Star Wars needs to take its own advice and let the past die
By Jason Burke
Photo Credit: [Star Wars: The Last Jedi] Lucasfilm
Splitting a galaxy far, far away right down the middle
The Last Jedi promised to move Star Wars away from the past at the peril of splitting the fandom, but, four months later the franchise gave us Solo: A Star Wars Story. There’s a duality at play here that is worse than the conflict of Ben’s struggle with the light and dark.
Lucasfilm wants to bring Star Wars into the future but can’t escape the shadow of its past–nor does it seem prepared to.
Since its inception, Star Wars has always been armed with a fanatical fanbase even if certain sections of fandom wanted to annihilate the prequels and strip any credentials of George Lucas’ hand as the creator of the universe. But, a huge gap exists between The Return of The Jedi and The Phantom Menace—16 years to be exact.
A lesser gap exists between 2005’s Revenge of The Sith and 2015’s (might as well be 2016) The Force Awakens, and there was a question that always remained after the end of the Holy and Prequel Trilogies: Is this the end of Star Wars?
Of course, we knew the series would always live on in animation, comics and through the written word but Lucas always hinted that it was complete in its cinematic form. So when we got wind more motion picture adventures were on the horizon, it always felt like we were getting something that wasn’t supposed to be given to us.
Now, we know Kathleen Kennedy and cohorts want to supersize and Marvel-ize the cinematic landscape, just as much as every other studio prays to every god and rubs every golden lamp to do the same. Two, three Star Wars movies a year until the sun sucks the earth into its atmosphere and even then, Elon Musk might chuck us up to Mars, so we could get more Star Wars films.