Every franchise fears a point where the audiences would lose enthusiasm. After all, how can you expect people to react the same way the sixth or the tenth time? Instead of the big bang, which most franchises would aim for, Star Wars has now got a newer generation of writers and directors to help get freshness into the narrative and attract new audiences.
The creator of the universe far, far away, George Lucas once famously defined Star Wars as essentially “a film for a 12-year-old.” So, what do you do when the 12-year-olds grow up? Well, you let them have a go at their favourite fantasy. Previously Star Wars’ commercialisation was limited to merchandising or tie-ins, but now it has entered a whole new era. Today, you have the ones who grew up on the film get a shot at making their own version and everyone’s invited to the party.
Much like the buzz surrounding the making of Rian Johnson’s Star Wars: The Last Jedi, the initial reactions, too, are nothing less than fantastic. And that is hardly surprising. The latest in the Star Wars franchise, The Last Jedi is the second in the sequel trilogy that has no connection with Lucas, who sold his company, Lucasfilm, and the rights to the money-spinning series to Walt Disney Company in 2012 for a cool US$ 4.06 billion.
Mirroring the manner in which the first three Star Wars films transformed not only the way in which Hollywood approached the summer blockbuster but also changed the world, this Johnson flick has more than achieved its goal of being the next dose of the infusion of new blood into the franchise.
Legend has it that no one expected much from the first Star Wars film. In fact, some of the closest friends of George Lucas, who also happened to be filmmakers rewriting the rules of the game, thought Lucas had pretty much lost it. It is said that Martin Scorsese didn’t get the film, Brain De Palma told him that the crawl at the beginning was too long and gibberish (he helped him re-write it later), and simply didn’t get the whole ‘may the force be with you’ business.
It was Steven Spielberg, fresh from the success of first summer blockbuster, Jaws (1975), who had faith in Lucas and told him that his film would make more than his own Jaws. To keep Lucas’ spirits intact, Spielberg agreed to put his money where his mouth was and traded 2.5 per cent points of Close Encounters of the Third Kind, the sci-fi that he was making at the time, for 2.5 per cent points of Star Wars and in the bargain, made almost $40 million from the success of Star Wars.
One of the most aggressively marketed brands ever in popular culture, Star Wars was the first instance where Hollywood ‘suits’ began to ease their way into the New Hollywood. The film, as well as its merchandise, captured the imagination of an entire generation and suddenly everything became about the way one could maximize the profits from an idea. When Michael Cimino’s Heaven’s Gates flopped gloriously at the box office (it shut down United Artists permanently), the era of the director came to an end and everything began to be dictated by profits and such or in other words the Star Wars way.
Since then brand ‘Star Wars’ permeated into almost every possible facet of human existence. In the 1980s the then US President Ronald Regan’s Strategic Defense Initiative that aimed to use ground and space-based lasers, missiles and other weapons to help protect the United States from attack by nuclear missiles was derisively referred to as “Star Wars.” In fact, this could have been a result of President Reagan himself using a Star Wars-inspired reference where he called dubbed the Soviet Union “the Evil Empire” almost like opening crawl’s “evil Galactic Empire.”
Even the US military was said to be researching the idea of super-soldiers like Jedi warriors, who among other things, would be able to pass through walls and sense the future or kill by just staring! In the 2001 United Kingdom census, some 390,000 people stated ‘Jedi’ as their religion and that particular census saw Jediism become the fourth largest group in the UK!
The manner in which the franchise evolved post-Lucas’ prequel trilogy between 1999-2005 has led to a new interest in Star Wars. It took almost a decade for the Sequel Trilogy to fructify and with JJ Abrams’ The Force Awakens (2015) the multi-billion dollar franchise entered a new era. With the ouster of George Lucas, the shackles of the past were being done away with, at least in the minds of both the trade and a newer generation of audience. After Abrams, who also reinvigorated both the Mission Impossible as well as the Star Trek series, it’s now the turn of Johnson to bring in a whole new set of fans. The Last Jedi is being hailed as a ‘near –perfect reinvention of the franchise.’
The combination of a series that evokes passion to the degree of frenzy and a filmmaker like Johnson, who has been called an auteur, Star Wars is undergoing a transformation that James Bond experienced with an Oscar winner Sam Mendes calling the shots on Skyfall.
In an early review of The Last Jedi, The New Yorker’s Richard Brody mentions a scene in the middle of the film where what was happening on the screen is a peep into what might have happened behind the camera to the Star Wars concept.
Brody noted that the scene where Luke (Mark Hamill) is being coaxed to come out of hiding and join the heroes in the Resistance to the First Order was inspired but so “tenuously attached” to the movie that it “virtually shouts its presence as the writer and director Rian Johnson’s embedded showreel.”
Brody felt this was the moment where the audiences would feel the Star Wars cinematic universe experienced an independent power and who better than Johnson, an auteur who has a vision and also a sense of “glee”?
Instead of concentrating on the past or the glorious history, Disney is looking ahead by getting a Johnson to direct or actors such as Adam Driver, Daisy Ridley, John Boyega, and Oscar Isaac to feature in pivotal parts. Anyone who might not be interested in a Star Wars films might still want to check it out, thanks to Johnson and his body of work that includes the neo-noir Brick and the thriller Looper. This is what perhaps Abrams hopes to achieve on Star Trek where apparently Quentin Tarantino has pitched him an R-Rated idea for the series.
Can you imagine Tarantino directing a Star Trek film? Well, it’s indeed a brave new world, or shall one say ‘galaxy’ out there and anything’s possible.
(Gautam Chintamani is a film historian and the author of ‘Dark Star: The Loneliness of Being Rajesh Khanna’ and “Pink The Inside Story” | Twitter - @gchintamani)
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