The Definitive Star Wars Saga Watch Order

The debate is over.

What is the correct order to watch the Star Wars Saga?

In brief:

A New Hope (1977)

The Empire Strikes Back (1980)

Return of the Jedi (1983)

The Phantom Menace (1999)

Attack of the Clones (2002)

Revenge of the Sith (2005)

The Force Awakens (2015)

The Last Jedi (2017)

The Rise of Skywalker (2019)

At length:

In the early 80s, my father bought himself a new set of The Chronicles of Narnia. In that collection, The Magician’s Nephew was labeled as the first book in the series before The Lion, The Witch and the Wardrobe.

If you’re not up on C.S. Lewis chronology, The Magician’s Nephew was the sixth book published in The Chronicles of Narnia. The first three books (The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe / Prince Caspian / The Voyage of the Dawn Treader) are the original trilogy. Lewis followed these books up with The Silver Chair and The Horse and His Boy, loosely connected to the narrative.

By the time The Magician’s Nephew was published, Narnia was a well-known world to readers. It was never meant as an introduction. It was and is Narnia’s backstory.

My father took it upon himself to move The Magician’s Nephew, with the bright “1” on its spine, further into the cardboard cover that bound the series together. He moved it to second-to-last, right before The Last Battle.

My father believed in Release Order. I am very much his son.

Star Wars consists of more than Episodes I-IX, of course, much more. But the Star Wars Saga is, at heart, one central myth told in three parts of three: the original trilogy, its backstory, and its aftermath.

Still, the order in which the films were released has created a conundrum and debate. The movies are labeled Episodes One through Episode Nine. Which implies that’s their order. That’s the mathematical solution. Start at the beginning. The beginning of any story is part one.

But they were not released or made in that order. Episode One was released sixteen years after Episode Six. Which was the third movie. Episode One is the fourth film. Honestly, one of the best things about The Force Awakens is at least it is the seventh movie released and also Episode Seven, generously resetting our numbering system to some form of sanity.

Which begs the question: what is the correct viewing order? If you have 20 hours to kill, where do you start and where do you finish? If you were going to show the films for the first time to your kids, what is the first movie they should see? (Honestly, if you have an adult in your life who has carefully avoided seeing any Star Wars films somehow, and is relying on you to decide the watch order? You’re wasting your time worrying about it. If they cared, they could have watched them without you.)

You’ll find arguments for Episode Order and Release Order that rely on what ‘George Lucas intended,’ or ‘how to best preserve the iconic surprise in Empire.’ Reactions to the films have inspired popular proposals like Machete Order (nonsense, highest recommendation to avoid, zero stars).

I’m here to end the debate. The answer to the question is the order in which they were released. First, Star Wars: A New Hope. Finally, Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker.

That’s it. Here’s why.

Each Episode of the Star Wars Saga is a response to the Episode that came before it.

The very first Star Wars film is complete unto itself. It requires no other information to make sense and every piece of exposition exists to support the story on the screen. You don’t need to know what the clone wars were, see Anakin Skywalker, or know where Han Solo got the Millennium Falcon to make sense of A New Hope. The story begins with a chase and ends with a celebration. If you watched only the original Star Wars, you would understand what Star Wars is about, its style and influences, the main characters, and even the importance of John Williams’ music.

Which is to say, you don’t need to watch Episode III in order to understand Episode IV. Even calling it Episode IV was not initially intended to imply there were more movies on the way: it was an homage to Saturday matinee serials.

You do, though, need to watch Star Wars to understand The Empire Strikes Back. The Empire Strikes Back is the ur-sequel. It takes the most popular movie ever made to that point, a whiz bang pastiche with bombast and propulsion, and improves on it. It’s sexier. It’s scarier. It’s more adult. It’s more mystical. It’s bolder. It’s sadder. In every way the first film is tidy, The Empire Strikes Back is messy. A New Hope ends with Triumph of the Will-meets-getting-your-Merit-Badge. The Empire Strikes Back ends with a hand on the shoulder in a space hospital.

Return of the Jedi shows up to lighten the mood. Every hero is saved, everyone’s a little goofier (as Lawrence Kasdan would say), the movie is lush with green life and stuffed with Teddy Bears. Even the music feels like it’s having a cheerier time. As the finale of a trilogy, it solves story problems with a wave of its hand: Luke, Han and Leia love triangle? No, they’re siblings! No hard feelings. Either in the original release or the revised version, be it a forest celebration or a galactic one, it ends with a bunch of friends being smiled at by ghosts they’ve given some peace.

Which is why The Phantom Menace is the brilliant shock to this particular system. The Phantom Menace is equal parts expectation arson and wish fulfillment. George Lucas litters the movie with moments that are designed to satisfy your curiosity. In fact, a lot of the movie works best if you came in curious.

If you don’t give a damn what Jedi were like in their prime, then watching Jedi walk around like clock-punching samurai may not hold your interest. On the contrary, if you have been waiting to see real Jedi just do anything at all, then watching two Jedi Knights mow down some tinker-toy droids is totally dope. It’s climatic lightsaber duel is especially wonderful if you have seen only three lightsaber duels before, and they featured exactly no double-bladed red lightsabers spun around by the devil.

The Phantom Menace is made up of foreshadowing and winks, aimed squarely at an audience that knows what’s coming. “Anakin Skywalker, meet Obi-Wan Kenobi,” says Qui-Gon Jinn. “We will watch your career with great interest,” says Senator Palpatine to Anakin. “You will never get me onto one of those dreadful starships!” says C-3PO.

(It’s also a movie full of events audiences were not expecting at all. Like, you know, Anakin Skywalker being a virgin birth.)

Also, to its creator, Episode I was a technological response to what came before. Lucas was never being quite satisfied with what he could achieve in-camera in the late 70s and early 80s. The Phantom Menace is a statement of digital freedom from the rubber puppets and hand-built models, Frankensteined and kitbashed.

Attack of the Clones, for its part, responds less to the original trilogy and more to The Phantom Menace itself. Audiences in 1999 felt as if Episode I was (to put it mildly) inert and they were not fans of Jar Jar Binks. After spending their childhoods watching smugglers race through asteroids, some audiences were restless watching Natalie Portman intone “I move for a vote of no confidence” in a giant digital Galactic Senate.

Episode II is all “stuff happens.” It starts with an assassination attempt, goes directly to another assassination attempt, and then sends our heroes off on a Mystery and a Romance. Everywhere The Phantom Menace is leisurely, Attack of the Clones is frantic. Everywhere that The Phantom Menace subverts expectations, Attack of the Clones tries to satisfy.

For all the “stop complaining, here’s Yoda kicking ass like heroic frog” energy of Attack of the Clones, the real clue to its “this ain’t Episode I” theme comes in a quieter moment.

Early in the film, right before Anakin and Padme are about to travel together as refugees to Naboo, they share a brief scene while she packs her refugee-style roller bags. Just outside the room, Jar Jar accepts a position as Senator for Naboo while Padme is out of commission on her mission. “Jar Jar,” she impatiently says, “I’m sure you have a great deal to do.” He’s dismissed from the movie, interrupted mid-sentence. When I watched the movie at a midnight showing in New York City, that line got a vocal response from the crowd. He doesn’t come back until he is called upon to drop a “bomba” on Democracy.

That’s the spirit of Episode II. Bye Bye, the opposite of a fan favorite, says Episode II. Bring on the debut of Yoda’s flippy-fighting! Bring on the stormtroopers that look like Boba Fett. Farewell, menacing phantom! Clones! Attack!

Not to put too fine a point on it, but Attack of the Clones was also the first major release to use cinematic digital cameras. Lucas declared freedom from film, pushing the medium forward technically, just as he had with Episode I.

It’s hard to remember now, but in 2005, Revenge of the Sith was billed as the final Star Wars film. It was meant to bring the Saga full circle and complete the story of Darth Vader, his fall and redemption.

So Revenge of the Sith, watched as the sixth film, completes that thought, finishing the journey of Anakin from cute kid to terrible, terrible husband. It ends with an image that is meant to remind us all of where we started, A New Hope. It’s written like it knows it’s that empty space in your Star Wars DVD box set. It’s purpose is to give us the things we have been waiting for.

The inevitability of Anakin Skywalker’s downfall is what undergirds the prequel trilogy. When he finally turns to the Dark Side, gets kind-of-accidentally set on fire and then turned into Frankenstein’s Monster, we aren’t meant to be surprised. We’re meant to feel like the waiter got our order right.

It was fully 10 years after the release of Episode III that The Force Awakens came to theaters. The sequel to Return of the Jedi, one could be forgiven for imagining it is a movie in conversation with the film that comes before it in the timeline.

But it isn’t, really. The Force Awakens is best understood as in conversation with the prequels that preceded it. The prequels were a digital revolution, built out of green and blue screens, with heroes that spoke more like King Arthur than Buck Rogers.

The Force Awakens returns to shooting on film, with a focus on hand-built costumes, and legacy designs. Every frame is designed to give the audience something they missed: a crane shot of an X-Wing, an aging scoundrel bursting into frame, the just-waiting-to-be-discovered Millennium Falcon.

It’s impossible for a new audience member to fully replicate the experience of watching Episode VII for the first time after such a long wait, the thrill of seeing characters that had been missing for fully thirty years.

A detour into the prequels after Return of the Jedi can provide, at least, a psychological stand-in for having to be patient. Watching Han Solo say “Chewie, we’re home” would be a lot of fun if you’d just seen Return of the Jedi. Watching that same scene if you had just spent a whole trilogy with no sign of Han Solo for ages? That’s the feeling the filmmakers are trying to inspire.

The Force Awakens knows you missed Han and Leia and Chewie and Artoo. The Force Awakens knows you wonder what ever became of Luke Skywalker. If you’d just spent three movies getting a history lesson, chances are, you do miss them by now.

The Last Jedi is often treated like a detour, as well, throwing many fan expectations for a loop. In fact, The Last Jedi carefully follows the path laid down by The Force Awakens. It identifies that Finn, when we leave him, has one friend in the galaxy and that’s Rey. His first word? “Rey!” It picks up the haunted, exiled Luke Skywalker we find at the end of The Force Awakens and uses all the available information to create his circumstances. Take a listen to Han Solo’s speech about Luke’s whereabouts in Episode VII and you’ll see The Last Jedi follows the text to the letter.

Even the plot point that seemed to rankle some fans most - that Rey’s parents are no one - is set up in the text of The Force Awakens. Rey’s family leaves her with a junk trader. Her waiting for their return is treated as her being stuck in a past that will never provide closure. Maz Kanata tells Rey that the belonging she seeks is not behind her, but ahead. There’s far more support in the script for Rey’s parents being a red herring than there is evidence that she’s the hidden offspring of the Empire.

It’s also worth noting that The Last Jedi is the only Star Wars film that follows its predecessor immediately in the timeline. In previous entries, there is a range from one year to a full decade (between Episode I and Episode II) to thirty years (between VI and VII) where developments have happened off-screen. The Last Jedi literally picks from a cliffhanger.

The Rise of Skywalker, as the final film in the “Skywalker Saga,” does a lot of work to tie up the story, connecting the sequel trilogy to the overarching narrative of Jedi versus Sith. It’s clearest conversation, though, is with The Last Jedi. Setting aside the meta-textual conversation the two scripts appear to be in (there will be time for that in another post), there’s something more obvious at work.

The Rise of Skywalker brings the new heroes together as a team for the first time. Up until The Rise of Skywalker, The Force Awakens and The Last Jedi tightrope walk between establishing the Resistance and revisiting the Rebels.

That leaves The Rise of Skywalker as the sole film where Rey, Poe and Finn are treated as old friends. The movie short-hands this the way the original films did: with bonding off-screen. Just as Luke calls Han “old buddy” in The Empire Strikes Back, Rey and Poe squabble like siblings in the early scenes of The Rise of Skywalker. Somewhere between Poe introducing himself to Rey in the final scene of Episode VIII and the first ten minutes of Episode IX, these two have become so familiar with each other that they drive each other nuts.

In support of my thesis, if The Rise of Skywalker was a merely response to The Last Jedi? Dayenu. But Episode IX has another coded message that supports Release Order.

The Rise of Skywalker views itself as ending a nine part story that began in 1977, not 1999. The final Star Wars film does not return us to the funeral pyre of Qui-Gon Jinn on Naboo or to Coruscant to reinstall the Senate. Instead, Rey’s epilogue is a return to the Lars Homestead, burying the Skywalker lightsabers where the story began. She takes on the name of her adopted heritage and stands with BB-8 in the silhouette of the Twin Suns. (In fact, both of the antecedent trilogies to the original end with a callback to this moment.)

The story doesn’t end with a farewell to Anakin Skywalker, Obi-Wan Kenobi, Qui-Gon Jinn and Padme Amidala. It ends with a farewell to the Skywalker Twins.

So, A New Hope begins the story, The Empire Strikes Back expands on that story, Return of the Jedi brings original story to its conclusion. Just like the Magician’s Nephew, The Phantom Menace provides backstory to the well-known tale. The Phantom Menace is followed up with the lore-dense Attack of the Clones and the two trilogies are connected by Revenge of the Sith. Years later, The Force Awakens brings us characters and imagery we’ve missed since the original trilogy. It is followed immediately by The Last Jedi, for the penultimate conflict between the past and the future. Finally, The Rise of Skywalker brings its heroes together to end the nine-film conflict with the Sith. Episode IX then returns viewers to where the story truly started over 40 years ago on Tatooine with A New Hope.

This order preserves the reasons for the creative decisions that compose each film; and preserves the conversation the films and filmmakers were having with one another.

REGARDING SOLO AND ROGUE ONE

One might ask where I would put Rogue One and Solo in the Star Wars Saga watch order. My answer is: I wouldn’t. One might include them in a big chronological rewatch that includes the full breadth of the Star Wars timeline, but I wouldn’t include them in a straightforward “Skywalker Saga” rewatch.

These movies are fabulous, but inserting them into the release order doesn’t actually make sense - there’s no reason to watch Solo after The Last Jedi in particular.

Even in chronological order, though, these are side missions. As much as I love Rogue One, for example, there is no information conveyed in that film that is not summed up in the first paragraph of the opening crawl of A New Hope. If you don’t watch it, you’ll miss a modern and beautifully shot riff on Star Wars, but you won’t miss anything necessary to the mythology.

The same is true of Solo. Solo is a rip-roaring Lawrence Kasdan space adventure that’s got a ton of heart, but it’s premise (that Han Solo’s nature is to be the good guy, despite his protests) is entirely shown to us in the original trilogy.

That isn’t to say these movies work without the core saga. In fact, it’s far more accurate to call these movies ‘Star Wars Stories’ than stand-alone films. They really don’t stand alone, they depend a great deal on preexisting material in order to make sense.

So, if you’re going to add them to your Star Wars watch menu? These movies are dessert, a compliment to the meal.

I have spoken.