I wrote the cover story this month for Vanity Fair about Star Wars.

People talk a lot about the connections between the new Star Wars trilogy and the old ones, but what interests me even more is the differences between Disney Version and Lucasfilm Perfect.

The main difference for me is the old movies were kind of a fairy tale in a way.

I mean, they went to some very dark places, but we kind of thought at the end of return of the Jedi I that it was happily ever after for the rebellion and for Han and Leia.

What we discover in the new movies is it's not quite that kind of a fairy tale.

Things get a little more complex, a little darker, maybe even amore.

Little more realistic.

When Lucas made the movies in the 19 seventies, it was really kind of an antidote to a lot of the disillusionment that was happening.

They were coming off the Vietnam War.

They were coming off water day.

We were coming off a lot of really great but depressing 19 seventies cinema, Lucas said in interviews.

He wanted to rebuild optimism and in many ways That's the tone of the original trilogy.

The new ones are more complicated than that.

I think they come from a less disenchanted place, but they are also a little less wide eyed.

The old movies were so much about this idea of restoring the old Republic over 1000 generations.

The Jedi Knights were the guardians of peace.

Justice, the old you don't hear that much about it in the new movie is what you hear about is younger people wondering whether they can repair the damage of the past and build something new that's gonna last.

Look, it's kind of in a wonderful way that I love.

He's kind of muni in romantic.

He has these ideas about how life is gonna pan out for him, and in a funny way they do, and in a funny way they don't.

But he finishes the movies looking really happy.

It's not bittersweet for him, really.

He does what he needs to do with Ray kind of wonder if it's gonna go in that direction.

Necessarily in the new movies, we kind of have a loop figure in Ray.

She is on a desert planet.

She's young, she's an orphan I have a lot of time wasting my family.

They'll be back.

But things were much rougher for Ray.

She doesn't have that kind of family support system that Lou had.

She's much angrier.

She's not trying to join the resistance.

She is just trying to get by when the movie starts.

So even more than Luke, she kind of starts at nothing, and she has to kind of build herself up piece by piece.

When you look at the later Luke, he is a guy who is very disillusioned and really struggling with a kind of mid life prices that someone like Obi Won haven't really had to confront Luke and Obi Wan are.

They're kind of emblematic of the differences between the trilogy's because Obi wan his pot.

Owen obviously goes massively off the rails, but he deals with it and he retreats to the desert and he's a hermit and he's meditating for 20 years or however long it is.

And then when it sort of comes of age, he's ready to kind of guide him.

Lucas.

The same thing happened.

He has a Prada Juan who turns to the dark side and kind of ren, but he doesn't recover from it.

In that same way, he is so upset and so ashamed that he has to hide himself away.

He isn't there for Ray in that way that everyone is for Lu.

Ray has to go find him and kind of twist his arm to get him to train her and keep the jet I order going.

So when you have look suffering this terrible loss, he doesn't bounce back from it as easily audience.

Expect him to kind of wrestle internally with this problem in a little more of a challenging way.

And he does.

He has to work it through in this really dark psychological way that Obi Wan never really had to.

Darth Vader was cool.

He was so cool all the time.

Name is like James Bond.

You know, nothing ruffled him.

Things went wrong.

He just kind of kept on going.

Whereas Kylo Ren, he's just the Zemo.

You know, he has tantrums.

You can see this psychological struggle working through him.

It makes him feel, you know so much for president emotionally also in some ways, more scary, because he could really go off and just do anything in any time.

One of the big differences between Colorado and North later is our theater keeps his mask on, and as a result, he's kind of a super villain.

You know, he feels a little bit like something out of a comic book.

When Kylo Ren takes his mask off, you realize that there's a human being who's doing terrible things, you know, you see his face, you see the emotion on it.

He makes fascism feel like much more of a riel living thing, like something we should really think about and worry about it because it's sort of all around us.

Probably The biggest change for me is the difference between the resistance on the rebellion.

I have placed information vital to the survival of the rebellion into the memory systems of this R two unit.

My father will know how to retrieve the rebellion, were always trying to bring back that over public, which was super, super great.

And there was this enormous feeling of nostalgia, which is a big Lucas theme.

If you look in American graffiti, that's just a nostalgia fist.

And in Star Wars it's kind of the same when we get to force, awakens everything has changed because the rebellion one and they brought back the old Republic and it didn't work.

It was kind of politically passive and myopic, and it allowed the first order to rise up again.

Nostalgia has completely gone out of the movies, and it's much more about looking forward and assessing the mistakes of the past and learning from them and then building something new that hopefully will last.

Certainly, the rise of populism worldwide on it's kind of pseudo fascist feel is very well reflected in the rise of the first order.

There's also this sense that the older generation really the generation of the original Star Wars they kind of screwed up, particularly in the area of climate change.

But in lots of ways we made so many mistakes, and we're now looking to our Children to try to do better and basically saved the planet from our terrible screwups.

And that's kind of the position that the younger characters in New Trilogy are in.

I mean, you got ahead of the fascists, they stay on message.

It is always the same.

If anybody is kind of carrying the torch for nostalgia, it's the first order They're the ones now talking about restoring the past and making things great again the way they were under the empire.

But hopefully they will fail.

Well, Kyla Reds Very different from Darth Raider as a character.

As for the kind of political apparatus around him, it's very much the same.

They even used the same tactics militarily, which is kind of a huge mistake.

You would think they would have learned their lesson after losing to death stars.

Now they've lost Star Killer bases.

Well, I'm hoping to come up with some new way to trying to extinguish everything good in the galaxy.

And at same time, I hope it doesn't work.

One thing I think Abrams did incredibly right.

Waas.

He got back into that thing that Luca's hand of shooting on location, which has this credible effect of making everything feel super real in the first film force awakens.

They were working so hard to build that sense in that sister Star Wars movie that you can make a Star Wars movie without Lucas about Lucas film, which is not something that everybody was convinced it.

Yet they worked so hard and in some cases, probably too hard to build that sense of connection to the old movies, like in having basically a cantina in the new movie.

One thing Abrams said about the way that he directed the rise of Skywalker is that it was different from how he did.

Force awakens.

He felt Frayer to do his kind of Star Wars and to shoot things his way and to kind of leave behind in some ways that legacy that George Lucas left behind, which was so amazing, which everything is built on and get some point.

He'd had to kind of decided to be himself as a director, and that is something will definitely see in rise of Skywalker.

The pace at which Disney puts out New Star was material is so much faster than Lucas film did.

I mean, it was a filming here for five years now.

I think they were testing to some extent.

Will people experience Star Wars fatigue?

And the answer was almost no.

So low, as it turned out, was kind of a bridge too far.

I think Disney was testing whether they could make Star Wars movies the same way they make Marvel movies, which is just spinning them off around different characters at a huge rate.

And the result of the experiment is you can't I think, the differences between the old movies and the new one there partly about people they struggle within themselves.

More than names to kylo Ren struggles to state Army.

He struggles with the goodness in himself even more than looks struggle to resist the dark side.

At the same time, that fairy tale kind of spell has been broken.

That sense that we used to have that everything was gonna be okay.

Everything was gonna be happily ever after.

We don't know that now, for some reason, and I don't know if it's what's happening in the world or if what's happened in Media has has changed.

Things were certainly used to very, very dark stuff.

Post the Wire Post Sopranos.

We're used to seeing dark endings on screen.

For whatever reason, as an audience, we won't sit still for that fairy tale ending the way we used to.

We expect things to be bittersweet and that, for good or ill, is what the new Star Wars movies deliver, and it makes them feel like they belong to this particular moment.