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If the reports are true, and Kathleen Kennedy is to step down as president of Lucasfilm, it is possible to look back on her near 13-year reign over the Star Wars movies and wonder how one person managed to oversee an entire industry of sci-fi fantasy dreams, decrees and doomed announcements that always seemed to fall apart as quickly as they were constructed. Like any of the Death Stars that have permeated these films, Kennedy’s apparently well-constructed visions for future episodes always seemed to be blown to smithereens just as they were about to take over the Hollywood nebula. From Josh Trank’s mysteriously vanished Boba Fett film to Patty Jenkins’ Rogue Squadron crash-landing before takeoff, her time at the helm of Lucasfilm will be marked by vast, ambitious projects that promised to be “fully operational” – only for the scrappy reality of budget concerns and creative differences to transform them into little more than unfinished, floating chunks of cinematic debris, drifting aimlessly through the void.
It is fair to say that while her predecessor George Lucas procrastinated, toiled, and employed as much energy as a protocol droid attempting to jog through quicksand, Kennedy, in terms of bringing new Star Wars films to the multiplexes (after the mixed reception to his midichlorian-infested, blue-screen-heavy prequel trilogy), moved like a hyperspace-jumping Millennium Falcon. Initially at least: no sooner had the ink dried on Disney’s galactically ambitious purchase of Lucasfilm for a $4.5bn (£2.5bn) in 2012 than Kennedy was off hunting down JJ Abrams to oversee 2015’s The Force Awakens. It was a movie that – at the time – felt as if fans of the saga had finally been gifted a return to the knockabout space romps of Lucas’s original trilogy – but these days it feels like a gleaming hyperspace lane to nowhere: a void at the heart of everything that is wrong about modern-day Star Wars.
The sequel trilogy was grand, kinetic and beautifully shot – the memory of the splendid scene in which Adam Driver’s Kylo Ren first lands on Jakku in his sinister-looking command shuttle will always stick in the cerebrum. But now that we know the whole thing ended up with space-zombie Palpatine coming back from the dead with his armada of planet-killing Star Destroyers, hooded Sith acolytes, and what can only be described as an infinite supply of evil red mood lighting, there’s a nagging sense that the creative team spent most of their time mugging up cool cosmic designs rather than worrying about unimportant guff such as character and story arc, thematic consistency and any semblance of a long-term plan.
Yes, the sequel trilogy was technically impressive, occasionally dazzling, and sold a lot of toys. But it ultimately flickered in and out of coherence like an astromech droid with a low battery – bleeping optimistically for a while before toppling over lifelessly, right into the bottomless abyss of forgotten plotlines. There are moments of visually operatic splendour, segues and set pieces in which it feels as if our eyes are popping out on stalks. Let us not forget those battered Resistance ski speeders carving scarlet streaks across the battlefield while facing down the approaching enemy walkers on Crait’s salt-encrusted surface in Rian Johnson’s The Last Jedi, or the dazzling throne room duel where Kylo Ren and Rey briefly set aside their differences to slice through Snoke’s Praetorian Guard in a ballet of crackling lightsabers and burning red drapery in what felt like a moment of raw, operatic grandeur ripped straight from the Star Wars of our dreams.
But the overall sense was of a film trilogy directed by talented but completely out-of-sync directors operating with little sense of where they were supposed to be going, of creatives who would have benefited from being given a star map from A to B, rather than just being handed the keys to the Millennium Falcon.
For other than the sequel trilogy, what does Kennedy have to show for her time? She stepped in to prevent Gareth Edwards’s Rogue One: A Star Wars Story from being a disastrous mess; Edwards’s majestic prelude to the original trilogy may go down as one of the best films in the saga, of any era. But reports from the period always suggested that if Tony Gilroy had not salvaged and reshot it, it might have been a complete disaster. Credit then, where credit is due, and these behind-the-scenes power struggles, 11th-hour rewrites and white-knuckle reshoots ultimately led to Gilroy being given free rein on the fabulously dour and doomy Rogue One Disney+ prequel series Andor. The Mandalorian is so good it has survived three seasons and is about to head to the big screen with the forthcoming The Mandalorian & Grogu. Yet all of this feels more like firefighting than smart planning; nobody can really suggest that the grand idea from the beginning was to mainline the entirety of Star Wars around a pseudo-Lone Wolf and Cub dynamic that conveniently sidesteps any real reckoning with the total muddle left behind by Abrams et al.
And it’s not over, just yet. Even if Kennedy does retire at the end of the year, at least five more mooted Star Wars movies are at various stages of pre-production. Sharmeen Obaid-Chinoy is set to direct a film focusing on Daisy Ridley’s character, Rey, as she establishes a new Jedi Order, while James Mangold is developing an episode exploring the origins of everyone’s beloved space monks set approximately 25,000 years before the original trilogy. Dave Filoni will direct a film set during the New Republic era, intended as a cinematic apex for Disney+ shows such as The Mandalorian, Ahsoka, and The Book of Boba Fett, and Shawn Levy is in talks to direct a standalone Star Wars film that might just star Ryan Gosling in the lead. Then there’s Lando, in which Donald Glover is set to reprise his role as Lando Calrissian, co-writing the script with his brother, Stephen Glover.
Any one of these movies might spin Star Wars off in a completely new, utterly brilliant direction, but is just as likely to be as stimulating as a Senate debate on trade route taxation. Unfortunately, this feels like part of the problem. If your job is to decide where this sprawling, lore-laden galaxy of Jedi, Sith, bounty hunters and increasingly bewildered audiences goes next, there ought to be a plan that’s more precise than just throwing hyperspace coordinates at the wall, like some cosmic Jackson Pollock, and seeing what sticks.
