By Jonny Lupsha, Wondrium Staff Writer
Disney has announced Star Wars: Galactic Starcruiser, a two-day vacation experience. Visitors can meet famous characters, learn to wield a lightsaber and go on story-based missions. Star Wars uses good and evil in clever ways.
The most realistic and immersive Star Wars adventure ever created will take visitors to a galaxy far, far away in 2022. Based in Disney World in Florida and set during the latest trilogy of Star Wars films, Star Wars: Galactic Starcruiser offers a two-day interactive experience that goes much further than rides and attractions. Visitors stay in a hotel meant to look like a galactic cruise ship, where they can eat food modeled after otherworldly cuisine, watch characters play out a live story, or even run missions for the First Order or the Resistance to help tip the balance of the story’s outcome.
Part dinner theater, part culinary experience, and part live-action role-playing, Star Wars: Galactic Starcruiser lets Star Wars fans live out the film series’ much-explored dichotomy of good and evil. In his video series Sci-Phi: Science Fiction As Philosophy, Dr. David Kyle Johnson, Associate Professor of Philosophy at King’s College in Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania, explained how the new trilogy of films makes the sci-fi franchise’s codes of virtue even more cloudy than previous films.
Finn Walks the Line…
“The moral ambiguity of the new Star Wars material that has been released since Disney bought the rights from George Lucas in 2012 is even more pronounced [than previous films],” Dr. Johnson said. “Disney’s first film—The Force Awakens—begins with what would have been impossible in the original series: a faceless stormtrooper has a crisis of conscience.
“Tired of the First Order (a reawakening of the Empire) forcing him to kill, he teams up with a resistance pilot, and later an orphaned girl named Rey, to escape.”
While this may seem to paint Finn, the turncoat stormtrooper, as a good character, he eventually abandons the other “good guys” for his own safety halfway through the film, only rejoining them to save Rey, who has been captured. He is frequently seen acting in his own self-interest, or at least from a motive of survival, rather than virtue.
…As Does Rey
Rey, the main protagonist of the recent Star Wars films, also balances her inner good and evil, although it’s often far more subtly.
“When she defeats Kylo Ren, the film’s masked bad guy, there is a moment when you think she might kill him in cold blood,” Dr. Johnson said. “Indeed, in the novelization of the film, Rey actually hears the voice of Ren’s master, Supreme Leader Snoke, telling her to kill him—and she almost does. Only because the earth splits between her and Kylo does she lose the opportunity.”
Another clue towards Rey’s darker side is the musical theme that composer John Williams created for her. Like the themes of Darth Vader and Emperor Palpatine from the original film trilogy, Rey’s theme is composed in a minor key. This led some fans to believe that at some point, Rey may turn bad, like Anakin Skywalker turning away from the Jedi path and becoming Darth Vader.
When Star Wars: Galactic Starcruiser opens at Disney World in 2022, fans will have the chance to choose between good and evil themselves if they wish to get the fully immersive experience of the two-day adventure.