It’s pretty much an accepted fact nowadays that Keanu Reeves can do anything, but would you have ever considered his talents to extend so far that he can star in movies that don’t actually exist? If not, feast your eyes above for a trailer for Star Wars: The Old Republic.
Of course, this is a fan trailer, a creation by mashup editor Stryder HD, who was also responsible for the clip seeing Baby Yoda arriving to join the fight in Avengers: Endgame. The idea is that Reeves is portraying Revan, a former Jedi turned Sith Lord who lived some four thousand years before the formation of the Galactic Empire and the player character of the RPG Knights of the Old Republic.
The trailer builds its action and implied story by using shots from a number of sources such as games and fan films, thereby avoiding recycling footage from the existing movies whose use would be most glaringly apparent, plus a few clips from The Mandalorian to tie in with the turning point in Revan’s history during the Mandalorian Wars. The footage of Reeves himself is taken from pseudo-historical fantasy action movie 47 Ronin, edited to superimpose a lightsaber over the outcast Kai’s katana and the voiceover repurposed to suggestively apply to the Jedi and Sith rather than warring factions of feudal Japanese clans.
With the announcement of the Sequel Trilogy, the events of KOTOR and thus Revan himself were relegated to non-canonical status along with the rest of the Expanded Universe, but the character has been made official again following the release of The Rise of Skywalker. The film’s accompanying Visual Dictionary tie-in names a number of the legions of Sith Troopers, one of which is “The 3rd: Revan Legion,” thereby re-canonizing the character as an existing historical figure, and one with a compelling story that many fans would be eager to see told on screen. Something which may already be happening with Reeves, taking the franchise in hopefully a far more universally popular direction.
