What exactly is the essential DNA of Star Wars, its unique selling point, its defining je ne sais quoi? Is it its uncanny ability to turn space wizards, walking carpets and beep-booping rubbish bins into the backbone of a multibillion-dollar mythology? Naturally, it’s the creation of a preposterously hopeful galaxy in which a lowly moisture farmer can become a Jedi knight, or a hardbitten bounty hunter can find himself playing surrogate daddy to a tiny green enigma who communicates entirely through coos, ear twitches, and an ability to devour live amphibians. And it’s most definitely the conviction that you can slap a fresh coat of CGI on a 40-year-old spaceship, throw in a few cryptic prophecies about destiny, and still convince millions that this time – this time! – it’s all leading somewhere achingly, untouchably profound.
But what it’s never really been, ever since George Lucas began mulling the idea of a big budget space opera influenced by 1930s adventure serials and 1950s Japanese samurai flicks, is a star vehicle. Which is why this week’s news that Ryan Gosling is to join a new Star Wars film being directed by Deadpool & Wolverine’s Shawn Levy feels downright weird. It’s as if the Mona Lisa suddenly showed up as a background painting on the set of a TV sitcom.
It’s not that Gosling is too good for Star Wars. Let’s be clear: Star Wars deserves the best in Hollywood and beyond. If Leonardo DiCaprio had been cast as Anakin Skywalker in Attack of the Clones, rather than the out-of-his-depth Hayden Christensen, we might all have been pondering for the last 20 years how obscenely romantic those scenes with Natalie Portman’s Padmé Amidala were, rather than, you know, cringing as if we were watching a high school production of Romeo and Juliet. The original trilogy would have been a whole lot worse had it not been for Alec Guinness’s ability to glide through the script with the dignity of a man who clearly knew he was slumming it but refused to let anyone see him sweat. Without Harrison Ford (not then a star but soon to become one), it might have been as dry and lifeless as the Tatooinian summer.
And yet none of them were Gosling: so much the man of the moment that Disney/Lucasfilm has decided to greenlight a Star Wars movie just because the guy who played Ken in Barbie has signalled a flicker of interest in starring in it.
What are long-term Star Wars fans to make of this? Many of us like Gosling. There aren’t too many Hollywood megastars who can convincingly play a replicant in Blade Runner 2049, a stoic, morally ambiguous getaway driver in Drive, and a glowing caricature of masculine hegemony in Barbie. But do we really want his casting to be the deciding force, if you’ll pardon the pun, in getting this movie made? It would invert the Star Wars formula, bringing a pre-established star into a world that has traditionally been defined by its ensemble storytelling. Suddenly, this grand old franchise might start looking more like a Gosling movie than a Star Wars one.
Moreover, Levy is best known for a film that took Marvel so far into meta territory that it was possible to wonder if Deadpool and Wolverine might end up stumbling into the writers’ room and start reworking their own script. Combine this with Gosling in Jedi robes and you’ve got a Star Wars movie that starts to look like it might open with Ryan Reynolds narrating a crayon title crawl while space monks battle it out with lightsabers shaped like pool noodles.
If that is the case, will the galaxy’s delicate balance of scrappy underdogs, epic destinies, and charmingly janky force wizards survive the transition? Is this the end of Star Wars as we know it? We’ll probably only know when we see the new, chronically handsome and brooding face of Lucas’s venerable galaxy far, far away – only to discover he’s a bemused Force ghost, shaking his head as Reynolds and Hugh Jackman flip a coin to decide who gets to take out the Death Star.
Source: theguardian.com
