Public Service Announcement: The answer is ALWAYS "Just watch it in Release Order." Every time. No exceptions.

I swear to God, Star Wars "discourse" has ruined so much shit for so many people in so many different ways.Every so often (sometimes daily, sometimes weekly, dread it, run from it, it arrives all the same) some curious film fan will log onto reddit and ask, in completely good faith and without any fault or ill will on their part, what they assume is a pertinent question re: an interesting possibility they've learned about semi-recently; a possibilty that has gotten popularized over the last 15+ years of online conversation among members of various Fandoms:What's the best order to watch (Insert Film Series X here) for me to get the most out of them?And the answer is always this:Just watch the movies in the order they came out.There's no reason not to do it that way. The idea that you can make a movie better by rearranging the order it was released in has always been bullshit. It's never worked in reality. It's a dumb hypothetical that started with a Star Wars fan trying to cope their way through believing you can make all the Star Wars movies good if only you rewrite literal history and pretend you haven't already watched all the movies (half of them legit not good) 3000 times.For real, before there was ever a "Machete Order" for someone to refer to in an Aint It Cool News talkback, people just understood that a movie was what it was, it was always going to be that, and it didn't matter when you watched it, it was either going to be good or was going to suck because when you watched it had nothing to do with what was in it. Back then, people were also more accepting of the idea of the thing they enjoyed still being worthwhile - even if some parts of it were shitty. They didn't think it was worth retconning actual history in order to convince themselves that a bad movie wasn't bad. They just shrugged and went "yeah, that one was bad, but still..."But then, one day... a desperate Star Wars fan unleashed upon the world a would-be "lifehack" to make bad movies most people didn't like "better!" They'd simply pretend the movie didn't come out when it did, and that it would somehow enhance itself and the movies around it by being in a different order. They called it "The Machete Cut" or "The Machete Order" and people didn't actually try this very often, but they entertained this as a thought exercise (which is the only way it works) so eagerly that it became accepted as truth.Once this weird bit of reasoning was popularized, suddenly everyone started to believe there was some sort of secret slow-motion fan-edit you could deploy to "unlock" the potential of every film series. All you had to do was pretend real hard that the movies you've already got memorized actually came out in a different order than the one they really did and now they weren't bad movies anymore! Or at the least, they were now better, and their bad parts were minimized because the order in which you slotted them in a hypothetical movie marathon was "optimized."The "best order" to watch any film series is to watch them in order of when they were released, because that's the context they were intended to be seen in, and that's the context they were made in.And honestly, the "best order" will likely include you bailing out on some of these franchise movies (a lot of them, honestly) when you realize how fucking bad they are. And that's okay too! You don't have to love everything that comes out under a unified brand. Watching bad franchise entries in some sort of retconned release order isn't going to change that they're bad, or make them less bad. And the things you like don't have to be perfect to justify your still liking them. They don't even have to be mostly good. They certainly don't need to have reality and all historical context retconned for them.Just watch em in the order they came out. The way everyone who made them and watched them in the first place did. via /r/movies https://ift.tt/3pwJYVK