One of the most creative minds working in Hollywood these days is the Maori filmmaker Taika Waititi. He first gained worldwide recognition for the superhero film Thor: Ragnarok, widely regarded as the best Thor movie, which also added a much more comedic tone than its predecessors. He also won a screenplay Oscar in 2019 for the dramedy Jojo Rabbit, a film in which he also played a childish buffoon Adolf Hitler. In this writer's humble opinion, Jojo Rabbit was tied for best film of 2019 with the whodunit film Knives Out.
Between his successes for Disney with Thor: Ragnarok and episodes of The Mandalorian, it's no real surprise that he'd eventually be given his own Star Wars film to direct, because Disney is giving out Star Wars roles like candy, given the sheer volume of material they have planned for that galaxy far, far away.
However, given the successes that Waititi has enjoyed so far, there is a lot of good potential for what he's going to with the universe. But, he knows that the stakes and expectations are sky high for whatever he's going to do. Passionate fans have the tendency to throw the phrase "ruined Star Wars" very frequently. It first started really entering the public consciousness after the release of The Phantom Menace, when we had to endure political talk and not so well received humor.
As the years have gone by and more and more Star Wars stuff has come out, we're hearing that more and more. People are calling the sequel trilogy worse than the prequel trilogy and complaining about every little detail that they don't like. The main exceptions are The Mandalorian, Solo, and Rogue One, which weren't derided as much as the sequels were.
Now that Waititi has been given his own film, he has "admitted" that he's going to do his part to ruin Star Wars even more for everybody. In an Instagram post announcing his project, he stated:
It's impossible to ignore the fans saying that their childhoods have been ruined by some addition or another, and Waititi is playing into that. Now, it could simply be a vocal minority that has such a passionate hatred for the new films. Not every person who helped the new Star Wars reach over a billion dollars apiece hates them with such vocal venom. There are plenty of people who enjoy both the prequel and sequel trilogies, and that's okay. Just because a new thing is added to a series doesn't necessarily mean that it's ruined forever.
Unless an upcoming film revealed that Obi-Wan gleefully committed genocide on an entire planet with Yoda's help between Episodes III and IV. That wouldn't help.
But since that's probably not the case, "ruin" is a strong word. Even if new things added in current movies add plot holes and answer things we didn't necessarily want the answers to, that doesn't ruin the magic of the first time you saw the original films. You'll always have that. No matter how bad the films get, I'll always have memories of my Star Wars-themed fifth birthday party, complete with a Death Star piñata.
Waititi is a talented filmmaker, and given what he did with Thor, there is hope that he gives us a really amazing film, or at least one that takes Star Wars in a different direction. Now that the saga of the Skywalkers has come to an end, there's a vast galaxy to explore, and Waititi is a great choice to help flesh it out.
Either that, or he's not joking about how he's going to ruin Star Wars, and we're in for a really rough time.
Source(s): CinemaBlend
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