By Chris Snellgrove
| Published
Recently, Disney surprised Star Wars fans everywhere by announcing Starfighter, an upcoming film starring Ryan Gosling. Right now, nobody knows much of anything about this movie except for its title and star. Nonetheless, I’m ready to make a prediction worthy of Qui-Gon Jinn: Starfighter is going to be the cinematic Chosen One, bringing balance to the deeply uneven world of Star Wars cinema.
Why am I willing to make such a bold prediction for this movie based on nothing but its name and the name of its star? For one thing, the name Starfighter implies that this movie will focus on a pilot rather than the Jedi and Sith that the Star Wars Sequel Trilogy was so obsessed with. To modify a phrase from the killer Star Trek podcast, Greatest Generation, it sounds like Disney is embracing the idea of “Star Wars as a place”…after all, the galaxy far, far away is ripe for different kinds of stories rather than lame retreads of what came before.
The failure of the Star Wars sequels left many fans wondering where these movies went wrong…like, how could Disney screw up a follow-up to the most famous sci-fi movies ever made? There are plenty of narratives floating around, including criticisms that the movies failed because they revolved around Rey, a so-called Mary Sue character. But the truth is that these movies failed because they gave us an infinitely crappier version of the Original Trilogy, with Jedi fighting Sith and rebels fighting an evil empire.
Starfighter doesn’t seem like it will revolve around that tired formula; instead, it will likely focus on original characters in this familiar fictional universe. This is exciting because it reminds me of the original Mos Eisley Cantina scene from A New Hope…a scene which is so exciting precisely because we know that each of these crazy critters has their own wild story. With any luck, Starfighter will focus on a similar character…someone who is just trying to survive and otherwise couldn’t care less about franchise icons like Darth Vader and Luke Skywalker.
Plus, Starfighter is guaranteed to give us something that the Star Wars franchise has always excelled at: killer outer space battles. The trench run cemented A New Hope as the first true sci-fi blockbuster, and the Battle of Endor was easily the best part of Return of the Jedi. Assuming it can give us something more impressive than the weak sauce space battle of The Rise of Skywalker (admittedly a very low bar to clear), Starfighter could restore this franchise to its former glory quicker than 12 parsecs.
Should Starfighter break the theatrical Star Wars slump and become a critical and commercial hit, it will inspire Disney to create more content built around original characters rather than creating endless films and shows based on what came before. That’s the main reason why I see this movie as the cinematic Chosen One: it has the potential to remind audiences and executives alike that Star Wars is a fictional universe with endless narrative potential. The only way to squander that potential is to do the same thing over and over to diminishing results, which is what Disney has been doing, effectively running this franchise into the ground.
When a franchise has been run into the ground like this, it has nowhere to go but up…in this case, to the stars. We still don’t know much about Starfighter, but for this old-school fan, it’s enough to know that we’ll be getting a fun solo film built around an original character. Only by ending the endless nostalgia-baiting of years past can Disney give a franchise set a long, long time ago the better, brighter future it deserves.
