The Disney media conglomerate recently announced a spate of new Star Wars movies. One of the three is said to pick up 15 years after the previous installment, 2019’s Rise of Skywalker, reprising Daisy Ridley’s role as Rey.
Though the rest of the cast remains under wraps, the biggest shake-up is the film’s director: Sharmeen Obaid-Chinoy. The two-time Oscar winner largely made her career in activism, filming documentaries that shed light on the plight of women in Pakistan.
It was partially for this reason that her comment during a 2015 panel discussion at the “Women in the World” summit, where she stated her goal as a filmmaker was “to make men uncomfortable,” was quickly misinterpreted, when taken out of context, as her intended direction for the upcoming Star Wars reboot.
She was speaking, at that time, about her documentaries, which cover honor killings, acid attacks, and unjust death sentences against women under Pakistan’s dictatorial Islamic regime: a worthy cause, but not a typical resume for a space-adventure film director.
Released against the backdrop of the Cold War, George Lucas’s original 1977 Star Wars film captivated audiences, cutting across demographic lines with its universal themes of the hero’s journey and the classic battle of good versus evil. While its highly acclaimed sequel, The Empire Strikes Back, and the serviceable conclusion, Return of the Jedi, were successful, subsequent attempts to recapture the charm of the original trilogy have largely fallen short.
This could be the fault of George Lucas’s hubris to think he could forgo a compelling narrative in his prequels (1999-2005) and instead make a trilogy centered on interplanetary politics, trade disputes, and senate hearings. Or maybe it was the pervasive progressive ethos in modern film studios that led Kathleen Kennedy to reshape the Star Wars universe in 2015, aiming to mirror the demographics of modern-day Manhattan. Perhaps more of the audience could see their ethnicities reflected through characters on screen, but the banal and meandering plot resonated with none. Following this trajectory, the franchise hit its nadir in 2017 with The Last Jedi, which garnered a 42% audience score on Rotten Tomatoes.
It’s bewildering that, despite the rich and endless lore the Star Wars universe affords, both attempts at reviving the franchise for new audiences have leaned heavily on original characters. This approach uses them as a crutch instead of striving to create an original story. It seems the galaxy far, far away only has room for a dozen characters. The only decent Star Wars movie made since 1983 is 2016’s Rogue One, an original story tangential to the Skywalker storyline, existing outside the now nine-movie-long series.
Speaking to CNN, Obaid-Chinoy expressed excitement over the opportunity to write the next chapter of Star Wars: “We’re in 2024 now and I think it’s about time we had a woman come forward to shape the story.”
From the litany of shortcomings that have marked the Star Wars sequels, a scarcity of women isn’t one of them. However, it’s evident that a new perspective is much needed for the beleaguered franchise — hopefully, one that places a premium on original storytelling.
Harry Khachatrian (@Harry1T6) is a film critic for the Washington Examiner’s Beltway Confidential blog and a computer engineer in Toronto pursuing his MBA.