ye olde world historian who hunts down and trades in old tech to survive. Maybe he could have found my lost remote. Maybe that can be the second movie. 

Mortal Engines is a post-apocalyptic world where entire cities are mounted on wheels and drive around preying on each other and, let me tell you, I’m gonna kill my bloody remote when I find it.

So after lots of button pressing and holding, it quickly became apparent that I needed another way into the machine. Professionally trained ‘child safety lock mode’ defusers get paid a lot of money to do this job with a remote. One small mistake, and you’re dead.

So, I turned to the Googles to help me dismantle the 'child safety lock mode' sans remote. Unfortunately, I immediately ended up in one of those tech help forums, where the answers to questions create more confusion than the questions themselves. And then, before I knew what was happening, information technology folk starting peppering me with questions via a bot called Bob. I didn’t care for it, so I left the theatre of war, and took sanctuary IRL.

In the end, much like in the movie, the device wasn’t infiltrated, someone was mortally wounded in a sword duel, the crash drive was destroyed with an old tech nuclear warhead, and no-one lived happily ever after.