The space opera to end them all once blasted everything in its path. But a muddled approach has led to indecision and paralysis
A long time ago, in a galaxy far, far away, Star Wars was an actual movie that people watched. It drew people to cinemas in huge numbers, largely because it was completely unembarrassed about being a pulpy space adventure about comic wizards and laser swords. Nowadays, it is something else entirely. A TV show about a likable space dad and his cute, cheeky, telekinetically powered adopted alien son, or perhaps a divisive culture-war bellwether that vacillates between trying to destroy itself in a blaze of operatic self-importance and hamfistedly rebuilding itself.
These days Star Wars also seems mainly to be press releases and announcements, throwaway comments in interviews that gesture mournfully towards what once was and what might, one day, be again. Which brings us to Taika Waititi, the Oscar-winning director from New Zealand, who has been giving fresh updates on his episode in the long-running space saga. “I’m just trying to sort of go back and harness a little bit more of the fun from the original films,” he told Variety, adding of George Lucas’ original trilogy: “The stakes were very high [and] there were serious things going on but also there was a lot fun to be had in those films. That’s what I was trying to bring back.”
This sounds like a perfectly reasonable way forward, until we recall that Waititi was first tipped to make one of these films six years ago and that nothing much has happened since. Most of us only remembered that the New Zealander had once signed on to this thing because Kathleen Kennedy, the outgoing Lucasfilm president, described the proposed film as “still somewhat alive” in an “exit” interview earlier this month with Deadline. Other once-mooted projects that still might one day make it to production apparently include Donald Glover’s idea for a Lando Calrissian movie and a possible new trilogy from Simon Kinberg. Kennedy even suggested Adam Driver and Steven Soderbergh’s mysterious Hunt for Ben Solo script, which caused a minor buzz when its existence was revealed by the actor last year, might have a chance to get made “if somebody’s willing to take a risk”.
Less was said about the once much-hyped New Jedi Order film that was announced at Star Wars Celebration 2023, with Sharmeen Obaid-Chinoy directing and Daisy Ridley’s Rey as the central character. Reports this week suggest that Ridley won’t be returning in next year’s Star Wars: Starfighter, which Ryan Gosling is set to headline. Screenwriter Jonathan Tropper told Screenrant the film features “no legacy characters”, adding: “You’re not going to see any of the characters you’ve seen in the other movies.”
This could of course be typical Hollywood smoke and mirrors, though few fans are really clamouring for the return of any of the characters from the sequel trilogy. So awful and misguided was the last entry, 2019’s The Rise of Skywalker, that the idea that Star Wars could wheel out Rey, Finn, Poe Dameron (or anyone else from the recent films) to gasps of wonder is laughable.
Instead, next up for the saga is The Mandalorian & Grogu, a big screen segue for a TV series that pretty much everyone likes. And yet even here there are naysayers, pointing out that director Jon Favreau and new Lucasfilm president Dave Filoni could have just given us season four instead. The show has everything Star Wars fans want: nostalgia, lore expansion, charm and knockabout space larks, and yet bringing it to the big screen does feel a little bit like cheating, as if theatrical relevance is now something that has to be reverse-engineered from streaming success.
The problem, perhaps, is that Lucasfilm has spent so long palpably having no idea what Star Wars is supposed to be, and where it should be going. Some would inexplicably rather see Driver firing up the crossguard lightsaber again; others want something entirely new, provided it also feels exactly like the old thing they loved.
What this leaves Star Wars with, yet again, is not a creative crisis so much as an identity standoff: a franchise paralysed by its own audience, endlessly triangulating between comfort, novelty and outrage, and somehow managing to disappoint people even when it gives them what they asked for.
