Darth Vader by Daniel Warren Johnson

Imperial Remnant Snow Trooper by Mizmaru Kawahara

Star Wars: The Mandalorian and Grogu

The strangest thing about director Jon Favreau's Star Wars: The Mandalorian and Grogu isn't that Disney have decided to relaunch the big screen aspect of their ailing space saga with an adaptation of an off-the-boil streaming series, it's that in centring Jabba the Hutt's offspring, Rotta the Hutt (voiced here by Jeremy Allen White), this adventure now becomes something of a sequel to Dave Filoni's unwatchable animated feature Star Wars: The Clone Wars. Speaking of Filoni, Lucasfilm's new Chief Creative Officer gets a co-writing credit with Favreau and Noah Kloor for this film; voices a couple of characters; and even scores a distracting cameo in the X-Wing pilot equivalent of a staff canteen. Actually, returning to Hutts, it's definitely more bizarre that, in detailing the living arrangements of Jabba's massive, slug-like species, viewers are treated to repeated instances of these creatures - sometimes even a pair that are related - writhing and intertwined. 

When Pedro Pascal (actually seen as well as heard)'s bounty hunter first arrives at the palace of these intergalactic gangsters, he walks along corridors lined with darkened rooms that appear, very much, like they have recently hosted gastropod orgies. The participants are abashed; pulling apart and reorganising themselves as Pascal (or Brendan Wayne or Lateef Crowder) stomp past. Perhaps it's the confrontational nakedness of The Hutts that gives pause? The film's repeated demand that we appraise blubbery bodies that sometimes look like puppets and other times look like their primitively textured ancestor from the 1997 revision of Star Wars? The grown-up Rotta - a gladiator who battles scaled-up monsters from Chewbacca's chess board - sports pumped-up arms and bulging pectoral muscles, an explicit point of departure from every other reptilian mobster we've seen so far. If nothing else it seems notable that Rotta's acceptance into the ranks of the Galactic Republic pointedly comes with a promise of clothing that is big enough to fit, and therefore conceal, his enormous body. 

This preoccupation with minor variations and the three-dimensionality of the film's participants speaks to, really, the piece's core appeal: these are the kind of adventures dreamed up by children as they played with their Kenner action figures. The first instance of connection with Star Wars for this viewer was, in the mid-1980s, seeing the overstocked occupants of Jabba's sail barge, from Return of the Jedi, heavily discounted in open-air markets. You might never come across a Luke Skywalker or a Darth Vader on these stalls but if you wanted a 3.75 inch reproduction of a Gamorrean Guard or a Weequay, you were in luck. You could slowly amass an entire collection of these bystanders and background players; characters who made basically zero impact on the unfolding saga but held their own creepy visual appeal as pure merchandise. Keenly aware that his film is, at its best, a rolling bestiary, director Favreau finds umpteen ways - beyond previous speculation on the Hutts' sex life - to fascinate and entertain. To wit: Pascal's delivery may be flat; his action so expert as to be dull, with a face buried beneath a gleaming helmet, but his side-kick is often delightful. 

A mixture of puppetry and computer-generated imagery, Grogu is of a piece with the Mogwais from Gremlins when sharing his scenes with larger characters. He's rapid and chaotic; possessed of an insatiable hunger for luminous snacks. When the film contracts to accommodate his tiny stature though, we are regaled with a sustained, wordless sequence in which this frog-like guru fashions a clay barracks around his deathly ill parent then traverses an inhospitable jungle and the swamp beyond, stealing smoked fish from Stephen McKinley Henderson's kindly, reptilian medicine man. If Mandalorian and Grogu is a truncated season of streaming television then this interlude is its own little bottle episode, reminiscent of similar asides in the Lone Wolf and Cub movies. As time passes to Ludwig Göransson's pitch-perfect Amblin score, and the camouflaged structure around the unconscious bounty hunter grows, there's a brief sense of a different, more ambitious movie: a Star Wars in which we are confronted with a melancholic permanence rather than just a temporary setback. Grogu seems to toil for days if not weeks. What if Mandalorians had a constitution closer to human? What if they were a little more fragile? What would that film look like then, if Favreau completely gave himself over to the Jim Henson of it all? Baby Yoda living amongst the bones of its parent, slowly honing his extra-sensory skills and fashioning his own approximation of armour before walking his own, vengeful path.  

Ludwig Göransson - Grogu's World

David Matthews - Main Theme from Star Wars

Anakin by Matías Bergara

Star Wars by Dan Goozee

Inescapable by Peach Momoko

Ben Kenobi by Artyom Trakhanov

Star Wars by Peach Momoko

Boba Fett by Artyom Trakhanov

THX 1138 - The George Lucas Director's Cut

George Lucas' first feature film imagines a near future that is chemically moderated and heedlessly consuming. THX 1138 presents a closed loop of production, humans working on vast assembly belts, heavily tranquilised to be able to perform the keyhole surgery style construction of their android overseers. This population is numb and mumbling, their home lives a mechanical routine of appliance assisted masturbation, capsule cocktails and the hammering, holographic, violence that passes for an evening's entertainment - the projected beatings metronomic enough to be used as a percussive lead-in to Nine Inch Nails' Mr. Self Destruct. Robert Duvall's THX is a worker on one of these robot manufacturing lines, his live-in partner, Maggie McOmie's LUH, is secretly varying his state-issued medicine doses, weaning him off the sedatives in the hope that they can then pursue a romantic relationship, in defiance of this society's laws. 

Despite the all-consuming repetition, putting together mechanical police officers is extremely dangerous work, often resulting in radiation leaks and fiery explosions. Workers, at the end of their seemingly lengthy shifts, are congratulated for completing their duties with only hundreds of lives ending. Later in the film, when THX and LUH have aroused suspicion in the spider-web of bureaucracy that monitors their day-to-day lives, we get some sense of why fatalities are so common. Burping his way through a particularly nauseous comedown, THX is mind-locked, an enforced halt that interrupts his painstaking tinkers, freezing him in a kind of seizure. In this expanded edit, the fizzing radioactive isotope THX had been handling, and attempting to thread into the face mask of a disassembled automaton, tumbles away from the mechanical arms he was animating. The tiny rod burns through anything it touches, setting off all manner of alarms. 

Although THX had found this precision work difficult in his tremoring condition, he was still able to slowly complete the process. This stuttering approach isn't good enough though, interrupted simply on the basis on a perceived mistake. The system simply will not tolerate this quiet irregularity in its components. Not that the lanky, cattle-prodding, cops that ceaselessly patrol the city operate with a perfect record either. We see a couple locked into degraded routines, striding purposefully into walls then cueing up a repeat step, as if expecting a different outcome. As with Lucas' later film Star Wars, there's a tension underlining THX 1138. You do not feel that this is a civilisation that has naturally tracked to this point of technological fluency, there are missing pieces, a pervading sense that something primitive and aberrant has been plugged into a pre-existing procedure. Originally released in 1971 THX 1138 was, like its space opera follow-up, given Lucas' now-customary Special Edition pass. THX's occurred in 2004, re-released to compliment the first DVD release of the Star Wars Trilogy. 

As with the Skywalker series, THX 1138 - The George Lucas Director's Cut has become the only version of the film currently available, leaving a couple of previous cuts and r-edits to languish on analogue formats like video cassette and LaserDisc. Lucas' alterations - conceived and executed following the production of Star Wars Episode II: Attack of the Clones - are, by now, either pleasantly quaint or conspicuously artificial. The quantum leap in special effects seen in Star Wars Episode III: The Revenge of the Sith is, notably, still just out of reach here. The creature animations used to depict the mutated Shell Dwellers - originally played by actors with dwarfism, dressed in tatty monkey costumes - are the most obviously jarring, both in terms of their crude motion and the slippery, not-quite-perfect, interactions between the new character models and the vintage footage of Duvall. This admittedly fleeting sequence is a rough gear shift, conjuring up memories of the Jabba meeting that Lucas insists on keeping in Star Wars - a million dollar carbuncle squatting on the middle-act of an American classic.

Not all of this film's additions prickle an acute revulsion, a few inserts are actually beautiful. Skywalker Ranch and ILM's best work in this George Lucas Director's Cut come from the corrections applied to the previously spare android assembly line. The abstracted tinkering of the theatrical cut is given a golden wash, stressing both the unstable energy output of the construction materials and (strangely) the Champagne colourways of Pioneer's combination DVD and LaserDisc players - perhaps the film's intended home? Similarly, the low polygonal androids being repaired have the same simple structure and gleaming carapace as a Hajime Sorayama piece. The robot as a splayed, naked, body rather than just disassembled machinery. For the most part though these computer generated additions are used to expand the otherwise claustrophobic scope of the film, shrinking the captured photography of underground carparks or hotel lobbies into the corner of a frame, then filling in the new space with structures that grow away from the original image. 

These tweaks have a tidying effect on the film, stressing a hive-like sterility already present in the work. The added vertical and horizontal expanse is similar to that seen in the white-out corridors of The Empire Strikes Back's Cloud City or the Kamino clone farm that Obi-Wan investigates in Episode II. Lucas making the connective tissue between THX 1138 and Attack of the Clones - two films produced more than 30 years apart - explicit. Both films are premised on the unnerving horror of a human battery farm. A callous, unnatural, kind of reproduction presided over, in both instances, by tranquil beings completely disconnected from the shock experienced by a human witnessing the slavery of his race perpetuated on an industrial scale. THX 1138 explores a perspective that none of the Star Wars prequels (or sequels for that matter) seem interested in pursuing - that of a person with skin in the game. THX is the product, a genetically engineered person slowly finding their way out of a chemically maintained fog. The film traverses this shock of self-determination, examining how THX's struggling psyche copes with an avalanche of new information, before locking this now enlightened cog into a jet-powered car chase. 

Stormtrooper by Hary Istiyoso

Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker

Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker doesn't pay shallow homage to the Buster Crabbe serials that wowed a young George Lucas. The film takes on both the structural and aesthetic peculiarities of those drip-fed cliffhangers; mixing the breathless, full-speed-ahead pacing with a mise en scene that is deliberately recycled from earlier, related sources. Writer-director JJ Abrams and co-writer Chris Terrio seem to have arrived at this wavelength in their efforts to design their sequel as not just the ultimate summation of Star Wars as an organic story, but also as a piece that talks about, and comments on, the systems and mechanisms that have always underwritten the series.

Rise of Skywalker then is a strange film that attempts to account for both its place within this saga, and its various, dangling plots, as well as its status as a cultural touchpoint that is now stuck combining nostalgia cues with mythic storytelling to wring the maximum amount of spend from its audience. As a sequel to Star Wars: The Last Jedi, Rise of Skywalker is obtuse and contradictory, junking much of that film's playfulness and rolling sense of mystery to arrive at hard, extremely specific solutions. Rey has an identity forced on her that, at first contact, feels not just illogical but pandering. The answer that Rian Johnson's film so adequately provided is voided to place this young woman at the centre of another dynastic struggle.

George Lucas' monotone rhythms may be back but the knowledge they provide does, at least, build on ideas and inference scattered throughout the wider legend. In Star Wars Episode III: Revenge of the Sith, Ian McDiarmid's Emperor Palpatine took a moment to explain to his pupil, Anakin Skywalker, the ways in which the dark side of The Force could be used to manipulate our concepts of life and death. All Skywalker hears is a route to keeping his beloved wife alive, but the audience discovers something different. This tragic recounting of Darth Plaugueis' fate basically states that wrinkly old Sheev is a key figure in Skywalker's immaculate conception. Star Wars: The Force Awakens seemed to be contextualising Rey in similar terms - another rootless vessel of overwhelming power called into being to answer a specific, metaphysical need.

As it turns out, Rey's origins are rather blunter than that but the data (and it is data, rather than something a little more organic) Rise of Skywalker provides still ends up positioning the character in the same monstrous, emotionally tempestuous terms as her prequel ancestor. Just as Adam Driver's Kylo Ren has allowed the sequel filmmakers to salve and redesign Anakin's explosive, teenage tantrums, Daisy Ridley's Rey provides the opportunity to explore the path Anakin Skywalker chose not to take. Instead of siding with bottomless, ancient evil, Rey can call on the positive teachings and affirmations she has experienced to help guide her decision. Unlike Anakin (and, really, even Luke), Rey has matured in the company of masters who genuinely care for her. This very real, parental, affection allows her to vanquish not only a deeper, hereditary temptation, but the sickness it has transmitted out into the galaxy.

The Rise of Skywalker demands to be considered in these familial terms. Not only are we explicitly dealing with the children of the characters and movements that drove Lucas' original trilogy, the film is also built on top of the intriguing-but-discarded ideas detailed in JW Rinzler's wonderful The Making of... books. The half-formed, usually supernatural, notions that Lawrence Kasdan or Lucas only briefly considered are brushed up here and reevaluated. This necromancy doesn't always work, indeed a number of the more in-your-face, character specific callbacks flounder so badly because they ask the audience to engage, emotionally, with a film that has built itself, almost completely, out of rolling action and hyperbolic imagery. Terrio and Abrams don't accomplish the impossible then but they do deliver a conclusion that feels indebted to a series of films that has run the gamut from genre-defining classic to infuriating waste of time.

Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker - TELL ME ABOUT IT STUD

JJ Abrams can pile on as much C3PO-with-murder-eyes, stroke Evil-Rey-is-Kylo-Ren's-saucy-Dagobah-tree-fantasy misdirection as he likes, the one thing you cannot take away from the Star Wars series is the sheer, awe-inspiring scale of John Williams' music. A couple of creeping notes and you're instantly transported to this place of space opera adulation that you might not even otherwise possess. That's the power in Williams' brooding, heroic score - it's authored - connecting you with an instant sense of fondness that no temp track snippet could ever inspire. 

Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker - LIGHTNING GHOST

Saddled with a wacky, video gamey title, Star Wars: Episode IX - The Rise of Skywalker appears to be pushing the series back into the realm of broad mythology, positing Daisy Ridley's Rey as a literal summation of a thousand generations of Campbellian heroism and Ian McDiarmid's cackling, Sith hag as an undying, ultimate obstacle.

Solo: A Star Wars Story

Star Wars is a series choking on criss-crossed continuity and the expectations they invite. The individual Episodes, no matter how they are told, revolve around chosen ones discovering and exploring their destinies, usually at the forefront of galaxy-spanning warfare. They are a prestige brand churning through the same basic set-ups; change and re-evaluation deployed as archetypal modifiers that upset and please in apparently equal measure. Surely, the promise of the A Star Wars Story sub-brand then is to upend these assumptions and hurtle off somewhere new? The Journal of the Whills is fine but isn't there also room for Rogue One's tales of the army-builders?

Solo: A Star Wars Story, despite its big fish lead character, at least starts somewhere pleasantly messy. Alden Ehrenreich's Han is a Dickensian orphan, bullied into lifting techno bric-a-brac for an enormous, incredulous Muppet in a smoke-clogged Armaghetto. Writers Jonathan and Lawrence Kasdan use their hero's introduction as an opportunity to pay tribute to both franchise creator George Lucas and original Solo actor Harrison Ford. Naturally, given his pedigree, Han is a Bob Falfa-esque speed-freak, at home gunning around shipyard slums in a stolen sports car that combines the basic design principles of Luke Skywalker's hovering Landspeeder with the ratcheting oomph of American Graffiti's V8 monsters. Armed with Kasdan, one of Lucas' favourite collaborators, Ron Howard's film covers all the testimonial bases.

Regardless of this obvious talent, Han is still a nobody. He isn't related to anyone important and no Jedi hovers on his periphery, ready to step in then whisk him away. This is fertile ground for Disney's spin-off line. In a universe that ebbs and flows on their achievements, it must be crap not being a Skywalker. Other people have to scam and grift to stay afloat. Solo's path off home planet Corellia involves him enlisting with Palpatine's plastic bovver boys to serve as cannon fodder in some pointless, deliberately ill-defined war. Howard's film, more so than any previous Star Wars entry, really leans into the idea of the Galactic Empire as a lightly dressed stand-in for Britain's slathering colonial ambitions. Reasonable aliens are othered into blood-sucking monsters; dying for the Navy is positioned as aspirational for the dirt poor; and all wars revolve around mud, misery and a misplaced sense of competence.

It's a shame Howard's film isn't a bit more interested in Solo as a lowly grunt bumping up against the machinery of intergalactic oppression. Before long Han is caught in a criminal conspiracy that tracks towards an unspeakably tidy solution, despite Donald Glover's extra-louche interpretation of Lando Calrissian and Paul Bettany's tiger-striped cad. Several parties are undermined by dramatic developments that speak to the kind of corrective numb you expect from a well-oiled production line. These victims include a gang of jet-biking wizards and Emilia Clarke's Qi'ra. Han's compromised, secretive love interest trades a moment of credible, meaty selfishness to quake in the interlaced shadow of an incompetent Sith. In a series seething with spikey, exciting ideas that pointedly go nowhere, straight-laced sequel plotting leaves a medicinal taste.

Unusually, for a set of films built on kaleidoscopic special effects technology, the stars of the Solo show are Howard and his stunt team. For all the medium talent acquisitions thrown the director's way, Howard at least creates readable movement, happy to explore the pure visual mechanics of physical objects hurtling from point A to point B. Set pieces, while not necessarily fraught with the palpable danger of a Tom Cruise vehicle, are instead built around the brief, unmistakable buzz of being a successful show-off. This bluster also finds its way into key CG sequences. Han, on a roll, uses his knowledge of drag-race minutiae to oversteer the Millennium Falcon through an impossibly dense asteroid field. This approach is nothing new for Howard, 1988's Willow described fantastical adventure using the yeehaw language of a Wild West Stunt Spectacular, but these earthy, meat-and-potatoes thrills sing in a series obsessed with luminescent baton twirling.

Star Wars: The Last Jedi

Firmly estranged from creator George Lucas, the third Star Wars cycle has struggled to beat its own, distinct path. The two films that precede Star Wars: The Last Jedi have cannibalised Lucas' entries, remixing and rehabilitating ideas to generate new material. Disney's contribution to the series seems to be focused on safety; incremental product that recycles past successes so as not to upset their lucrative apple cart. Star Wars: The Force Awakens plotted out a familiar heroic journey with characters that struggled with dead-end jobs and post-traumatic stress disorder, all the better to appeal to millennial spenders.

Rogue One: A Star Wars Story proposed a desperate war story told with a visual language indebted to the interlaced buzz of an NTSC LaserDisc, then reverted to type with your standard three-front battle. Given Rogue One's well-documented reshoots, not to mention Phil Lord and Christopher Miller's ejection from the Han Solo film for termination catch-all 'creative differences', there's an expectation that Rian Johnson's Star Wars: The Last Jedi would have to play it safe, spinning the galactic wheels just enough for Colin Trevorrow or JJ Abrams to swoop in with a satisfying (rhyming) conclusion. If Disney demand a specific tone and structural stranglehold for their side-stories, then surely actual saga installments don't stand a chance?

Watching The Last Jedi it's immediately obvious that this is not the case. Johnson's film is playful, irreverent even. The opening crawl has barely faded before we're straight into something resembling a skit - hot shot pilots prank calling the fascists while Vyvyan from The Young Ones paces the deck of the feature Star Destroyer. As the film unfolds it becomes clear that Johnson's approach to Star Wars isn't a bit cautious, it's impulsive and sweeping. The Force Awakens isn't treated as a holy text to be slowly decoded. Johnson instead positions the predecessor as a jumping off point, a platform that allows the writer-director a natural point of conflict when steering the characters into situations he finds exciting. Rian Johnson is having fun.

Unlike your standard middle chapter, The Last Jedi hasn't been written to signpost a route to an eventual outcome. The film races straight into conflict, arriving at moments that push resolution then demand a wider re-evaluation. Rather than write to please the kind of episodic drip-feed you might expect, Johnson has constructed his film around Daisy Ridley's Rey and Adam Driver's Kylo Ren. The film moves on their decisions, using their mounting sense of uncertainty to posit routes and solutions that lie outside the strict binaries their masters are selling. Even an important, legacy character like Luke Skywalker is examined and deconstructed in ways that predominantly cater to the needs of Rey and Ren's arcs.

Since this isn't his trilogy, Luke Skywalker is played at arm's length, his failure rationed out in short, contradictory recollections that hit like confrontations. Johnson and Mark Hamill propose a Skywalker struggling to reconcile his status as an intergalactic messiah with the knowledge that he wasn't strong enough to protect his pupil. This Luke hasn't been defeated by the resurgence of a galactic dictatorship or the dark lords that steer it, he has chosen to remove himself because, just for a moment, he couldn't shoulder the burden of another family member hurtling deeper into hate. Luke is presented in strictly human terms in The Last Jedi. Specifically, he's an anointed one deaf to the hubris his achievements should arouse.

Johnson and Hamill's skill is that The Last Jedi's Luke doesn't feel dissonant when compared to one we saw in Return of the Jedi. Given the circumstances, it's the only Luke Skywalker that could exist. The details of Skywalker's interim years may be disappointing in terms of a promise unfulfilled but they are instantly understandable. Luke's inability to dredge up the compassion that saved his monstrous father when faced with a corrupted innocent would undermine his sense of self. Johnson puts the dour Jedi we met in the prequel trilogy to good use too, using Luke's knowledge of their dogmatic thinking to exacerbate his sense of personal failing. What use is the most powerful being in the universe if he can't even take a child in hand?

E3 2017 - Star Wars Battlefront II

With The Phantom Menace's 20th anniversary approaching rapidly we're probably at a point where the children who greedily gobbled up the adventures of Darth Maul and pals are looking to re-examine their lost youth and spend their way towards resuscitating their long stagnated sense of wonder; hence DICE's tried-and-tested Battlefield 1 sporting a Clone Wars revamp.

Star Wars #52 by Walt Simonson