After being seen as a bike-riding assassin in the music videos for "Needed Me" and as a dancing vixen in "Work," RnB singer Rihanna has now donned the avatar of a beautiful alien in the music video for "Sledgehammer." It is a piano-based ballad-like song from the soundtrack of the upcoming film "Star Trek Beyond" and it has been written by Australian singer Sia.
Directed by well-known music video director Floria Sigismondi, the video sees Rihanna with a tattooed face and shaved eyebrows as she sports an alien-like outfit while standing on a desert of a distant planet and singing the song. As the clip progresses, Rihanna slowly starts moving towards the sky and into space before multiplying herself and eventually becoming one with the universe.
The singer recently said in a video on Facebook that she has been a "Star Trek" fan since childhood and that she is emotionally connected to epic characters from the movie like Captain Kirk and Commander Spock. "My dad really is the one who introduced me to Star Trek, it just took me one episode to fall in love with this other world I couldn't understand but I felt I could relate to," she said.
The video, with its trippy visual effects, looks like a space adventure of sorts. It is quite a befitting preview to the epic space adventure of the latest film of the "Star Trek" franchise. In an interview with Entertainment Weekly, Sigismondi explained that he wanted to create unique visuals for the video while incorporating elements from the actually movie. "We wanted to use some of the elements from the film. I watched the film and gravitated towards some, like the floating rocks. I thought that could help elevate my world and make it otherworldly. We used the broken moon, we used the swarm ships, and we used [Starbase] Yorktown—that's the big floating thing that looks like a planet but is actually a base where people live," he explained.
"Sledgehammer" is one of the few non-album tracks that Rihanna has released this year.
