After The Phantom Menace introduced Star Wars fans to the sprawling worldwide metropolis of Coruscant, the rest of the prequel trilogy spent a lot of time on the planet. However, the movies mostly focused on the political arena, leaving the planet’s seedy crime-infested underbelly largely unexplored. There’s a glimpse of that underworld in Attack of the Clones when Anakin and Obi-Wan chase Zam Wesell through the sky streets to a shady bar full of deathstick dealers. But this thrilling chase sequence just scratched the surface of this rich, fleshed-out world.
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After classic film noirs like Double Indemnity and The Big Sleep explored urban decay and moral gray areas in a post-WWII society, neo-noirs took these themes to even darker places to reflect a post-Vietnam America. Chinatown stars Jack Nicholson as a private eye who’s hired to investigate an extramarital affair and stumbles upon widespread corruption and a history of incest. Klute stars Donald Sutherland as a detective searching for his missing friend and an Oscar-winning Jane Fonda as his only lead, an expensive call girl. Taxi Driver stars Robert De Niro as a Marine who returns from Vietnam with PTSD and insomnia, fills his nights by driving a cab around New York, and eventually decides to take up arms and exact vigilante justice when he meets a 12-year-old prostitute with an abusive pimp. This genre is an opportunity for Star Wars to tell a darker story on the big screen than ever before.
With the box office failure of Solo: A Star Wars Story, the once-ridiculous notion of “Star Wars fatigue” has become a much more realistic possibility. Marvel has managed to avoid franchise fatigue by keeping its movies fresh with different genre frameworks. Spider-Man: Homecoming is a high school comedy, Captain America: The Winter Soldier is a paranoid conspiracy thriller, and Thor: Ragnarok is a zany space opera in the mold of Flash Gordon. The Star Wars universe is so vast and wide-ranging that it gives Lucasfilm the opportunity to follow suit and explore different genres with its “Anthology” movies. It could make a spaghetti western set on Tatooine or a political thriller set in the Galactic Senate – or, indeed, a neo-noir set on Coruscant.
While the prequels dedicated a ton of screen time to Coruscant at the height of its powers under the rule of the Galactic Republic, it would also be interesting to see Coruscant outside the Old Republic era. At the beginning of the original 1977 movie, the Emperor shuts down the Imperial Senate, suggesting that he continued to hold Senate hearings for years into the Empire’s reign. A Coruscant movie could chart the fall of the planet following its prosperous time under the Republic. It doesn’t need to take place during the time of the Empire, because that era has been done to death in the Star Wars canon – including in the last two “Anthology” movies.
Colin Trevorrow’s unproduced script for Episode IX, titled Duel of the Fates, heavily featured a sequel-era Coruscant functioning under the First Order’s rule, which could’ve been very interesting. All the facilities created to help the Republic democratically govern the galaxy have been repurposed to allow the First Order to operate as a more efficient fascist regime. One of the little people living under the iron-fisted rule of their bureaucratic overlords would make the perfect antihero for a noir-tinged Star Wars story.
Disney already needs to flesh out the sequel era to retroactively improve the movies in the same way The Clone Wars did for the prequels. A Coruscant movie could explore the extent of the First Order’s rule. After the prequels depicted Coruscant under a democracy, a Coruscant-set “Anthology” film could explore Coruscant under a ruthless dictatorship. If Domhnall Gleeson would be interested in returning to the role, it could even be used to make General Hux – one of the most disappointing and underutilized villains in the new trilogy – a more interesting, complex character. A neo-noir set on Coruscant could paint Hux as a corrupt, unscrupulous antagonist with enough power and political influence to get off scot free, like John Huston’s sinister baddie in Chinatown.
Despite its prominent role in the prequels, Coruscant still has a lot of uncharted territory. The incomplete 1313 video game took place in a subterranean section of the city-planet and saw a young Boba Fett rising through the ranks of the bounty hunter trade. So, Lucasfilm has reams of concept art of a gritty vision of Coruscant’s criminal underworld just sitting on a shelf, gathering dust. There are a lot of stories to tell in the Star Wars universe, but a neo-noir set on Coruscant could be a great one.
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