When it comes to storytelling in movies, there tends to be a clear divide between subtle world-building – world-building that simultaneously whisks a viewer off to another realm while still allowing their own sense of imagination to run wild – and ham-fisted exposition. And there’s perhaps no better example of that disconnect than Lucasfilm’s Star Wars saga.
By funnelling its fantastical galaxy through the lens of Luke Skywalker, a farmer-turned-Jedi who hails from Tatooine, George Lucas and his team managed to inspire a generation without feeling the need to explain each and every facet of their galaxy far, far away – that was a task for the expanded universe. And then came the prequels.
Thankfully, it looks as though writer-director Rian Johnson, who is at the helm of Star Wars: The Last Jedi, isn’t about to repeat the sins of the past, after he told Entertainment Weekly that the forthcoming sequel will only shed light on a portion of Snoke’s mystery backstory.
Similar to Rey’s parentage, Snoke is here to serve a function in the story. And a story is not a Wikipedia page. For example, in the original trilogy, we didn’t know anything about the Emperor except what Luke knew about him, that he’s the evil guy behind Vader. Then in the prequels, you knew everything about Palpatine because his rise to power was the story.
It’s for this reason that our knowledge about Andy Serkis’ Supreme Leader has been limited to throwaway pieces of speculation. Granted, EW’s ongoing coverage brought us closer to Snoke and his “dangerous” crimson guards – known officially as Elite Praetorian Guards – but in The Last Jedi, it seems “we’ll learn exactly as much about Snoke as we need to.”
“We will see more of him, and Andy Serkis will get to do much more in this film than he did in the last one. And that guy is just a force of nature. It’s entirely a mo-cap performance. [Creature designer] Neal Scanlan built a maquette that we had on set for lighting reference and to give the actors a sense of what it was going to feel like. And then we scanned that and [Industrial Light & Magic] used that in their renderings, but Snoke will be an entirely CG creation.”
And for those of you familiar with Serkis’ nuanced, deeply provocative performance in Fox’s Planet of the Apes trilogy, it should come as no surprise to hear that the actor is about to knock it out of the park.
I’d be sitting at the monitor just with my eyes as big as dinner plates. It’s one of those performances where after every line, I’d look over at whoever’s standing next to me with an expression on my face like, ‘Oh, my God, we just got that.’
And though EW’s blowout would lead you to believe that The Last Jedi‘s first full trailer is right around the corner, word is that Disney and Lucasfilm won’t unveil said reel of footage until October. We’ll let you know if and when that situation changes.