Can Taika Waititi revive the cosmic sweep of classic Star Wars?
When entertainment reporters play Hollywood roulette, the practice of attaching directors and stars to forthcoming movies based on little more than rumour, their little white balls nearly always seem to land on Taika Waititi’s number. If you’ve been keeping a close eye on this column over the past year, you’ve probably spotted the white-hot Kiwi director being touted for a remake of Flash Gordon and the next Deadpool movie among other projects, neither of which have yet come to fruition.
Waititi’s next film, according to reports this week, will be a Star Wars episode. Will he end up making it to the first day of production on this one? The chances seem better, as Disney has officially confirmed the appointment via the space saga’s official website, with 1917 co-writer Krysty WilsonCairns helping deliver a script. But this is Star Wars we are talking about – Colin Trevorrow, Josh Trank, Phil Lord and Christopher Miller, David Benioff and DB Weiss are among the numerous film-makers who have cheerily signed up to try to bring back the glory days of the long-running series in recent times, only to ultimately fall foul of Lucasfilm president Kathleen Kennedy’s merciless Force choke.
The reason Waititi is touted for so many projects is that he boasts the rare ability to add verve and cheeky personality to the most ostensibly bland and corporate of projects. In his hands, Chris Hemsworth’s Thor was transformed from po-faced cosmic lordling to the cheerily mutton-headed comic centrepiece of the Marvel movies via 2017’s Thor: Ragnarok. No wonder Waititi’s been invited back to direct the forthcoming Thor 4: Blood and Thund
er.
But is he the right person to revive Star Wars’ fortunes after the crushingly disappointing Rise of Skywalker? Monday’s annual Star Wars Day came and went with little more than a whimper this week: JJ Abrams’ misguided climax to the saga is available to stream, for those of us who can bear to sit through it all over again. And the flawless The Mandalorian can now be viewed in its entirety on Disney Plus.
But the fact the film series has been overshadowed by the unflashy magnificence of Jon Favreau’s bounty hunter series is hardly cause for celebration. Disney clearly has the nous and resources to get Star Wars right if it really wants to, but the latest film’s clunky, knuckleheaded conclusion now means there are two full trilogies in the saga that will need to be watched through cracks in fingers (or preferably not at all) for the next few decades.
Abrams’ approach to Star Wars (beginning with the decent enough The Force Awakens in 2015) was all about reinvigorating the series with the knockabout space larks that made the original trilogy so much fun, an entirely natural furrow to plough after the overly fusty and workmanlike prequel trilogy. But the new films, despite attempts by Rian Johnson’s The Last Jedi to plant the odd seed of mystery and wonder here and there, largely failed to summon up the mythic, epic sweep of old-school storytelling that permeated George Lucas’s 1970s and 80s movies. There was often the sense that Disney imagined it could turn Star Wars into the space opera equivalent of the Marvel universe, with whip-sharp comic smarts used to paper over any inconvenient narrative cracks in the firmament. The problem was that fans of the original triptych are way more geeky and particular than their comicbook-loving counterparts. Star Wars trilogies need to be made with the understanding that audiences will still be watching them in decades’ time as a cohesive whole, while the new films seemed to lurch from episode to episode with little or no consideration for internal consistency. They come across, ultimately, as throwaway confections, made with little respect for what came before.
Waititi is an excellent film-maker. But he seems to fit the modern Marvel blueprint far more easily than he does Star Wars’ more venerable, old-school template. His approach to commercial movies is to ignore the size of the budget and ruthlessly inject them with the cocky indie silliness of his lower-key films. But one wonders if he can engage with Star Wars fans’ near-religious zeal for classic adventure fables that we can believe sprang fully formed not from an airless LA meeting room, but from some half-remembered legend of the cosmic sublime.