Can’t wait for Star Wars: Rogue One to come out in December? Lucky for you, there’s tons of high quality fan-made Star Wars content floating around on the web to tide you over. But how do you sort the good from the bad? Well, it turns out there’s an annual Star Wars fan film awards held at Star Wars Celebration Europe where all the best content ends up. The winner of this year’s 2016 Filmmaker Select Award was the above TK-436: A Stormtrooper Story.
The film follows a wide eyed young lad from some random imperial planet as he leaves his girlfriend in search of glory as a stormtrooper in the Empire’s army. He has his first “Are we the baddies?” moment when his squad burns Luke Skywalker’s aunt and uncle alive, but goes on to justify the terrible things he does in the name of the greater good in the war against the criminal rebels. But then something happens that challenges everything the Empire taught him.
You can see why the short film won. The stormtrooper outfits are on point and the special effects are impressive, especially for an independent production. But TK-436 wins in my mind because it manages to pack two pretty effective twists into a 10 minute runtime. The project took a crew of dedicated fans approximately 7 months to complete, and it’s a pretty good entry point into the world of Star Wars fan-film.
