For my money, the most striking shots in Annie Leibovitz’s Star Wars: The Last Jedi Vanity Fair photoshoot are of the snooty looking gaggle of aliens that seem like they’ve walked off the set of a Lady Gaga video. As Rian Johnson explains in the article, these are the denizens of the casino planet Canto Bight.
What’s that, you ask? Well, apparently it’s a place in the film that’s set to serve a purpose similar to the Mos Eisley Cantina, introducing us to a bewildering gaggle of alien races in an exotic environment. But this time, it’s less the arrays of tentacles, fur, and eye stalks that set our heroes on edge – it’s the economic disparity between them and this snooty looking crowd.
Johnson describes the planet as “a playground for rich assholes” with Finn and newcomer Rose (Kelly Marie Tran) being sent there on a mission. Finding out what one-percenters do in the Star Wars universe is an idea so obvious I’m surprised it hasn’t been done on screen before (I guess Cloud City was kinda luxurious, but that was still a gas mining facility). The director goes on to explain that so much of what we see in Star Wars is either sleek military or dust-blown shitholes, so it’s going to be a nice change to find out what the equivalent of Mar-A-Lago was a long time ago in a galaxy far far away.
If nothing else, these fantastically costumed and stylish looking background characters are going to provide extended universe writers fodder to explore for countless years to come. I, for one, am dying to know what the giant angry-looking horse dude’s story is.
Star Wars: The Last Jedi is set to be released on December 15th