Star Wars: Is 'The Book Of Boba Fett' Going To Be A Revenge Thriller?
After Luke Skywalker’s mind-blowing cameo appearance, The Mandalorian’s second-season finale still had one more surprise up its sleeve after the end credits. In a post-credits scene, Boba Fett and Fennec Shand arrive at Jabba the Hutt’s old palace on Tatooine, whose throne has since been claimed by Bib Fortuna. They kill everybody in there, then Boba drags Bib off the throne and takes it for himself. A title card then teased another Star Wars spin-off series titled The Book of Boba Fett for release on Disney Plus in December 2021.
No details have been revealed about the series beyond Temuera Morrison and Ming-Na Wen starring as Boba and Fennec, but the fact that Boba is digging into his pre-Sarlacc history and taking the helm of Tatooine’s criminal underworld seems to suggest that it’ll be a revenge story that sees a re-armored Boba settling all his scores across the galaxy. The titular “book” could be a list of names of people who have wronged him in the past, a la Kill Bill, that he’ll check off throughout the series as he confronts his enemies.
Jon Favreau’s creation of The Mandalorian has drawn a lot of influence from the western genre. The Book of Boba Fett should stay in this vein, because Boba is a similarly ice-cool gunslinger and Lucas has always been influenced by westerns, but it can take inspiration from a different subgenre of the vast catalogue of movies set in the Old West. Whereas The Mandalorian is a deconstruction of Star Wars' myth-making inspired by revisionist westerns like The Wild Bunch, The Book of Boba Fett can offer a bleaker, more violent look at those myths in the style of spaghetti westerns.
Pioneered by Italian directors like Sergio Leone and Sergio Corbucci, spaghetti westerns often revolved around a revenge story. In Django, the title character wants to avenge his murdered lover Mercedes Zaro. In Death Rides a Horse, Bill Meceita spends his entire life training to avenge his murdered family. In Navajo Joe, Joe sets out to avenge his entire massacred tribe. In this spirit, The Book of Boba Fett can see its badass eponymous bounty hunter scouring the galaxy for his various nemeses.
Boba’s quest for revenge would be a great way to bring back some fan-favorite Star Wars characters, because the people who have wronged him happen to include a few icons that fans are dying to see return. For starters, the first person Boba might want to track down to dole out some vigilante justice is Han Solo. On Jabba’s barge, a semi-blinded Han accidentally set off Boba’s jetpack and sent him careening into the Sarlacc Pit. It was just a clumsy mistake, but Boba doesn’t know that, he and Han already had a long-standing rivalry, and the pain of being devoured by the Sarlacc was still very real, regardless of the exact circumstances of how he ended up there.
An appearance by a post-Return of the Jedi Han in The Book of Boba Fett could rival post-Return of the Jedi Luke’s appearance in The Mandalorian. It would interesting to explore Han’s role in the foundation of the New Republic, even if it’s just briefly in the context of Boba seeking revenge against him. The two iconic gunslingers could engage in a climactic shootout, like the ending of countless classic westerns, from Shane to High Noon to The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly. It’s unlikely that Harrison Ford would return to the role of Han and be de-aged to his ‘80s-era self, but Lucasfilm already has a great young Han in Alden Ehrenreich. Ehrenreich’s pitch-perfect performance was undermined by a flimsy, muddled script in Solo: A Star Wars Story. He could get a second shot at doing the character justice with a supporting role in The Book of Boba Fett.
Mace Windu decapitated Jango Fett during the Battle of Geonosis – right in front of a young Boba. From the Jedi’s perspective, it’s a glorious moment of heroism, but from Boba’s perspective, it’s essentially the opening scene of Death Rides a Horse. Windu killed Boba’s only family in the world when he was still just a kid. In The Clone Wars, this evolved into a general resentment toward the Jedi, but in The Book of Boba Fett, it could lead to a full-on vengeful crusade against Windu himself.
Samuel L. Jackson has been eager to return to the role of Windu since Disney acquired Lucasfilm, but aside from Grogu reaching out to all the Jedi in the galaxy via the Force, there’s never been a clear way to bring him back. Canonically, Windu survived the fall on Coruscant. Both Jackson and George Lucas consider it that way, and Windu was seen to survive much bigger falls in The Clone Wars. In The Book of Boba Fett, Boba could track down a weary, aging Windu – withered by Palpatine’s Force lightning attack and grizzled from years of living helplessly under the Empire – like Captain Willard tracking down Colonel Kurtz in Apocalypse Now, culminating in a breathtaking final showdown.
It’s a promising sign that Robert Rodriguez, who directed Boba’s triumphant return to action in The Mandalorian’s “Chapter 14: The Tragedy,” is signed on as an executive producer for The Book of Boba Fett. From Machete to the Mexico trilogy, Rodriguez’s filmography is filled with action-packed revenge thrillers whose themes he could easily transfer to a galaxy far, far away.
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