We do not know how the Jedi of Star Wars began, except for their own self-reported histories. Obi-Wan Kenobi tells Luke that “the Jedi protected peace and justice in the galaxy for a thousand generations.” Decades earlier, Mace Windu declares that the Jedi are “keepers of the peace, not soldiers,” while Yoda, at the time of their fall, muses that they “spent [a] millennium training to re-fight the last war” against the Sith – and still managed to lose. Whether any of these fragments factually represent the Jedi’s history is up for debate, because we are not shown how the Jedi began. We are, however, given a front-row seat to their end.

Star Wars has always been political. The original trilogy, released from 1977 to 1983, uses the struggle between the Galactic Empire and the Rebel Alliance as a proxy for the U.S.’s failed war in Vietnam, a framing George Lucas has very clearly acknowledged. In contrast, the prequel trilogy (1999–2005) has been frequently compared to the War on Terror and the rise of George W. Bush. In this case, the similarities between the movies and “real life” are less intentional, as Lucas planned the prequels long before Bush’s presidency and was focused on the fall of more classical republics (as well as continuing to pull the thread of the U.S.’s response to Vietnam).

I was supposed to attend The Mountain Goats concert in Tucson tonight. For various reasons, I am no longer able to do so. Since I was planning to write an extremely cool and super deep review of that concert and now I can't, I thought I'd write about why I wanted to go to this concert at all.

Is Oppenheimer a good movie? Maybe. Probably, even. But I’ve been angry about it for a month now, so it’s finally time to write a (somewhat biased) review so I stop annoying my friends and family. And it’s still in theaters! You can still go see it, and then call me and I will talk to you for at least the three-hour runtime about why it’s such a frustrating film! (Please do not do this unless you are prepared.) What follows is kind of a review, but kind of a thinkpiece.

The Star Wars prequels are, ostensibly, about the fall of the Galactic Republic and the rise of the Empire, as well as the origin of Darth Vader, one of the most iconic villains of all time. It’s rare to see stories so grand in scope that are also… so hamstrung by the way they’re told. And nowhere is this clearer than in the central figure of Anakin Skywalker, the boy-turned-man who is both the Hero with No Fear and doomed to become Darth Vader. His portrayal is often as distressing as it is compelling.

The first time I watched Star Wars: The Last Jedi, the 8th film in the Skywalker Saga, I was in the middle of the first of several major low points induced by my time as a PhD student. The Friday it was released, I tiptoed quietly out of my office and headed towards the movie theater to catch the first showing of the day, desperate for the kind of hope that Star Wars had always provided for me. I was ready to see good triumph over evil, and to ride that high through all the work I had to do.

My journey to a PhD in Earth, Atmospheric, and Planetary Science is a tale of two inflection points. The first was when I walked into Alan Levander’s geophysics class as a freshman at Rice University, buoyed by curiosity and absolutely no advanced math knowledge. I walked out determined to be a geophysicist. The second is when David Kring led me up and down the walls of Meteor Crater, Arizona, with a single-minded determination to show me where physical evidence met destructive process. I left Meteor Crater possessed by the desire to become a planetary scientist. And now, seven years later, that is what I am.

For all that it’s a fun caper of a movie, filled with daring escapes, piles of treasure, and a literal floating palace, Castle in the Sky has always sat heavily on my mind. Like many Studio Ghibli films, it leaves viewers with a hefty blend of hope and melancholy. What sets Castle in the Sky apart is how it also forces the viewer to confront their own expectations for adventure stories; for me, it illuminates how those expectations have shaped much more of my life than I thought.