Shouldn’t a first look, you know, actually give you a first look at a movie? Especially when it’s the first glimpse of a “Star Wars” set we’ve seen in over six years?
It’s been that long since “The Rise of Skywalker” came out, that long that Lucasfilm has been figuring what the future of “Star Wars” would be on the big screen. And now we have heard that the upcoming “Star Wars: Starfighter,” set in the years after “Rise of Skywalker,” has set much of the rest of its cast — Amy Adams, Aaron Pierre, Flynn Gray, Simon Bird, Jamael Westman, and Daniel Ings join the already announced Ryan Gosling, Matt Smith, and Mia Goth — is going into production, and is giving us a first look.
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If you can even call it a first look. What’s the opposite of a first look? A blank stare. That’s kinda what Gosling and Gray are doing above.
Look, a posed photo of the actors just being themselves isn’t always terrible — the epochal 2014 “Force Awakens” cast photo was incredible, just to see Mark Hamill, Carrie Fisher, and Harrison Ford occupy the same space once again, but that involved a level of interest that simply is not yet there for “Starfighter.”
Three IndieWire staffers had strong thoughts about this “Star Wars: Starfighter” first look, and we’re going to vent them like superheated plasma.
Kate Erbland, Editorial Director
Over the course of a normal workday — especially one in the thick of fall film festival season — one can probably imagine the glut of emails that arrive with tick-tock regularity in the ol’ IndieWire inboxes, so the unexpected ones? Those require a higher level of interest to get me clicking. A “first look” image of the next “Star Wars” movie? That fits the bill — but, alas. There’s no question that plenty of words and phrases have lost their meaning in recent years, and “first look” seems to be one of them, at least in the entertainment space.
What should a true “first look” be? Well, for my money, it should be an actual production still, an initial peek not quite behind the curtain, but adjacent to it. I want to get a sense of what the final film will look like and feel like, a little action, a little movement. A black and white still — not, it seems clear, a photo taken during the filming of a real scene — with our stars (or is it their characters? that’s always unclear) simply resting on a landspeeder, everything so dark and muddled that it’s impossible to see much else? There are, uh, big pipes? Sure. Star Ryan Gosling might be wearing a cape? Fine.
It’s fine enough to mark the start of production with some glamour shots, but a “first look” this does not make, because it doesn’t speak to the primary function of these kinds of photos: it doesn’t tell me about the film itself. It doesn’t even tell me about the making of this film (think about that recent first look for Richard Linkater’s “Nouvelle Vague,” which captured the impish creative charm that runs through the final film). And don’t even get me started on the use of black and white. “Star Wars” films used to have some pop and pizzazz, but this first look? Doesn’t tell me anything.
Christian Blauvelt, Digital Director
It’s not just funny, it’s fitting, that the very first reply on Discussing Film’s tweet with the photo is “It is time for ‘Drive’ in space.” Because there’s almost nothing that actually connotes “Star Wars” here other than the vaguest outline of a landspeeder. Why is this in black and white other than because of some idea that black and white signifies importance? If this is really a set from the movie, it’s the first glimpse of a “Star Wars” movie set in over six years — we deserve to see that in color. You know, the way the movie itself will be presented? Gosling doesn’t look like he’s in a flight suit, and Flynn Gray looks like he’s just Ezra from “Star Wars: Rebels” come to life, even though we know this movie will be set in a time when Ezra is a middle-aged man. What is there here to be really excited about?
You couldn’t even have a glimpse of an actual “Star Wars” starfighter in this first look at “Star Wars: Starfighter”? Maybe give us an A-Wing, to think outside the box a bit. Hell, throw Expanded Universe fans a bone and make it an E-Wing. I’m not saying that there needs to be some Easter Egg to suggest Gosling is playing Corran Horn (though, let’s face it, any diehard “Star Wars” fan will tell you they could do a lot worse than adapting Michael A. Stackpole and Aaron Allston’s peerlessly great “X-Wing” books), but something to suggest, you know, intrigue.
“Who’s that guy?” People loved asking that when Vanity Fair would run their (color!) first looks at “Star Wars” movies back in the day. No one is going to ask “Who’s that guy?” about this image.
Christian Zilko, Senior Editor
Sometimes, a traumatic experience burns itself so deeply into your psyche that your worldview is irreparably altered. For me, one such memory was the first look photo for “Tulsa King” Season 1 dropping. The year was 2022, we hadn’t seen a trailer for the Sylvester Stallone-led gangster series, and the world was hopelessly naive to the crime comedy delights that awaited us. But, one day, our first breadcrumb arrived… and it was just a picture of Stallone standing in a suit, looking exactly like I imagine he looks when he goes out for coffee on a random Tuesday.
Perhaps it was just a formative memory because it came early in my media career, but I remember being dumbfounded by the notion that a show whose entire appeal rested on a single star would announce itself with such a regular-ass picture of said star. (To give some reluctant credit, he was standing in Tulsa, but I feel that’s a detail we could have inferred from the title.) Close friends of mine know not to bring up the “Tulsa King” first look around me anymore because it often devolves into a rant that has real potential to ruin a night.
“Tulsa King” has since become one of my favorite shows, so all’s well that ends well. But that was the day I decided I was done with first look photos. I’m not even sure that the difference between black-and-white or color matters. I simply have no desire to see A-list stars looking exactly like themselves in a movie before I have the chance to see a second of them in action. I don’t think there’s a single person who looks at these things who isn’t already following movies closely enough to be aware of what’s coming out. These photos aren’t swaying anybody, no matter how devilishly handsome Ryan Gosling looks.
Nobody on this planet is lacking for opportunities to see pictures of celebrities anymore. We can Google or stream anything at any time, and algorithms go out of their way to shove our favorite beautiful people in our faces at all hours of the day. Yet we’re still just uploading more pixels of the same people to data servers simply because we can! Somebody has to stand up to this madness, and I’m willing to risk everything to do it. I know attention spans are getting shorter, but I truly believe the human race is capable of waiting for a trailer. We need less stimulation and more patience, and these disingenuously named “first looks” are not helping us in either department.
