Like Tears in Rain: Meditations on Science Fiction Cinema (2 page)

The Ancient Fear

Was Darth Bane Wrong?

Let’s talk about
 J. J. Abrams’s 
Star Wars
 film, the working title of which is reportedly 
The Ancient Fear
. When the official cast list was first announced, my first reaction was that it was embarrassingly male-centric, but there 
was
 one man whose involvement I couldn’t help but get excited over: Max von Sydow. The assumption being bandied about by fans is that he’ll play the villain—a part he nailed in Steven Spielberg’s 
Minority Report
 (2002), which happens to be this particular Jedi Archivist’s all-time favorite film.

A quick scan of Google search results for his name indicates that the widespread, unsubstantiated theory about his role is that he’ll be playing Darth Plagueis, the canonical Sith Lord who mentored Palpatine for decades prior to and during
 
The Phantom Menace
 and, later, 
Attack of the Clones
. A member of the humanoid species the Muun, Plagueis was first and foremost a businessman who used his vast wealth and influence to advance his Sith agenda, much like Chancellor Palpatine.

With Andy Serkis heavily involved with production of
 
Episode VII
, this idea isn’t entirely without merit. Weta Digital’s MoCap technology would be the perfect VFX solution for translating von Sydow’s performance into a convincing alien Sith.

That said, I don’t quite buy it.
First off: Plagueis was killed—that is, 
physically
 destroyed—by Palpatine, or Darth Sidious, in the events of the novel 
Darth Plagueis
 by James Luceno, ca. 
Attack of the Clones
 (or 22 B.B.Y.); while his life’s ambition had been devoted to achieving immortality through the power of the Force’s Dark Side, Luceno’s book seems to make it sufficiently clear that he failed to achieve that goal.

Second, I’m not convinced that Lucasfilm’s goal with the sequel trilogy will be to rehash existing Expanded Universe material that at this point has been deemed noncanonical, or that was only really relevant to the prequels.
“The Legend of Darth Plagueis the Wise,” as Palpatine refers to it, is a story best left shrouded in mystery—it was a nice plot element in 
Revenge of the Sith
, but we don’t need it going forward.

Were I writing a film called
 
Star Wars: Episode VII
—
The Ancient Fear
, well, I’d first approach the script with thoughts of something decidedly more ancient. If Plagueis was killed roughly twenty-five years before 
Jedi
, then that’d make him old news by the time the events of the sequel trilogy unfold, some sixty years or so after his death.

But that ain’t exactly “ancient.”

Now, I’m not going to claim that I’m some expert on Jedi or Sith history, or assert that von Sydow is playing Bane. The Lucasfilm Story Group would be lucky to have somebody who’s as passionate about this mythos as I am on board, sure, but I don’t consider myself a 
Star Wars
 scholar when it comes to the EU and so forth.

What I do feel I’ve got a firm grasp on is that period of the saga’s history beginning shortly before the events of BioWare’s
 
Knights of the Old Republic
 and concluding with the final Darth Bane novel, 
Dynasty of Evil
.

Drew Karpyshyn has his critics, as does any author given the privilege of playing around in this beloved universe, but I can honestly say that there’s no one whose books I’d more readily suggest to folks looking to get into
 
Star Wars
 beyond the scope of 
The Clone Wars
and the films themselves. What Karpyshyn did with both 
Knights of the Old Republic
 and his Darth Bane trilogy has, in my mind, forever enriched and expanded upon the mythology of the ancient Sith.

Again, I don’t suppose that von Sydow’s going to be Bane in
 
Episode VII
. But I 
do
 think he’s going to be playing at least some form of Sith Lord from the pre-B.B.Y., even pre-
Dynasty of Evil
 chronology.

In Ryder Windham’s
 
Jedi vs. Sith: The Essential Guide to the Force
, a piece called “The Shadow of Freedon Nadd” explains that:

Four centuries after Nadd’s death, . . . Queen Amanoa, wife of Onderon’s ruler King Ommin, was
 possessed by the spirit of Freedon Nadd. . . . [The Jedi] tracked Amanoa to the deepest sublevels of her palace and discovered Freedon Nadd’s tomb, which had become the focus of dark side energy and enabled his power to pass to his descendants from generation to generation. (p. 17)

(We’ll just avoid the obvious pop-culture tangent here, where we delve into von Sydow’s
 role as 
The Exorcist
, and any implications to be made about Sith “possession.”)

In other words, Plagueis failed in his lifetime to do what at least one Sith Lord had accomplished almost four millennia prior. We’re also told by Yoda on-screen in
 
Revenge of the Sith
 that Qui-Gon Jinn was perhaps the first Jedi to master the Force and commune with the living beyond death, meaning that Plagueis’s goal can and has been achieved by members on both sides of the ageless war.

So Darth Plagueis is, essentially, incidental to the larger story of the Skywalker family and their role in the conflict between Jedi and Sith. A quick aside: there exists the possibility, based on the Expanded Universe’s success with the Yuuzhan-Vong War series beginning with R. A. Salvatore’s
 
Vector Prime
, that the titular “ancient fear” and any associated characters may not be Sith at all—but if the core six films of the canon are all about the Skywalkers bringing balance to the Force, I very much doubt that we’ll be seeing some alien species heretofore unknown to moviegoers.

It’d be cool to see the smart but whacky metadrama of Matthew Stover’s
 
Luke Skywalker and the Shadows of Mindor
 played out on the big screen, to offer a third possibility, but based on the track records of people like Abrams, I would err on the side of the sequels focusing on the Sith’s reemergence post-
Jedi
.

A Sith Empire, specifically.

Windham’s account of “The Battle of Ruusan,” also found in 
Jedi vs. Sith
, describes the Sith Order prior to Darth Bane’s seizing of the mantle (through the eyes of Luke Skywalker, via Yoda’s tutelage) as follows:

Hundreds and hundreds of years ago, a Jedi named Kaan turned away from the light and formed the
 Brotherhood of Darkness. The Brotherhood used the dark side of the Force to build an empire, and they were well on their way toward expanding it when an army was raised to opposed them. . . . They were Jedi. (p. 27)

Now, as we know from various (now-noncanonical) storylines in the
 
Star Wars
 video games published by LucasArts over the past ten to fifteen years, the Brotherhood of Darkness was likely not the only Sith Empire ever to have surfaced—but given Darth Bane’s elevated status among the canon, thanks to his brief appearance in spirit on 
The Clone Wars
 during Yoda’s journey to the Sith homeworld of Moraband (i.e., Korriban), the Brotherhood’s history is one piece of the 
Star Wars
 mythos I’m confident that Lucasfilm’s Story Group considers to be canon.

What do we make of this? Well, most importantly, the Brotherhood of Darkness was, in the context of the Expanded Universe, the original precedent for what constitutes the Sith. The so-called “Rule of Two,” established by Darth Bane after he betrayed and murdered the Brotherhood with an ancient, forgotten Force technique called the Thought Bomb, only exists as the normative mode of being for the Dark Lords for a brief span of time
—roughly a thousand years B.B.Y., I’d say.

Not to mention the fact that the Jedi Order still existed during the Battle of Ruusan. Thirty-some odd years after
 
Return of the Jedi
, who knows what remains of its hokey religion and ancient weapons? Probably not much.

Suppose Bane was wrong about the nature of the Dark Side. Suppose the ancient Rule of One, with a vast empire of disciples at the sole Dark Lord’s disposal, proves a source of greater power for the Sith, despite the apparent sacrifice of secrecy and stability.

Rumor has it that Han Solo hasn’t seen Luke in years at the time of 
Episode VII
’s opening crawl—which 
could
 mean that, if Asajj Ventress or Darth Maul is still alive and seeking vengeance, a centuries- or millennia-old Dark Lord of the Sith looking to return from the netherworld of the Force and assemble an empire of Sith acolytes would be in a pretty advantageous position. With no Jedi to oppose him, a Freedon Nadd or Naga Sadow or Lord Vitiate might well cast the whole of the galaxy into a new era of darkness.

Guardians of the Galaxy

An Insta-Classic t
hat Goes All the Way

Nobody ever told me I needed to watch 
Parks and Recreation
, that it was the funniest television series since Dave Chappelle broke all the rules over a decade ago. But my fiancée had the good sense to give it a go one night when there was nothing else to see on Netflix, and we’ve watched the hell out of it ever since. Seeing people like Amy Poehler, Aziz Ansari, Nick Offerman, and Aubrey Plaza hitting their stride was its own reward—and every episode is eminently rewatchable, which is more than I can say for some of the more disposable programming the big networks are churning out these days—but it’s the sudden and total self-reinvention of familiar character actors, like Rob Lowe, that makes 
Parks and Rec
 the finest sitcom I’ve ever had the pleasure of watching.

Enter Chris Pratt, who has made memorable appearances in
films ranging from the graphic-novel adaptation 
Wanted
 (2008, Timur Bekmambetov) to the unexpectedly brilliant romcom 
The Five-Year Engagement
 (’12). As the underachieving shoeshine boy with a big heart and small intellect, Pratt rounds out the core of 
Parks and Rec
’s truly perfect cast, offering up ironic deadpan and lowbrow one-liners with the kind of timing and delivery that have grown to define his raw, enormous talent.

When Marvel announced a
 
Guardians of the Galaxy
 film, I remember thinking, 
Well, cool. If it’s got more than a hint of 
Star Wars
 flavor, which seems a fair guess, how can it not be fun?
 And then they announced the cast. . . .

It was clear Feige and the rest of the people who’d made Joss Whedon’s
 
The Avengers
 (2012) such a colossal success were willing to take some chances and play around with the greater universe to which they’d staked their claim. This was around the time of the 
Marvel NOW!
 relaunch, which included a new ongoing 
Guardians of the Galaxy
 title—a comic that would go on to develop a reputation as one of the best things to come out of the Marvel universe in ages.

“It’s got a talking raccoon with a big-ass machine gun!”

That was how Stone, the guy who runs my local comics shop, summarized the new series. And it was impossible 
not
 to be curious. If Marvel was making 
Guardians
 their big post-
Avengers
 tentpole film, something exciting had to be going on. I was pleased to discover that Tony Stark makes the occasional appearance, for starters. And Peter Quill and Gamora both hit all the right notes for me.

To say my hopes for the film adaptation became high might be
 something of an understatement, especially once I’d seen the trailer.

“I feel like this is maybe the movie I’ve been waiting my whole life to see,” I commented to a friend online. Then the months flew by, July 31st arrived, and somehow James Gunn didn’t disappoint.

The soundtrack alone—from ’70s staple “Go All the Way,” by the Raspberries, to The Runaways’ energetic “Cherrie Bomb,” not to mention Tyler Bates’s epic original score—gives the movie a certain
insta-classic
quality by balancing modern sounds with a healthy dose of nostalgia.

Star-Lord’s introductory sequence on the planet Morag demonstrates Gunn’s competence as a director right away, from the well-choreographed action of Quill’s escape to the polished feel of the wide opening shots of the tomblike world and the augmented-reality technology necessary for Star-Lord to navigate it. Pratt earns a few laughs right out of the gate, doing what he does best; stellar actor Djimon Hounsou makes an appearance as Korath the Pursuer; the otherworldly Star-Lord mask is a given an immediate closeup, to ensure that its red-eyed stare becomes as iconic as the film itself seems destined to.

It never really slows down from there on out.

John C. Reilly makes a couple amiable appearances as a Nova Corps officer, with Glenn Close portraying his commander-in-chief, Nova Prime. Bradley Cooper and Vin Diesel steal much of the show by lending their voices to the wildly lovable Rocket Raccoon and sentient tree-thing Groot, respectively.

And by the end of the film’s two-hour runtime, you’re left buying it all—to the fullest extent possible. Instead of just having Rocket be a fast-talking, clever raccoon, the script mentions that he’s the result of experimentation using cybernetic uplift technology. Instead of Gamora (Zoë Saldana) and Nebula (Karen Gillan) having a petty, baseless sibling rivalry, we’re told that only one of them is Thanos’s daughter by blood; Gamora might as well have been called his prisoner of war, her family having been slaughtered by the Mad Titan (voiced and portrayed via MoCap by the inimitable Josh Brolin).

The backstories of Drax the Destroyer (Dave Bautista) and Groot are
 
slightly
 less developed, and the film does its best to avoid the matter of Quill’s crown-prince-of-Spartax heritage—but given Gunn’s deft handling of the material that’s present in the film, I can’t help but feel all this will be handled sufficiently in the inevitable sequel. Ultimately, I suppose, the villains are the film’s one weak point. Benicio del Toro’s The Collector feels criminally underused, despite his space fortress serving as one of the main settings of the film’s second act. And Lee Pace is a bit of a caricature in his turn as Ronan the Accuser, who acts as a kind of Darth Maul to Thanos’s Sidious, to draw an all-too-easy comparison.

But
 
Guardians of the Galaxy
 is, at the end of the day, something fresher and bigger than a mere 
Star Wars
 pastiche. Given its place within the larger context of the Marvel Cinematic Universe, it has free reign when it comes to making Starkian references to pop culture and the recognizable DNA of blockbuster filmmaking. And it makes full, unabashed use of its lead’s strengths. When Quill hollers, from the cockpit of his starship
Milano
, “They got my ‘dick’ message!”—well, you don’t have to roll your eyes. Because this flick has so much heart, and contributes to the fun-loving genre that is home to everything from 
Raiders of the Lost Ark
 to 
Back to the Future
, the audience is willing to follow Star-Lord and his ragtag team of Guardians anywhere.