Last year the 9-movie Star Wars saga ended with Rise of Skywalker. (for better or worse, depending on your point of view. Not counting ‘solo’ and ‘Rogue One’) Which, with the hindsight that we now have in 2020 and the tectonic shifts the coronavirus and Covid-19 have brought about (and will continue to do so for the rest of the decade as country after country with little or no health-care resources, stable economic bases and governance, and less-than robust food security, add one more burden to their already breaking shoulders), created a certain grim symmetrical bookend to the last 43 years, that otherwise might’ve been missed.

There was (eg, The Mandalorian) and will be (eg, Taika Waititi – he, of the fabulously successful ‘Thor: Ragnarok’ – has just been tapped to co-write and direct a new Star Wars feature film) more Star Wars-ian stuff, but it is essentially the end of an era.

Just as there was a (mythically proportioned) ‘Golden Years of Hollywood’ so now the last 50 years of western cinema can claim a similar appellation. Perhaps we can call it ‘The Birth of Special Effects and CGI Era’. (a bit long and it doesn’t acronym-ise very well either – TBSECE)

The force, (or as it’s known for just one single day every year, a bit like Brigadoon  really, ‘the 4th’) as Yoda describes it, is another name for the energy that so many of us have seen come into its own of late. What ‘life on Earth’ might just be like if everyone strove for balance rather than the accumulation of ‘wealth’. Or perhaps it’s a desire to experience that balance for more than a few fleeting moments, as we realise on deeper and deeper levels just how far out of balance we truly did fall.

‘May the force be with you.’

‘Do, or do not. There is no try.’

Luke – ‘I don’t believe it.’ … Yoda – ‘That, is why you fail.’