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

boy i hope darth maul shows up in any future solo movies so we can enjoy the kind of edge-of-the-seat tension which can only arise from the audience's absolute certainty that neither the protaognists nor the antagonists are in any real danger

lol but isn't this after the prequels? so maul could get offed at any time. but they're gonna need to do more than slice him in half and throw him down a well. which i hope maul tells them, hubristically, as wanders carelessly close to a molten river of lead

no, maul shows up in the clone wars tv series, which occurs after the events of solo, and meets his actual proper death there

xp Yeah, but he dies elsewhere - Kenobi kills him in Star Wars Rebels

Darth Maul is in Star Wars Rebels as well where he meets his PROPER proper death.

oh yeah, rebels is what mean rather than clone wars, thx fellow nerds

I wasn't sure what the high levels of skeeviness Maul was laying on were about.

I’ve heard Maul does in a different cartoon series, maybe after he kills Kenobi finally? I hear that guy is actually alive, escaped the jedi purge

I saw this. This was fine, better than expected really. Lots of things to dislike (drab color palette, clumsy inclusion of kessel run, kind of boring main villain) but mostly made up for by the good stuff (droid rights!, train heist, the cool looking rebels).

The whole thing felt a bit rushed and obviously was shot quickly (I'm thinking of the trench warfare scene in particular seen where all we see is a couple of guys at night shooting some guns) which makes me wonder if this would have been a much better movie if they'd have pushed back the release date 6 months or so (also Christmas is when people expect Star Wars movies at this point anyway).

the oddest thing about this movie is that if i had to rank ron howard movies this would probably be near the top even though i didn't like it very much

is that really that odd?

well, probably not tbh

apollo 13 remains great but you'd have to work pretty hard to fuck up that story imo

still scratching my head at young han solo, outspoken imperial mutineer over the rights of offscreen indigenous people. fine idea, especially for a movie that notionally should end with a once-idealistic young man turned cynical.... but totally dropped until the end bit with the masked rebels, since the empire aren't the bad guys in this movie. the idea is to weld this together by having the crime syndicate be the ones who colonized and exploited this refinery planet, thus giving han a moral choice to make: stick with the plan and give the monstrous villain the money (saving his own neck), or help the heroic rebels (risking his neck, and tanking his characterization in the original star wars). but the preceding two hours of film haven't been testing han's ethics or leading him to where he makes this decision, and the early scene with him mouthing off to his commanding officer comes off more like an adolescent rebellion, consistent with his mouthing off to Madame Millipede at the beginning. so it just comes out of nowhere and the decision isn't in doubt, making the whole rebel bit into padding.

whether the lead character is driven by his ethics or his ego seems like an important thing to have pinned down when writing a script. but of course, three-quarters of the film were reshot; i assume howard shot woke han, and lord-and-miller shot insouciant han.

either way, han shot first

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

What was weird about this scene is that it was shot as if seeing the face of this person was some sort of revelation. I was trying to figure out if this was some important character I'm supposed to recognize.

yeah that was really weird - having heard that darth maul was gonna appear in this i was half-expecting him to be under there when the helmet came off but it was... someone we'd never seen before

Yeah, I also thought she was Woody and Thandie's daughter.

I think the shock was supposed to be that she was a kid, or if we're going to really be uncharitable about how jaded the filmmakers are, a woman

it might have been shocking if she was like 11 but it just landed with a thud

maybe there were supposed to be scenes building up what a terrifying badass she was but tbh i spent most of her screen time trying to remember whether it was her and her gang who showed up to foil the train heist near the beginning

I'd poke fun at that but it's refreshing to hear after all the times I've missed something really obvious in a movie and everyone on ilx has been confused that I missed the plot

look this movie is 400 hours long and not exactly gripping, u can't expect me to remember every detail

i also thought it was supposed to be their kid. and then i got distracted trying to remember what her name was. they said it a lot but it always kind of slipped past. it's really a problem now that almost every character in these movies has a syllable-soup name. again I would not mind some by-the-books, obvious filmic moves here: a hologram file with last-known-photo, a list of planets they've robbed, and a big name caption at the bottom pops up, midway through bettany dressing down woody: "i'm deeply disappointed to hear you were swindled by ENFYS NEST once again!" instead it's just this swish of N and S sounds that gets said a few times in the movie but never really glues itself to that one masked marauder.

In a galaxy full of Nien Nunbs and such, how does someone end up with a name like Tobias Beckett? Was he teleported from Earth?

he’s from space-ireland iirc

i have no desire to ever see this, but since Han's "arc" in STAR WARS (that's what i call it) was clearly modeled on Rick in CASABLANCA and similar characters -- the cynic who eventually does the right thing -- it makes total sense that he would've had some youthful idealism, like Rick.

Was the marauder's mask removal supposed to be a call back (call forward?) to Leia's unmasking in ROTJ?

Morbs, not that you saw it (or did you?), but The Last Jedi had a Casablanca-in-space scene. War profiteers in a casino.

yes, I saw it. There was a traveling shot in that sequence directly modeled on one from Wings (1927).

lol Morbs totally otm. Feel like there's a lot of calls for everything to be spelled out here, from the same quarters that also deride the idea of these "adventures" side-movies that... spell everything out

Presumably there is plenty of time for Hand Rebooto to turn cynic in the next two movies eh? THEN WILL YOU BE HAPPY??!?

*Narrator* They won't be

there’s a difference between wanting things to be spelled out and being confused by poor storytelling tbf

I mean the general vibe I'm hearing is that storytelling-wise Han should by rights should be an embittered cynic at the end of this one, to connect up to the Han of Star Wars but that just seems too neat for its own sake, like if the Young Indy movie had a grad-school montage where a snake came out of the toilet and bit him on the nuts. I don't need it dramatized (unless there's a great story connected to it of course! which may be coming in Eps 2-3 of this swizz)

the snake thing is in the River Phoenix prologue in Last Crusade

(not nut biting)

if the Young Indy movie had a grad-school montage where a snake came out of the toilet and bit him on the nuts

that’s almost exactly what solo is, though - we see the origin of virtually everything we know about him played out onscreen: the kessel run! chewie! the falcon! lando! his blaster! it adds nothing and overexplains everything

I figure we're still 10 years or so before the original Star Wars at the end of this movie. Having Han already be exactly the same as in Star Wars at the end of this would be weird.

how quickly we forget The Young Indiana Jones Chronicles

Lol I forgot that the snake thing was explained in Young Indie

xpost to silverfish yeah that's all I mean, there's plenty of time for Han to get crusty

bizarro no I get that. But like.. the Chewie meet-cute was FUN. Lando was FUN. His blaster was.. OK that was kind of a dud but took up 10 seconds of screen time. It was all pretty fun to me! Why not tell those stories if they're going to be fun! Getting away from that monster in the maelstrom was fucking HORRIFYING. And I love the idea that L3 is somehow.. guiding Han through the asteroid belt in the OG series. That's got nothing to do with explaining any backstory but is nonetheless a cool addition to the whole thing

the important question is who will star in Young Fugitive

when did "meet-cute" become omnipresent in our culture and how the fuck can I delete it from my brain

1998 and watch all the episodes of friends backwards

I swear I only saw it a few times in my life until the last six months, at which point it has been in a zillion articles not just about comedy and romantic fiction, but about actual dating

there are some threads where I should take this, though

For some reason I thought "meet cute" was one of those Ebert-coined terms bu apparently it dates back to at least 1941: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Meet_cute

The real phrase that needs extermination is "story beats".

"worldbuilding". Destroy "worldbuilding".

Ah man working in tv you hear stuff like "story beats", "signposting" and myriad other dumb terms flung around endlessly. I blame Hollywood.

I have discovered who Dr. C is in real life. Some of her criticisms are pretty sharp! (This one also thought what's-her-face was Woody and Thandie's daughter.)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XP8FZ4cBzaI

(That whole taking off the helmet scene was basically this for the audience.)

http://i0.kym-cdn.com/photos/images/newsfeed/000/968/818/6b6.png

Solo now projected to be the first Star Wars movie to lose money!

#freelordandmiller

"meet cute" is a staple of screwball comedy, like the one where Jean Arthur gets dunked by a fur coat thrown out the window