His movie JoJo Rabbit was terrible but I guess Disney must have liked it.
Terrible? He won an Oscar for it. It was probably my favorite movie of last year. Ragnarok also rejuvenated the Thor franchise. This is an excellent choice.
They’re still doing Star Wars movies?
James Bond has 24 movies in almost 60 years with no end in sight. SW only has 11 so far. As long as the tickets sell they will keep making them.
Now that Disney has wrapped up the never to be sufficiently damned Skywalker Saga, they can get on to making original shit in the SW Universe. I expect Waititi’s movie to be set during The Old Republic.
It may come as a surprise to you but franchises are the big thing going on in Hollywood, with all of the studios trying to create new ones or extend existing ones. Disney is probably the most aggressive about this so it’s no surprise that they’re going to do another Star Wars movie.
Rotten Tomatoes has the critic score at 79% and the audience score at 94%. I’ve had several friends recommend it.
I suspect your opinion is the minority opinion.
Jo-Jo Rabbit is the best movie ever made about the Hitler Youth. “It’s definitely not a good time to be a Nazi.”
However, although Waititi directed what is arguably the best episode of The Mandalorian, I don’t know how good of a choice he is for a Star Wars feature film. It’s not his abilities I doubt, but while the original trilogy made room for humor, the generally darker tone of the films seems ill-suited to Waititi’s brand of irreverence. It worked in The Mandalorian because the show has low stakes to begin with (taking the Western themes into Spaghetti Western territory), and perhaps it can translate into a full feature, but that is definitely a tonal shift that hardcore fans may not care for and casual viewers may not expect.
Then again, Solo was originally going to be more comedic until studio execs got spooked and decided to make it a more conventional film directed by a competent but uninspired director, and it ended up being he least memorable of any Star Wars film. I mean that literally; there are better films and some that are worse, but all I can remember from the film is that he is named Solo because he has no family, and for some reason Lando Calrissian is having sex with a droid, which seems like a gag directly from a Robot Chicken spoof, and nothing else about the film left any impression whatsoever. So, maybe what Star Wars really needs is a shot of wacky, offbeat humor. It certainly doesn’t need any more J.J. Abrams, but then, I can’t think of anything that does.
Stranger
13 movies so far, not 11. I swear, I’m the only one who remembers the other two.
Fourteen. If we’re counting the TV movies The Ewok Adventure and Ewoks: The Battle for Endor then you also have to count…The Star Wars Holiday Special.
Stranger
Jojo Rabbit was great, but Disney was probably looking at his direction of Thor: Ragnarok, which has a 93% critic score on Rotten Tomatoes. It had humor but also dark elements. Watiti is also directing the next Thor film. He also did the original film of What We Do in the Shadows, which I haven’t seen but also got good reviews.
I very much enjoyed that film. You should definitely give it a shot.
While I kind of have the same reaction, I’ve also always maintained that there’s gotta be something else interesting going on somewhere else in an entire “galaxy far, far away” that doesn’t have anything at all to do with these same like 5 people that all of the other films have revolved around.
Now that I see that Watiti was the director, I probably will. (I’ve been kind of burned out on zombie/vampire type shows.)
Plus, Disney has invested US$4B in Lucasfilm, and even if the films suck they’re still going to make bank on the licensing. They don’t want to be like Paramount, losing out on Star Trek for letting it lapse into production limbo, but they also don’t want to take the risk of introducing totally new characters with no connection to those same “5 people”, which is the same reason Bond films kept bringing back Blofeld until they could no longer legally do so.
To be fair, although the prequels were pointless filler, and the sequel trilogy was an uneven and poorly crafted effort to appeal to nostalgia, there is a lot left to be mined from the Star Wars universe. From the start is was a vibrantly characterized space opera milieu that looked lived in, with a rich backstory only hinted at by the characters, and if Lucas had been smarter than to hem in his prequel trilogy by simply having to run up to the original movies (and fill them with then-cutting edge CGI that now looks worse than a random episode of Babylon 5) then it could have expanded the world of Star Wars to encompass any amount of stories with loose references and connections.
The Mandalorian shows what could have been done with Star Wars, and while it is narratively far from original or perfect it has created new characters, as did Rogue One (despite existing just to plug a plot hole) which were memorable in their own right. Nobody asked for or needed a film that explained how Han Solo got his name, where his dice came from, and how he did the Kessel run in 12 parsecs, but they could (and should) make a Lando Calrissian movie where Han is mentioned or shows up for a cameo but otherwise delves into the previous unspoken tales of a grifter who made good, or a New Republic scout hunting down a secret Empire development lab where a potent weapon was being developed by a clan of malevolent space dwaves who forged it in the heart of a dying sun. No, wait, that is Nidavellir. Well, the appeal of Star Wars was never that it was terribly original; it is that it sewed together various elements into an entertaining and appealing story with compelling characters and richly designed set pieces.
Stranger
I can confidently predict this will be the best Star Wars film based on this alone. Also Jojo Rabbit was fucking great.
Jojo Rabbit WAS fucking great.
Like several others, I’d like to widen the scope. Even if we keep it roughly the same time there’s an enormous galaxy out there to make stories from. Even keeping with the western motif, you could do drama, adventure, political thriller, ranch or water wars, whatever.
Hell, a variation on The Searchers would be great. Even vary the genre. Imagine - well, Nora Ephron’s dead - but imagine a romcom in Ephron’s style set on some planet we’ve never heard of yet. I could see that being made. It would be great.
The Man Who Blasted Darth Valance: “When the legend becomes fact, hologram the legend.”
Stranger
Exactly.
Ten Little Tusken Raiders
The Corellian Who Knew Too Much
Sleepless in Mos Eisley
The Hutt Connection
What We Do In The Shadows is a great movie, and so is Thor 3. I liked Jojo Rabbit as well, but not quite as much. Boy was very popular in NZ, but I only thought it was OK.
He was good on The Mandalorian as well.