Star Wars Episode 7: 7 Reasons Why The Yuuzhan Vong Should Appear
3. They're A Genuine Threat
Every enemy in the Star Wars universe pales in comparison to the Vong. The Empire, the Mandalorians, even the Sith; they all don't even come close to holding a candle to these guys. They have the ability to reshape entire worlds to suit themselves with terraforming biotechnology, they manage to conquer and terraform Coruscant itself, and their opening salvo of the war is ripping a moon out of its orbit and dropping it on a planet. Which also kills Chewbacca. That's right, these Murglaks killed Chewie. Now you know the kind of foe the New Republic would be dealing with. Particularly since the normally placid Bothans go as far as declaring Ar'krai (a genocidal state of warfare with no concept of ceasefire where every single Bothan will not rest until their enemy is extinct) on the Vong after the fall of Coruscant. I think it's fair to say that when it comes to big budget action franchises (particularly Star Wars), we've more or less become desensitised to the kind of enemies and stakes that we've already seen. The scrappy underdogs fighting the evil Empire and ultimately winning out is now an almost exhausted concept. At some point, poodoo's got to go down and up the stakes so that we're not just going through the motions and rewatching something similar to what we've seen before. And that's exactly what including the Yuuzhan Vong would do. The good guys are in a position of power for once and have armies from thousands of systems and a re-established Jedi Order prepared to fight to the death but it's still not enough. The Vong are so powerful and fanatical that it takes the New Republic, the Imperial Remnant, and Boba Fett's Mandalorians combining forces to win. And even then it's a devastating fight with an eventual death toll of more than a trillion. The Sequel Trilogy needs stakes that are both higher than and different to what we've seen before. And the Vong would be the perfect way to make the Star Wars universe more hard edged.
JG Moore is a writer and filmmaker from the south of England. He also works as an editor and VFX artist, and has a BA in Media Production from the University Of Winchester.
