There might just be a strange irony to this week’s news that Oscar Isaac, AKA the tousled X-wing pilot Poe Dameron, is up for a return to Star Wars if the script is right. Because before the actor’s comments in a new interview with Variety, it was quite possible to forget that the sequel trilogy ever existed. Was The Force Awakens really a film, or just two hours of Disney rummaging through George Lucas’s recycling bin? Did The Last Jedi split the fanbase so violently that Brexit looked like a parking dispute? And could The Rise of Skywalker really have stunk that badly?
The problem with the post-Lucas films is that they never quite decided what they wanted to be. The Force Awakens tried nostalgia cosplay. The Last Jedi tried to set fire to nostalgia cosplay. The Rise of Skywalker then tried to urgently stitch nostalgia back together again. The result was messy, divisive, and – crucially for Disney – almost impossible to spin off.
Isaac might be up for returning as Dameron, but the truth is that nobody can remember why that might have ever seemed like a good idea. He had a nice leather jacket, right? When all’s said and done, and six years after JJ Abrams’s final instalment vanished down the memory hole with all the grace of Jar Jar Binks attempting parkour, this most dysfunctional and directionless of trilogies really does seem to have fewer memorable characters primed for Disney+ spin-offs or standalone movies than the Mos Eisley cantina band’s roadie crew.
Lucas, for all his faults, gave us the original trilogy – and iconic titans of space opera such as Luke Skywalker, Darth Vader, Leia Organa and Han Solo (not to mention Yoda, Chewie and even Boba Fett). Then he did it all over again, with much less success but still a few shiny new Jedi trading cards along the way: a lot of Star Wars fans really hated the prequels, but those three films and the spin-off Clone Wars series still gave us Ahsoka Tano, Darth Maul and Ewan McGregor’s young Obi-Wan Kenobi. What exactly have the sequels left us? So far it appears to be a jittery ball droid, a half-melted clone of Palpatine and a guy who shouted “TR-8R!” once before Han Solo zapped him.
Unfortunately, Lucasfilm doesn’t seem to have quite grasped the problem. In the years since The Rise of Skywalker vanished from the cultural lore, the Disney-owned studio has wisely pivoted to a completely different galactic era, decades before Luke. It has found a sweet spot on TV with the likes of Andor and The Mandalorian, so much so that the latter is getting a big screen transfer with the forthcoming The Mandalorian and Grogu.
But officially, at least, we are also still getting director Sharmeen Obaid-Chinoy’s “new Jedi order” film, in which Daisy Ridley’s Rey will attempt to rebuild the cuddly space monk cult from the ashes of nine increasingly bewildering films. The internet has tried really hard to announce that the project is cancelled but so far appears to be failing. Still, there is something a little suspicious about the fact we don’t have a release date yet (it was removed from Disney’s official slate late last year) or even a movie title. And given the pitiful survival rate of previous Kathleen Kennedy projects – that elusive Taika Waititi film; Josh Trank’s mysteriously vanished spin-off about Boba Fett; an entire Rian Johnson trilogy, for Yoda’s sake – it would hardly be a shock if the whole thing eventually slipped quietly into the Sarlacc’s gaping maw.
In the meantime, the longer this one sits in development limbo, the more the likes of Dameron, General Hux and the force ghost of Kylo Ren risk drifting into that very special type of Star Wars purgatory usually reserved for expanded universe novels about tax disputes in the Coruscant Senate. In a galaxy where even Boba Fett’s jetpack once got a spin-off, the $4bn trilogy meant to save Star Wars may end up remembered as little more than a dusty Wookieepedia footnote – the cinematic equivalent of Greedo shooting first, and nobody really caring either way.
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