star wars prequels: most embarrassing and hacky attempt at fan-service and plot resolution

lol, i stll haven't seen solo but that's my fault for reading this thread. sounds like a hell of an adventure!

Some other people show up, but possibly not long enough for them to justify their own spinoff comic books

oops, sorry karl!

haven't seen Solo but am surprised they didn't put Jabba in there. i guess you have to leave some toys in the bottom of the bucket for Solo 2

it was cutesy, and stupid - "i hear there's this guy on tattooine, pays good money, looking to put together a team for a job..." kinda thing. which i hate because it implies that following this film, han began working for jabba and stayed in his employ up through shortly before ANH, when he dumps his cargo... whereas he's a lot cooler as a freelancer who's worked for all kinds of scummy characters.

Like Scummy Scumbagano?

Solo 2: The Death Stick Prerogative

Nothing in Solo suggests that Han & Chewie were in Jabba's employ up until Star Wars. It's only mentioned a crime boss on Tatooine pays well, they could've completed that gig and continued as freelancers, working for Jabba every now and then. Certainly the OG trilogy implies Han and Chewie have a long history with Jabba (even moreso if you count the cut scene that was added to the Special Edition of the first movie).

sure, just given all the other tie-a-bow on it stuff, it really feels like, okay, han's life story is complete now except jabba, well we'll be cute and withhold that one but tell you he's heading straight there now... and once he gets there he's pretty much complete. (obviously his personality is entirely different from the guy in ANH but the film gives me no sense that its creators were aware of that.)

Surely the betrayals of Emilia Clarke's and Woody Harrelson's characters are supposed to be read as first steps on him becoming the cynical smuggler he is in ANH, as opposed to the fairly idealistic guy seen in Solo?

One might think

oops, sorry karl!

haha, oh no problem! tbh everything you mentioned i kind of assumed would be in a new disney han solo film, which is why i find the new ones to be satisfying in the moment but then i immediately forget about them afterward

the problem - and i basically said this in the solo thread so sorry for the rehash - is that it's AFTER at least one and maybe both (can't remember) of these two betrayals have been exposed that han does his most idealistic/altruistic deed in the film, presumably because someone thought that made for a happier ending. he finishes *less* like ANH solo than he starts. so at best they made a tedious, accoutrement-by-accoutrement origin story that ends still in need ("need") of another origin story. they shouldn't have made any origin stories for this character, but why do one that obsessively ties all his bits of business into a dead corner of the filmic universe but still isn't an origin? it's so dumb.

ehh, I took it to mean he’d pick an underdog if they tugged his heartstrings. pretty in-character

getting a little more guarded over the next decade would make sense

Is Han busting Chewbacca out of that pit this supposedly legendary "life debt" that makes him stick around forever or is that something for the next movie?

pretty sure that was it. it doesn't take much in star wars, cf. jar jar binks.

I took it to mean he’d pick an underdog if they tugged his heartstrings. pretty in-character

yes this. Dr C do characters really have to follow an exactly motivated arc in order to not be "dumb"? I'm retroactively anticipating the criticism of han joining in the death Star battle in star wars. so out of character! where did THAT come from? the audience hasn't been prepped etc

someone repeatedly making the same mistakes, learning from them, and then forgetting or ignoring the lessons seems at least as if not more human than "...and that is how i became the man i am today."

if it worked for you that's cool! for me the han movie felt like an embarrassing and hacky attempt at a fan-service cash grab so this character arc thing feels like a calculation that they bungled because they didn't understand or watch their own movie(s). not unprecedented in star wars prequels ("and he was a good friend"), and here we had a character who already went through an arc in the original star wars (and yes, a satisfying one) so shoehorning in another one was always going to be silly; i was far from the only person to predict that or to notice that the finished film fulfilled that prediction. ymmv!

it's almost as if you'd made up your mind beforehand

but yes i think that is what I'm saying, that my mileage is varying

"if this hacky, embarassing cash-grab resonated with you, that's cool i'm not judging"

haha sorry that's a fair response to my post. but really we've been over this on the solo thread: both of us walked in wanting to have a good time (in my case with a strong "in spite of what i feared likely" kind of thing, but still). the movie proved for me to be a hacky embarrassing cash grab, and for you to be a good fun time with your family. that probably colors how each of us responds to praise and criticism of any of its individual elements, like character arcs.

definitely. still.. just thinkin.. wouldn't it have been way more fan-service-y to end this movie on some sort of "and that's how he became bitter" beat? exactly the sort of loose-end-tying you decry elsewhere?

can't remember if i said so on the other thread but as the lights were coming up my 9-y-o said "dad i thought you said this wasn't going to be that good"

and i was like, i seriously thought it wasn't going to be!

i get where you're coming from but...idk. is fan service quite the right word for that? that's sort of "doing a competent origin story." all prequels are inherently fanservice of course. but clearly we can identify more or less satisfying attempts at the concept. what i wanted from solo, once they'd committed to making such a beast, was that they not make it an origin story - just have it be some caper centered around young han solo doing han solo stuff. maybe have it center on ONE of the things we already know about him (kessel run, or befriending chewbacca and lando) but not ALL of them. that could be a good, fun, afternoon's entertainment in the star wars universe. i guess. i also like the suggestion that's been made that it should have really been a lando movie (or more of an ensemble picture) since we know less about him and they have more room to do unexpected stuff.

but if it's gonna be not just a prequel but an origin story, and you're burning all this screen time to fill in the origins of all these other bits and pieces, but don't get around to the origin of the character we know as han solo, it feels to me more like you screwed up and didn't know what you were doing (consistent with a movie with a famously troubled production and two directors) than like you said "you know what, let's avoid the easy fanservicey thing, and leave this character in a totally weird, counterintuitive position! that'll shake things up!"

I thought this Solo was a reasonably fun adventure movie, but I also thought it went too far in the prequelly need to tick all possible boxes of an iconic character's past. What was especially pointless was Han learning the lesson to shoot first... It's like Indy's hat in The Last Crusade or Hal Jordan's jacket in Geoff Johns' Green Lantern: all these things already made perfect sense as part of how those characters were originally established, there was no need to come up with an actual origin story for them.

What did work, however, was setting the path for Han idealism turning into cynicism. The fact that he did still do a good deed after Tobias' betrayal isn't that big a deal; as Tobias himself pointed out, Han should've expected a man like him to betray them. But Qi'ra's betrayal must've cut deeper, because Han had idealised her in his head for all those years, and finding her was the reason that made him do all that shady stuff... And then it turned out she was not that different from Tobias after all. So that works perfectly well for me as the beginning of a character arc that's finalised in ANH.

(x-post)

So according to Warwick Davis his cameo character in Solo is the same person as his cameo character in The Phantom Menace. Apparently he gave up life as a professional gambler and became a freedom fighter.

https://i.imgur.com/2PhrbUH.png

https://pbs.twimg.com/media/DiKdRHwVQAEcVlE.jpg

and his sympathies for the rebel desert bikers is a nice seed to plant deep down, eventually flowering at the precise moment Darth Vader's special tie-fighter gets knocked into a spin

dr c maybe it makes more sense if you figure a couple more movies were slated in this set? i.e. it's an origin story, but only the first part of one

xpost nice!!

☐ The guy who stood next to Watto at the pod race later battles Darth Maul's crime syndicate, and participates in an attempt to recruit Han Solo to a proto-Rebellion

have to say i loved the open-ended vibe of Solo, felt like there was a lot more story to tell, a lot still to happen before Luke meets him in the cantina. even if it never reaches the screen. slightly LOTR in the way lots of other story is suggested but not told.

i wonder if i'd like the movie better if i'd never seen a star wars movie before and could genuinely see this guy's life opening out ahead into the unknown, filling it in with my imagination. i have to assume the answer is yes. like even valerian which was pretty much a garbage mess i was like "hey this is kind of a fun bit here," "ooh i like this alien" etc.

Hah, for me Valerian was pretty much the opposite, I was gringing every time they took elements and aliens from the comics which had provided me with genuine sense of wonder ever since I was a kid and dumbened them down to Hollywood sci-fi clichés.

yeah the comics look amazing.

maybe we can all agree that the best way to approach these movies is to watch them black-out drunk so that that every installment presents a fresh set of possibilities

It's kinda funny, with 5th Element Besson actually did a better job with bringing the sensibility of Valerian & Laureline comics on screen than with his actual official adaptation.

Surely the betrayals of Emilia Clarke's and Woody Harrelson's characters are supposed to be read as first steps on him becoming the cynical smuggler he is in ANH, as opposed to the fairly idealistic guy seen in Solo?

oof this sounds lame. he was great in SW because he was a random scumbag in a hive of scumbags who would rather shoot someone than argue with them. he was the cool outsider, he was this universe's rocker with a leather jacket smoking cigarettes. he helped Luke & pals because they personally went through shit together. by the end of they became a little family. that it was actually because he is secretly a rebel guy just like every other person in the universe is the most boring possible take.

xxp "What will happen next? No, I mean as regards my feet; I can't feel them"

I'm going full cynic now -- do we know how long Watto's species lives? he could totally be in the next movie

"Skywalker, Skywalker... *strokes chin* I owned -- I mean, knew -- a Skywalker once"

I hope in Solo 2 we see all the crazy stuff he’s seen while flying from one side of the galaxy to the other.