Daisy Ridley Says Star Wars Films "Are All Political" And They Pit "The Individual Versus The Big Corporation Or The Big Group"
Actress Daisy Ridley, who plays Rey in Disney’s Star Wars sequel trilogy, recently claimed that all of the Star Wars films are political.
Speaking with Inverse, Ridley stated, “I feel like [the Star Wars films] are all political. I feel like it's the individual versus the big corporation or the big group, so I think they always have been.”
She added, “And ultimately I think the films are emotional in that it's good and evil, which we all can relate to very specifically in our day-to-day lives. But yes, I do feel those conversations are woven within the story, and I'm very excited to see what George does.”
Ridley’s comments come in the wake of newly hired writer George Nolfi, who wrote Ocean’s Twelve and The Bourne Ultimatum, discussing how he plans to approach the film.
He told Film Stories, “The way I approach it is, you look at what’s come before you, you look at the broad ideas of what they want to do.”
“Meaning: Lucasfilm, Disney, Sharmeen [Obaid-Chinoy], the director, and then you do what a writer does, and try to try and put beats of a story together,” he explained. “Try and imagine characters, and then you present that with an understanding that it needs to honour, obviously, a long, incredible tradition.”
Nolfi then elaborated on what he sees as the Star Wars tradition, “If you think about George Lucas, the six movies that he did, and the universe that he created, it’s actually very steeped in broad notions of politics. It’s not talking about today, per se, but there’s the Empire’s Nazism slash Roman Empire. The democracy of the Roman Empire collapsing and becoming an empire and the perennial story of human beings organising themselves and against chaos, and then the tools that help human societies tamp down on chaos becomes oppression.”
“So that is really very core to what I think George Lucas was trying to talk about,” he said. “And one of the wonderful things about science fiction and Star Wars – which is more almost science fantasy or space opera – is that you can raise the deepest issues without it feeling like a philosophy class, or a political science class, or something I read in the newspaper today… It can be about real things, deep things.”
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Back in 2023, a press release from Lucasfilm explained what the film was supposed to be about. It stated, “Kennedy then revealed that Star Wars will head into the future, with a new feature set 15 years after the last events of the Skywalker Saga. Sharmeen Obaid Chinoy will tell the story of rebuilding the New Jedi Order and the powers that rise to tear it down; the director then delighted fans by welcoming Daisy Ridley to stage, confirming she will be reprising her beloved role as Rey in the upcoming movie.
Lucasfilm President Kathleen Kennedy also explained what the film was supposed to be about. She told IGN, “We’re 15 years out from Rise of Skywalker. So we’re kind of post-war, post-First Order and the Jedi are in disarray. And there’s a lot of discussion around who are the Jedi, what are they doing, what’s the state of the galaxy? And she’s attempting to rebuild the Jedi Order based on the books, based on what she promised Luke.”
Kennedy concluded, “So that’s where we’re going.”
George Lucas, the creator of Star Wars, previously told director Christopher Nolan how he came up with the idea, “I can take that concept of the psychological underpinnings of mythology combine it with the exciting action adventure of a Saturday night serial and that would be kind of a cool movie.”
Later, he shared, “I distilled it down. I wrote a giant script. The original film was basically subtitled “The Tragedy of Darth Vader.” And in the beginning Darth Vader comes in and kills everybody. In the middle you find out that this kid is actually the son of Darth Vader. And in the end the son validates, vindicates, and allows the father to be. So that was the movie.”
What do you make of Ridley’s comments about Star Wars?
The only way Star Wars rights the ship is to fire Kathleen Kennedy.
These movies will be feminist propaganda garbage like all the Disney films have been.