With Johnson, Disney has a unique opportunity to present a Star Wars film not tied to the conventions of the film saga or its timeline. The director seemingly enjoyed quite a bit more freedom while making his movie than some of his coworkers, which could indicate that the studio will give Johnson even more free rein to construct the story he wants to tell for the new trilogy. And as Marvel Studios has done with its more recent movies, Disney could lean even more on the uncanniness and humor featured in Episode VIII to bring something new to the film franchise. Then there’s Black Panther, a massive critical and financial success that goes a long way to represent a different group of heroes and villains than we’ve seen in past installments. It’s clear from the movies’ $235 million opening weekend, as well as the success of the other films listed above, that fans embrace blockbusters that break the mold. Even The Last Jedi, which has turned out to be a polarizing film among the fandom, has made over $1.3 billion globally and enjoyed much critical praise. Disney has undoubtedly taken note of its recent successes and will continue to experiment. In terms of Star Wars, Disney clearly trusts Johnson’s storytelling, which can be described as anything but conventional (see: Brick and Looper), and is setting him up to unlock unexplored territory in the galaxy far, far away – hopefully some of its weirder aspects, too. With two trilogies and a few rumored standalone films on the way, there will definitely be a need for a less conventional Star Wars story to ensure the galaxy far, far away doesn’t start to feel stagnant in the years to come. Johnson could benefit from examining what recent Marvel movies and the New Weird get right when crafting the story of his trilogy.
Ragna-Rock
Thor: Ragnarok went big and went home. In order to save his home city of Asgard, Thor teamed up with a drunken ex-Valkyrie and a space pirate to stop a world-eating goddess of the dead. It helped that the movie had a wacky cast of memorable characters, but Marvel movies are usually well-received on that front. Star Wars uses the dust and rust of a “lived-in” science fiction world as part of its basic visual language, but that doesn’t mean there isn’t room for more experimentation. One of the oft-GIFed and highly praised scenes in The Last Jediwas the destruction of Snoke’s command ship, slowed down and colorized and washed out into a scene that disrupts the rhythm of the film like a sudden key change in a song. It’s this sort of unique visual that could make Johnson’s new trilogy unique. Director Taika Waititi also filled the movie with off-beat, over-the-top performances, including Jeff Goldblum’s hedonistic Grandmaster and the droll, absurdly practical Korg. (Remember, Korg tried to start a revolution once, but didn’t print out enough flyers.) Star Wars movies have always been filled with humor, too: the down-to-earth inventiveness of insults like “scruffy-looking nerf herder” live on in pop culture. More of this can be expected in Solo: A Star Wars Story particularly and this use of humor could help the new trilogy stand apart from the more serious Skywalker saga, especially when it comes to the darker Sequel Trilogy. Larger-than-life characters are perfect for Star Wars. Let’s see explorers willing to set up elaborate starfighter racing circuits just to push a little further out into the Unknown Regions. How about some extreme Force users who can call down storms or finish other people’s sentences before they’re over. Even lightsabers themselves are so very suited to creative fight scenes as well as wacky hijinks — one can imagine a character like Thor using a lightsaber to topple buildings or, conversely, forgetting that they have one until the most dramatic moment. The Expanded Universe has incorporated some of this “rock ‘n’ roll” character work: the video game The Force Unleashed featured a main character who could drag starships out of the sky with the Force. The New Jedi Orderwas full of biological weirdness: the living planet Zonama Sekot, living spaceships that psychically meshed with their pilots, and the sadistic Yuuzhan Vong cloaks (not to mention their actual torture devices). With Disney hosting both Star Wars and Marvel and Johnson willing to keep the fun in a particularly dark The Last Jedi, leaning into a more over-the-top and funny production for the next trilogy could be a lucrative choice. Annihilation author Jeff VanderMeer defined New Weird as fiction with “realistic, complex real-world models as the jumping off point for creation of settings that may combine elements of both science fiction and fantasy. New Weird has a visceral, in-the-moment quality that often uses elements of surreal or transgressive horror for its tone, style, and effects.” New Weird often incorporates body horror and noir and ends without answering all of the questions posed by the story. Annihilation, for example, features four scientists exploring a mysterious swampy forest that seems to infect people with living vines and turns the sky into a soupy, oil-slick miasma. The trilogy of novels upon which the film is based isn’t hard science fiction, in which technology and phenomena are rigorously explained. Instead, it cultivates an atmosphere of dread and creative fecundity. Star Wars already has some of this type of weirdness too: certain cantina creatures are similar in design to Mieville’s insect-women, and the scene where Han surrounds Luke with the cut-open corpse of a tauntaun has the same kind of gross-out creature design. Star Wars movies also often have monsters. The rathtar chase in The Force Awakens features enough tentacle horror and forbidding corridors to fit nicely into New Weird, without the oppressive darkness of pure horror. The most recent trailer for Solo: A Star Wars Storyscratched some of the itch for monsters with a scene of the Millennium Falcon flying through a stormy sky filled with tentacles and teeth. The basic idea of that scene appears to be reminiscient of the space slugs from The Empire Strikes Back, a Scylla and Charybdis of Imperial forces and space monster. Scaling the monster up to something the size of a Star Destroyer makes it, for the purposes of the scene, an environment that reconfigures the viewer’s idea about where danger might come from and what it might do. How do you fly a spaceship through a sky that is itself a giant mouth? The monstrous element here is both central to Star Wars, which often includes elements of creature features and introduces creature horror at a new scale. New Weird isn’t always about horror, though: sometimes the unexplained nature of the story is a factor too, and especially early Star Wars stories had this in spades. Luke expressed amazement and fear when presented with the strange aliens in the cantina or the vision in the cave on Dagobah – the situation was clearly as strange to him as it was to the viewers. Those cantina aliens each have their own names and backstories now, but the initial sense of unexplained possibility is still a good thing to cultivate in the franchise, especially if Johnson’s trilogy is meant to show the audience people places and things we’ve never seen before in the galaxy far, far away. The style could be incorporated into Star Wars‘ world-building, with living cities or enormous monsters like the purrgils in Rebels. With its creatures and dramatic science fiction vistas, Star Wars is already weird, and its characters are primed to explore every corner of the galaxy. Johnson, who has already pushed what we thought we knew about the Force to a whole new realm of possibilities, now has the opportunity to stretch what we know about the galaxy far, far away as a home to billions of mysterious creatures. Pushing Star Wars a bit further into a weirder genre tone could give the saga a new energy and that recapture that sense of wonder fans first felt all the way back in 1977. *Art by John Harris.
