‘Tis the season for festive cheer, eggnog and hour-long debates about Star Wars. Wait, what?
On a more serious note, if you’ve been searching across the galaxy Internet to find a Christmas present for the Star Wars lover in your life, may we recommend The Art of Star Wars: The Last Jedi? It’s a newly-unveiled tome of concept art and design schematics that helps shed light on all those tireless artists who poured their heart and soul into Star Wars: The Last Jedi, resulting in one of 2017’s highest-grossing movies. And things are just getting started.
To give you a small sample of Phil Szostak’s companion piece, CBM has now unearthed a truckload of never-before-seen concept art which shows alternate designs for Phasma, Snoke and the mercurial Kylo Ren. There’s one or two nods to The Last Jedi‘s deleted scenes as well, which isn’t all that surprising given Rian Johnson’s initial cut came in at three hours in length.
Via CBM:
To offer some context to the newly-unveiled artwork, design supervisor Kevin Jenkins traced the genesis of the so-called Gorilla Walkers (real name: AT-M6), and how The Last Jedi‘s team looked to the Nazis for design clues – not unlike how George Lucas molded the Galactic Empire in way that echoed the Third Reich.
I thought, ‘What would the Germans have done in World War II? They would have just made a bigger tank.’ That’s what they and the Russians did. I said to Rian that it was a further iteration on the walker: bigger, heavier, like a Panzer tank. These hugely powerful things in The Empire Strikes Back are deliberately little puppy dogs, running alongside and protected by the big gorillas.
If you’ve been keeping tracking of The Last Jedi‘s post-release analysis – and if you’re reading this, chances are you have – then you’ll notice Snoke’s obsidian ring is also pictured in the gallery above. Over the weekend, that dark piece of jewellery became a point of fixation among some Star Wars scholars, who believed that the ring is a cute reference to the Four Sages of Dwartii – namely Braata, Faya, Sistros, and Yanjon – controversial philosophers and all-around gatekeepers who came into power during the formative years of the Galactic Republic.
Neither Rian Johnson nor Lucasfilm have commented on that speculative rumor just yet, but as a possible expansion of Snoke’s murky backstory, the Dwartii theory is bloody fascinating. And with The Last Jedi poised to Force choke the worldwide box office long into the new year, we imagine the Internet will be gripped by Star Wars mania for another few months…if not longer, given the impending arrival of Solo: A Star Wars Story.
