It’s done in a very clumsy, in-organic way.
Not a movie, but definitely Star Wars in the Disney era, on @Cremlian’s recommendation, I read the somewhat recent Darth Vader comic series by Kieron Gillen. It was amazing! If someone ever wants to make a Darth Vader movie or TV series, this should be the basis.
Highly highly incredibly highly recommended!
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I guess I will give in and read some of these Star Wars comics. I’m running out of graphics novels I can check out with my 5 free Hoopla checkouts that my local library gives every cardholder, and I know the Star Wars stuff is in there.
I haven’t read all the new Marvel star wars comics yet (I’m a few years behind now), but so far the worst they have been is just good but a lot of them have been excellent. Especially Vader.
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Star Wars Comics-wise: I highly recommend Doctor Aphra and the Lando miniseries.
The Poe Dameron series is pretty good, but it’s more for people who are more invested in the newer movies.
Solo was surprisingly much MUCH better than I was expecting and is probably my favorite of the Nu Star Wars movies. It was everything I wanted out of a Star Wars movie.
It’s nice to have a movie where there’s actually chemistry among the ensemble cast, where they interact with each other in meaningful ways, and where the audience actually cares about what happens to them.
They worked really hard to explain the Kessel run in 12* parsecs.
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Don’t see it in 3D. It’s basically 2D. I learned my lesson and will do better at researching 3D vs 2D in the future. Save moneys.
“Solo: A Stars Story” is a solid, and fun entry to Star Wars Universe. Much better than expected, watched in a standard screen. But it deserved an IMAX, or a Dobly watch.
Also, this movie would have made an awesome video game, think “Uncharted” but in space!
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Solo was everything I wanted Rogue One to be. It’s what Rogue One should have been.
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L3’s full name is L3-37.
Leet.
Like most here, I enjoyed Solo a lot more than I was expecting to. It’s probably the least consequential Star Wars movie ever made, but it’s still better paced, written, and performed than Rogue One and even a good chunk of the episode films. Kudos to that team for pulling it together against all odds!
Surprisingly, my brother liked it even more than I did, and he’s not really a Star Wars fan. He’s seen the original trilogy and all the new movies, but more or less thinks of them as regular movies, not something to fan over. Despite the number of fanservice-y references aimed at all the fanboys and girls out there, the references were integrated in such a way that they just come across as just worldbuilding flavourtext to someone like my brother who’s not in the know. He sent me a pretty interesting text review of the film later after we saw it.
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Solo ticked off a lot of points I wanted to see in a Star Wars movie since Disney took over, like a self-contained interesting story that wasn’t about a FUCKING DEATH STAR or who is the next chosen one Jedi. It also avoided the things I’ve been sick of in all the other Disney Star Wars movies, like having to end with space battles and laser sword fights. Instead it ended with genuine and surprising human character moments, not based on turning to the dark side or being evil, but just making their way in a desperate world.
In fact, I think that’s what I liked most about it. Because it isn’t about chosen people who are at the head of armies or royalty, it feels like the most grounded movie since the original. Desperate people thrust together, just trying to get by. I think that makes the story (which didn’t keep cutting away to action scenes and battles elsewhere) focus down onto a single interesting thread, and makes it the most satisfying story in Star Wars for a long time.
However, it was let down by some very clunky moments which, as far as I can tell, come from script rewrites and reshoots. There’s a lot of evidence of whole sections being left over from the original directors (Lord and Miller) before other parts were shot (or reshot) by Ron Howard. Most of those came from the fan service moments, things rammed in to the story that don’t make sense, and only survive because they reference something in the original trilogy.
For me the worst, which will come as no surprise, is the word choices in some parts of the movie. Words you would never say in that situation, because they don’t MEAN anything in that situation. Like in Rogue One, it was “hope”, “trap”, “hope”, “trap” and all can think was “THIS IS NOT A TRAP, IT’S NOT EVEN A THING YOU COULD CALL A TRAP” and “Nobody keeps saying the word hope that much!” I think I counted “hope” seven times in The Last Jedi.
One example in Solo is the line “This is a rebellion!” Sounds okay, but “rebellion” is what the people in power call a resistance or revolution. Revolutionaries don’t call themselves rebels, it’s what they are called. It’s like calling yourself terrorists… no, you are freedom fighters. But because “rebel” is now a Star Warsy word, it’s inserted into these new movies. “Rebellion” now joins “trap” and “hope” as a word without even a real meaning any more in Star Wars, it’s purely a signifier of “you have seen another movie”.
I kinda want to see a Star Wars movie written and directed by people who had never watched a Star Wars movie with any audible dialogue. Some words and phrases should just be banned, at least, just to keep the language making sense.
So mostly a good film, but uneven, and annoying in ways I wish these movies weren’t.
It’s Star Wars so they’re going to use words differently that we do, because it’s not our Galaxy. Similar to how the British call elevators Lift and Americans call them Elevators. They’re constructing their own language.
A good example of this is in the newer Star Wars novels. Han and Lando are “Heroes of the Rebellion” according to the people of the galaxy. Even though there’s a “New Republic”.
SWTOR did something similar, when you played a Trooper Character you fought “Separatists”, when you played an Imperial character you fought “Rebels”.
At this point Star Wars has reached a saturation point similar to the Origin of Superman and Spider-Man. You know the good guys fighting the Empire are the Rebel Alliance. So in One or Two lines they basically established “This is how the Rebels were able to afford a small fleet of ships and almost never had to worry about fuel unless the plot called for it.”
As we covered previously:
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Wasn’t the Mofference thing from a novel aimed at kids?
Muffs, Mufferences in a Mufference room on a Muffship.
Nope - it was from the Jedi Prince series, which was aimed squarely at the adult nerds.
The more I think back at Solo, the more I don’t remember the bad stuff, and just remember having a good time. I guess I had such a strong, but small and pointed, negative reaction due to the bad stuff being loaded up at the start. Especially the introduction of the dice. So clunky. And the dice were a way to connect Han and Luke and Leia in The Last Jedi, not for pre-Leia love interests of Han.
Anyway, I think if I were to pick a Disney Era Star Wars movie to watch again right now, I’d probably go for Solo, then The Last Jedi, then Rogue One, then The Force Awakens. That’s not a ranking of how good I think the movies are, just how interesting I think it would be to watch them again.
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