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How do you reinvent Star Wars? How do you flip the script and subvert expectations for a long-running, much-loved cosmic saga? The truth is, nobody really knows, because other than George Lucas, no one has really tried.
The prequels, for all their beige politics and clunky dialogue, were at least the Star Wars creator’s brave if misguided attempt to rewire the mainframe: a widescreen tragedy about the corruption of democracy, wrapped in a toybox of podracers and CGI frogmen with comedy accents. Elsewhere, experiments have been patchy. The excellent Rogue One took a gritty war-movie detour, only to end with a Vader cameo. The Last Jedi flirted with real subversion, then got bludgeoned into retreat by a panicked studio. And Disney+ has provided everything from samurai-inspired anime shorts (Visions) to Ewan McGregor brooding in a desert hut (Obi-Wan Kenobi). Bold strokes, yes – but ones that have usually been followed by a hasty retreat back to the warm embrace of lightsabers and Skywalker surnames.
Which brings us to Star Wars: Starfighter, introduced to the world this week via a first-look picture of Ryan Gosling looking distinctly sun-soaked floating on what appears to be the Mediterranean Sea. On the face of it, the new film looks to be the least adventurous new franchise addition since Fantastic Beasts: The Crimes of Grindelwald. But it’s not just the oddly Ikea-ish, flat-pack-ready title, which feels as if it really ought to be one of those Hollywood placeholder monikers. And it’s not the nagging sense that this film series is being mapped out like a Death Star trench run, or the decision to cast Gosling in the lead, when Star Wars has always prioritised storytelling over megastar wattage.
Perhaps it’s that, right now, we don’t know much about the new film. What we do know is that Gosling plays a new character, Flynn Gray will reportedly play his nephew, and Amy Adams will reportedly play the latter’s mother. Mia Goth and Matt Smith are down to portray baddies of some sort, and the whole thing is described as an original adventure, set in a “period we haven’t seen explored yet”. The new entry has been placed five years after The Rise of Skywalker, which means Poe, Finn, BB-8 and the bloody porgs may turn up. Are they going to bring Palpatine back again as a zombie clone of the zombie clone we saw in The Rise of Skywalker? Is someone finally going to explain what the point of Snoke was?
This all feels far too close to a period none of us particularly want to revisit (unlike the forthcoming The Mandalorian and Grogu, which will arrive in cinemas before Starfighter). It could have been set 10,000 years after the original trilogy, or in a completely different part of the galaxy that had never heard of the Skywalkers. It’s possible the latter could still apply – but then why opt for a timeframe that leaves the door wide open for sequel trilogy characters to return?
As we sit and ponder all this stuff, right now we’ve only really got that snap of Gosling all at sea to keep us focused. At least it’s not another desert. And yet, the longer Lucasfilm stays in the really rather joyless Skywalker sandpit, the less chance it will have of escaping creative drought. If director Shawn Levy and his team really wanted to rip up the rulebook, you’d think they would get as far away from The Rise of Skywalker as it is possible to go.
