The Star Wars universe has always traded in standard good-versus-evil narratives. Series creator George Lucas was inspired by the archetype-driven storytelling of fairy tales and mythology to create a modern-day myth that would encapsulate those values. Luke Skywalker is an incorruptible hero. Emperor Palpatine is the deceptively camp embodiment of pure evil. The Rebels defeat the Empire, the Jedi triumph over the Sith, the light side of the Force balances out the dark side, etc.
Lucas’ mythologizing changed the face of Hollywood in the 1970s, but today, there’s more of an appetite for darker, edgier, more morally challenging stories. Batman Begins and Casino Royale gave way to the “gritty reboot.” Recent Star Wars projects like Rogue One and The Mandalorian have flirted with these concepts, but the franchise has yet to really dig deep and explore them.
The “Golden Age of Television” has drawn viewers into the lives of complicated antiheroes like Walter White and Tony Soprano. Movies usually don’t have enough time to get audiences to sympathize with a killer, but TV has the flexibility to explore their psychology and humanize them. The latest Star Wars project to arrive on Disney+, The Book of Boba Fett, is Lucasfilm’s chance to venture into the hitherto-uncharted moral gray area between the galaxy’s heroes and villains.
As a former bounty hunter who has disavowed the Empire but not the business of killing, Boba Fett may fall somewhere between good and evil. By his own admission, Boba is “a simple man making his way through the galaxy, like my father before me.” He’s neither a hero nor a villain. Star Wars finally has the chance to escape the trappings of its mythmaking and present a moral ambiguity that the franchise hasn’t played with much on-screen.
Morally complicated stories have been seen in plenty of other Star Wars media. There’s an abundance of novels about the darker characters from a galaxy far, far away. The de-canonized video game The Force Unleashed is told from the perspective of Vader’s apprentice. But, unlike the MCU, The Lord of the Rings, and the Bond franchise, Star Wars actually originated on the screen. These morally ambiguous stories haven’t really been seen in Star Wars’ movie and TV content.
When it was first announced, The Mandalorian promised to be a darker, rougher, murkier Star Wars show that would explore the seedier corners of the galaxy and the cold-blooded killers that inhabit them. Din Djarin was a genuine revisionist western antihero in the show’s pilot episode, but he became a traditional hero as soon as he took Grogu under his wing.
Since there was nothing confirmed about Boba’s spin-off series besides its existence in The Mandalorian’s second-season finale, there’s been a lot of speculation about what the show could be. Some fans expected it to be a Star Wars spaghetti western about a bounty hunter traversing a lawless frontier, or even a straightforward revenge thriller following Boba as he settles various scores across the galaxy.
Now that Lucasfilm has finally dropped a trailer for the show, fans have a better idea of what to expect. It looks like it could be a Godfather-esque gangster epic about the balance of power between feuding outlaws. Boba has pledged not to rule with fear, but with respect. At the same time, it doesn’t look like he’s hoping to make any friends. He isn’t motivated by doing the right thing and he’s not above getting his hands dirty.
All signs point to The Book of Boba Fett being the first true Star Wars antihero story. It can be the show that The Mandalorian promised to be when its early marketing was hiding “Baby Yoda.” The Book of Boba Fett can launch a bold, daring new chapter of Star Wars that explores a more complex spectrum of ethics instead of telling the linear, black-and-white story of a righteous hero taking down an unscrupulous villain.
It’s in very safe hands with executive producer Robert Rodriguez. In addition to helming Boba’s spectacular return to action in The Mandalorian episode “Chapter 14: The Tragedy,” Rodriguez has directed a handful of awesome, action-packed antihero movies throughout his career. His El Mariachi trilogy followed the ultraviolent adventures of a lone wolf seeking vengeance. Sin City is an anthology of hard-boiled crime stories, adapted from Frank Miller’s comics, featuring a rogues’ gallery of femme fatales and tough-as-nails detectives.
Machete, based on a fake trailer from Rodriguez and Quentin Tarantino’s blood-soaked double feature Grindhouse, stars Danny Trejo as a Mexican federale doing the U.S. government’s dirty work along the border. The sequel to Machete, Machete Kills, promised a third movie entitled Machete Kills Again... In Space. Since that movie never got made, maybe The Book of Boba Fett can be Machete Kills Again... In A Galaxy Far, Far Away.