:: I am officially in SQUEEE!!! mode for The Force Awakens. That’s all about that.
:: How about Star Wars: Rogue One? I’m more intrigued by this than SQUEEE!. I’m not really sure that this is a story that needs telling, but it might be interesting. I’m more on the fence about the idea of a gritty war movie in the Star Wars universe. The gritty. shades-of-gray type of space opera war story has already been done to perhaps canonical effect in the Battlestar Galactica reboot series. As always, the proof will be in the doing.
:: The newest news this week (‘newest news’ is a really bad turn of phrase, but I’m going with it) is that the next “Anthology” movie (which is what they are collectively calling the stand-alone, non-episode Star Wars movies) is a Han Solo movie. I’m guessing that this will be something of an origin story, showing us the young Han. This will be interesting stuff, to be sure; it’s clear in the original movies that Han has quite a history, and we didn’t learn much of it at all. This could be very interesting, indeed.
The real issue with the Han Solo movie will be tone. It seems to me that this one might need to be the most purely fun movie of the coming flood of Star Wars movies. I hope that we don’t get a story that posits some kind of traumatic childhood for Han, or that postulates some other kind of massive tragedy in his youth that leads to him being the cynical pirate he is when we meet him in A New Hope. The thing is, he’s not all that cynical; it really doesn’t take much to get him to stick around long enough to bail Luke out at the Battle of Yavin. Han’s cynicism is more selfishness than the defeated fatalism of Captain Malcolm Reynolds of Firefly.
In fact, I wouldn’t mind not having much of an “origin” story at all. Why not just have an early adventure of Han’s? We don’t necessarily need to see Han meet Chewbacca, either. All those story beats are really obvious, aren’t they? Not that I wouldn’t be happy seeing them, but I think it would be a blast to have the movie open with Han and Chewie already together, already having adventures, and maybe — in the very first scene, maybe the very first shot — Han plays the hand at cards that wins him a new ship. Maybe he doesn’t like the new ship very much at first.
I hope there’s a lot of the Millennium Falcon in the Han Solo movie.
:: Oh, and one more thing? The Han Solo movie must be titled Star Wars: Never Tell Me The Odds. This is not negotiable, Disney and Lucasfilm!
I also have some thoughts on the current run of Star Wars comics, but those deserve their own post.
It’s a fun time to be a Star Wars fan, innit?
I don't know… I'm pretty dubious about both Rogue One and the Solo movie. I fear that Disney/Lucasfilm is going to make the mistake of crossing every T and dotting every I. We really DON'T need everyone's origin stories, or to have every little gap filled in. Han Solo, especially, is the character I have very well developed in my mind and don't want messed with. I was really glad when the rumors of Young Han in Episode II or III (whichever it was) didn't pan out…
I agree to an extent. My "view" of Han Solo is also fairly calcified (or encased in carbonite!), but I'm willing to budge a bit, I suppose. But I don't want all the t's crossed, either, as I noted in the post. I'd really like the story to start with Han already being a pirate, as opposed to going back to showing us Han's childhood on Corellia and "Han being bitten by the spider", if you take my meaning. I like the idea of seeing some of the cool shit Han was doing before he met Luke and company, but not every bit of it.
Agreed. My all-time favorite tie-in novels are Brian Daley's Han Solo trilogy, which take place just before A New Hope. I think your idea of a movie beginning with him winning the Falcon is a good one (as usual… guys like us ought to be running this whole thing!), but I've got no interest at all in Han as a little kid or even a teenager. I don't want to learn he was an abused kid, or a little street urchin or whatever.