Star Wars Anthology shit talk (Rogue One, Young Solo, TBD)

As one of the biggest SW stans on ILX, let me just say: Meh. This felt really perfunctory, the seams showed like crazy, etc. This "Han Solo" did not feel like a person that was going to become the person on the screen in the original Star Wars. It at least felt more or less like it took place in the SW universe, but all the "crime syndicate" storylines have always been my least favorite thing in that universe. Hell, it would have been marginally better if they'd gone back to the original EU materials and brought in Prince Xizor and Black Sun instead of Paul Bettany's boring character.

All that said, the cut from "We'll have you flying in no time" to THREE YEARS LATER and trench warfare was a very Ron Howard joke, but means that prior to the train job we see exactly zero minutes of Han becoming a hotshot pilot, so all of his flying skills fall under "informed attribute" basically until he takes the controls of the Falcon.

Took me longer than necessary to recognize Jon Favreau's voice, which . . . did not fit the character. To be charitable.

I'm sure the director replacement/rewrites/reshoots were responsible for this movie not knowing what to do with Thandie Newton. But she could be taken out of the movie with no difference made to the plot at all.

when the head of the pirates took off her helmet, I first wondered if she was supposed to be the long-lost daughter of Harrelson and Newton's characters but I may have been the only one

we'll find out when her spinoff comes out

she immediately explains who they are, so that possible misconception was short-lived

damn, missed out on a franchisetunity there

I actually like the idea of infinite concentric spinoffs of less and less important characters, handled by progressively less reputable filmmakers

I'm willing to accept that _more_ Star Wars movie could be the answer

like why do we care if the mid-tier spinoff doesn't have as many ticket sales as the main episodic story? get some market segmentation in there, then genuinely let some directors do their own thing on a lower tier without having the studio jump in as quickly

xxpost I thought the same thing

if a segment of the SW audience is *rebelling* at being expected to march mindlessly into the multiplex twice a year to see the same old formulas, my heart bleeds for Disney.

Harrison Ford's looks never did much for me tbqh

when the head of the pirates took off her helmet, I first wondered if she was supposed to be the long-lost daughter of Harrelson and Newton's characters but I may have been the only one

― (ノಠ益ಠ)ノ彡┻━┻ (mh), Tuesday, May 29, 2018 2:47 PM (twenty minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

I thought exactly the same thing and breathed an audible sigh of relief when Larry Kasdan proved to be smarter than that.

This "Han Solo" did not feel like a person that was going to become the person on the screen in the original Star Wars

young han is savvy enough to anticipate multiple betrayals toward the end there but maybe dænerys flying away after he dedicated years of his life to reuniting with her is the first in a series of legit solo-fying disillusion (including lando in cloud city and ultimately ben (kylo ren) in starkiller base)

For the fatigue theory, as a parent, I can see that the Star Wars toys section at target has been shrinking. A big problem on that front was the fate of the characters in 'Rogue One'.

I liked 'Solo'. I kept thinking of it as a SW novel.

saw this in a big auditorium with maybe 25 seats filled. and.... it's lousy! mess of a plot with characters very thinly imprinted before they hit moments where it's crucial that we care about them. i guess ehrenreich wasn't *great* and certainly wasn't ford, but before anything else it's the basic problem of prequels. when they announce they're going to planet kessel, you're not like ooh, i wonder what scrapes they'll get into there, i hope they make it out... you're like, ahh, this is where we find out what the "kessel run" is, i wonder if it'll be something lame or something kinda clever, or if they'll fake out my expectations by having it turn out someone else did the piloting on the famous run or whatever, and i wonder how they'll dispatch these other side characters who we never saw before, will they die or am i gearing up for some scene where they give a farewell salute and ride off into the space sunset...? and then meanwhile the characters have been unconvincingly pulling off a crazy heist, which you'd think you could make feel either tense (after all two movies ago a crazy heist ended up with everybody dead), or like a rollicking good time, but it just kinda runs out the clock for that act of the movie.

enough surface polish and set-piece fun to kinnnnnda carry you through, but man is it pointless, and wayyy too long for the light fun side movie, with all the needless reversals and invented crises. and there are so many lurching, distracting things to yank you out of the movie. are we doing spoilers? if not i'll just say that the hat-tip to american graffiti was one stroke of cutesiness too many for this viewer, though at least you could imagine how that *started* as ron howard wanting to honor his old buddies george and harrison, or something. but what a place in the movie to shoehorn it in!

It's wild to me how entire $10,000,000+ sequences are now being spun out of sentences a stones George Lucas farted out in 1975

*stoned lol

DC’s take is, in its own way, basically the same as Walter Chaw’s. That’s enough for me to avoid this until it shows up for free on HBO.

yall are a bunch of old poops

that’s all i have to add

<3

it’s not even that it’s boring. it’s boring in the laziest possible way.

idk there was something daring in having the female lead's much-dangled secret and super meaningful motivation for all her significant looks turn out to be that she is secretly in league with a previously-unmentioned Skeletor. almost dadaist in its left-field willingness to tank conventional notions of narrative resolution.

It’s not Dadaist at all though! It’s trying very sincerely to live in the sw universe and it just FAILS! It would be more interesting if it were a series on contextless sketches of Han solo’s life! If anything it’s trying really really hard to be in the 40’s and 59’s serials “see what happens next” style but I can’t be assed to care bc the script is so bad

i already cannot recall one interesting line of dialogue from this, or any dialogue at all except woody harrelson calling alden "kid" a lot.

another interesting choice, i thought, was to make endless hay out of han's desire to fly and skill at flying but never show any of his early flying experience, and then when he's on board the falcon, to depict it as if he's never been on a spaceship before. again radically deconstructing our bourgeois assumptions about setups and payoffs and consistency of characterization.

he is the best pilot bc his dad worked in a factory and because god he just is okay?

"luke, i am your father"

*sigh* "show don't tell, darth. jeez"

maybe i'm biased because i went with a 6-yr-old and 9-yr-old but long story short i thought this ruled

a little weird for a star wars movie in that it contained no "force", no skywalkers, no spiritual mysticism, no destinies etc - so far, so han - but despite a typical 2000s desaturated colour palette it certainly felt like it came from the star wars universe. thought everyone's acting was excellent and yes it was just a series of heist set-pieces but.. like, yay?? and the way they resolved the moral question at the heart of all heist movies i.e. who benefits, was satisfying

lotsa stuff here about friendship and i genuinely got choked up with L7 died or whatever her name was lol

also this movie suggests an alternate canon where young han solo grows up into being played by liev schreiber and i don't see how you can be honestly opposed to that

i don't follow?

a critical consensus seems to be forming that you can't get from THIS han to THAT han with this movie, which, maybe that's so but you do get to a putative han played by liev schrieber so what's not to like

does that still make no sense? sorry

love that phoebe waller-bridge has been retconned into the OG series

loved "that's just a rock! and you just made a clicking sound with your mouth!"

loved woody's "hold this for me, fellas?" before wasting fools against banks of classic SW controls

paul bettany an absolutely luscious villain, fully richard e. granting it up yet also scary enough that my 6-y-o pretended to need to pee whenever he was on screen

i guess the plot was "thin" but it led naturally along, i was always clear on what everyone was trying to do and why, which is all i really need? sorry i'm a bit simple in my SW needs i guess.

did NOT think there was one double-cross too many but the shifting nature of who to trust was key to the story they're telling, that han was once guided by love but now doesn't know who to trust, that he has a good heart, that he doesn't think he's the good guy but actually he is the good guy.

agree thandie newton was wasted of course but at least it contributed a "huh, anybody can die" factor

oh and i didn't even mention glover as lando, which was absolutely perfect, and you could see how much glover relished pulling out little bille dee williams flourishes but he managed it without overdoing it which of course would have been very easy to do. love that he keeps mispronouncing his name.

oh and the nebula-creature octo-thing was pretty goddamned lovecraft-esque and pretty horrifying to see its skin ripping away in the gravity well, that whole sequence was was sick as fuck even if you do know they're going to make it in the end

his name = han's name obv

oh and am i wrong but did han's heist actually end up funding the actual capital-R rebellion that he winds up RE-joining in the OG trilogy?

that was my takeaway

Thought this was good if a little long and somehow had some of the fly by night, rough around the edges quality of the ‘77 original (despite costing $400 mil or w/e). Loved L3 and her(?) performance anxiety at cutting the gate and the heart to heart with daenerys.

wow, so box office drop so huge there's a chance Deadpool might take number one in its third week.

han being "the good guy" is not a story i'm particularly interested in - YMMV! - and it means we're in a bizarre no-man's-land where we get a really long origin story movie nobody asked for, that still doesn't end with the origin of the character in question, who opens the original film as a cynical, seasoned criminal, the veteran of dozens of smuggling jobs, whose heart of gold even he doesn't believe in. but he ends this movie handing over his big score to the rebels! his love interest choosing skeletor's criminal underworld over him happens offscreen! i didn't really want to see the obvious story of how a performatively-rogueish young man becomes actually rogueish and cynical and pledges to never again believe in anything, but at least that's an arc. i guess he's learned a little bit about being a con artist? except two scenes ago was a joke at his expense where he tries to bluff everybody about the falcon being full of armed goons, so clearly he's not much of a con artist after all. maybe the filmmakers got confused by how the movie kept going a half hour after it should have been done, and could no longer tell if they were close to the end or not. so arc-wise the most you can say is he's acquired three or four of his character's accoutrements, but is that really a compelling tale for a two and a half hour film?

especially at the beginning I had a real whiff of forced-fun "you WILL find this protagonist rakishly enjoyable" energy. shades of valerian, echoed in aggressively throwing the doomed koala co-pilot at us, hey, this guy's rushed delivery of generic lines will sure make you like him right? 80s action adventure cartoons do a better job of selling you on the lovable co-pilot type. but of course, as in rogue one, everything is just thrown at you at breakneck speed. the first terrible sign was the worm crime boss at the beginning, who zips up out of the water and starts speechifying in two and a half seconds. let this shit breathe... build up some dread, some suspense, something. that way han deflating it all with a bro-y fake-out plan would be a genuine payoff instead of just one more thing that happens on screen.

meanwhile the kira thing is a complete muddle; the preposterous scene where they meet up again never feels like his reunion with someone he's been striving for for three years, and they never find a convincing vibe to play after that. i loved how, apparently following the dictates of some screenwriter's manual of when in your running time you need to remind the audience of something they'll see again at the end, she hands him the dice right as he's about to be strip-searched, sanitized and tortured as an incoming mining slave. like literally the worst and most illogical time to do this from the characters' point of view, and from the audience's point of view it's outright confusing since you're forced to conclude these dice are going to be key to them carrying off the heist, like a file baked into a cake or something. otherwise why would she do that? well that goes nowhere.

this movie is full of stuff like that. like how woody is interrupted grieving for the love of his life and fiteen second later it's "ya got moxie, kid" as the camera pulls back so as to draw less attention to the freshly-dug grave. or how han notices that lando used a card that had already been played, which just prompts the audience to go "wait - wouldn't all these other seasoned card players notice that too?" or how han starts talking about his dad's old factory job halfway through, after our attention's already been drawn to him supposedly not having a name or a family. was there an earlier and more intelligible draft where he was also trying to get back to corellia to help them out and they died, hardening his heart? was keeping them safe one reason for him taking a pseudonym? and does the empire really use john williams's imperial march in-universe as their ominous soundtrack? what a piece of junk!

Was it the New Yorker review that said for a guy named for being a loner he's almost never given a moment to himself?

so if this movie was so bad at selling me on things, and such a muddle, and so emotionally nonsensical, and didn't have an arc, how come it was so much fun to watch??

he preposterous scene where they meet up again never feels like his reunion with someone he's been striving for for three years

this is intentional i think?? it's super off. it feels wrong. (hint: cause she's a baddie!)

from the audience's point of view it's outright confusing since you're forced to conclude these dice are going to be key to them carrying off the heist

i.. didn't think that. i just thought it was a nice touch. it made me like her. it feels thoughtful. she's a baddie but han's such a catch she's conflicted. movies like this are full of little emotional beats in the midst of craziness. i forgot about them 2 seconds afterwards and that was.. fine? i guess 30 minutes later you were flipping through the script like WHAT ABOUT THE DICE?

co-pilot was kinda half-assed it's true i agree about that

DC yr long screeds are very extremely inside-the-writers-room scoffing at how poor a job these craftspeople crafted their object i.e. you talk about "the audience" instead of "i" and i wonder if you would have liked it better if you watched weren't thinking so much about arcs and stuff

sorry that might read better in the original shriiwook

lol i will also grant that they maybe should showed a little of han becoming an awesome pilot because when han fires up the falcon to get out of the mining planet my 9-y-o is like "how does he know how to fly that??"

also i dug the passport control scene. i could relate.

This was pretty much hot garbage, c'mon.

Dr. C otm with 'shades of Valerian" --- yikes! I was thinking more "Baby Driver" and was waiting for a quick closeup of his finger pressing some button on the dashboard > "cool intergalactic approximation of current (2017) hip hop/ trap tune comes on" >> YEEEAH! from our hero.

THIS IS THE SONG NEEDLES DIED TO

"getcher motor runnin..."

i enjoy your posts on this DR C, don't get me wrong. i learn a lot about the nuts and bolts of how stories fit together. but it's funny that it doesn't change my feeling about the movie i just came out of. like i can SEE how you're mainly right, and how it could have been better any number of ways. that initial pool-monster who's allergic to light - yes it would have been great if there had been some dread in watching it come out of the pool! and i can see how it probably would have made han's escape more exciting! but it didn't happen, and i guess the difference between you and i is that in real-time i didn't miss it, didn't think that i wanted it to do something else, be something else. i'll admit i "sign myself up" to movies a lot more and a lot earlier than a lot of other people. also maybe low expectations helped.

i feel the same way

there was something a little bit John Carter of Mars about it too. Basic space adventure, no more no less but I didn’t really *need* more.

believe me, I want to have a fun time at the movies! there were these bits and pieces where I could relax into the fun, was just caught up in the energy and momentum. the analysis comes after as an attempt to explain "why didn't i, in fact, have all that much fun?" there were a lot of really jarring and distracting things that took me out of the moment. again: we've been watching this is-she-good-or-bad-and-why-is-she-holding-back-from-han story the whole movie, and the resolution of it is.... she's working for a hologram of a guy who's never been mentioned before and i was like wait is that darth maul or like his kid? could it be darth maul? isn't he dead? could this take place before the phantom menace? no wait of course it couldn't because we already have the empire. is it someone else entirely? ... etc.... i mean this is a weird place to land in a good-time thrill-ride adventure movie.

of course the energy between her and han is supposed to be weird, but it didn't feel like *that* kind of weird, it felt like they were just forgetting to talk about things or when they do they get forgotten. "i've done terrible things" and then her next scene is a comedy beat looking at lando's capes. i couldn't get a bead on any of it, idk.

she was a v frustrating cipher but i thought that worked. that's who she was to han and it's who she was to us. she wasn't working for darth maul, paul bettany was (i refuse to learn these people's ridiculous names). once she had bettany's ring she could skype straight into maul. i could use some of those auto-shades for my own skype calls tbh. obviously bettany's working for someone even more powerful who appears as a flickery blue hologram, that's how all star wars baddies have always operated. anyway maybe i'm wrong but she actually throws maul off han's scent at that point, doesn't she? she says woody has the fuel. but she knows that han's going after woody. and at this point she's got a pretty good idea of how resourceful and bad-ass han is, so she's pretty sure woody's not getting off this rock alive. so by telling maul that woody's got the goods, han and chewie are home free.

maul looked like he'd... filled out a little since er, dying in the prequels. hmm.

oh and i'm just gonna say it, a phrase that we maybe thought we'd never hear.....

han/chewie shower scene