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

Are we not spoilering until Monday or so?

I spoilers a little, make a big “spoilers be here, matey” pirate banner and have at it

I'll sneak in my completely uninteresting, non-spoiler reaction: this was a fun movie, but Alden Ehrenreich doesn't seem very much like the Harrison Ford's Han Solo, nor like a guy who would become that Han Solo.

Also, I realized afterward that Ehrenreich previously played Hobie Doyle, the singing cowboy in the Coen Brothers' Hail Caesar! I think that was the role he was born to play (and I don't mean that as a diss, he was great in that movie).

I thought the actors were fine. The pansexual Lando plot felt a little forced but it doesn't sink the movie. My only real gripe was that the movie looks exceptionally dark. Its visual palette is undynamic and the dark colours don't work well with 3D effects. Also, it was slightly out of focus in the movie theatre I saw it in, but I guess I can't blame the movie for that. But I got a slight headache from watching it.

"Howard, you've done it again!"

Enjoyed this, didn't find the reference box-ticking as groan-inducing as I feared - my biggest gripe being the wasting of Thandie plus L3 was great and deserved at least as much time as K2 got in Rogue One (maybe she did but felt underused to me).

Ehrenreich first appeared almost a decade ago in Coppola's Tetro and impressed the hell out of me. He also survived that Warren Beatty film.

saw this, found it completely enjoyable. assuming q'ira (sp?) and ... her contact will show up again later maybe in another anthology movie?

curious what this film was like before they pulled ron howard in.

http://www.denofgeek.com/uk/movies/star-wars/57999/star-wars-boba-fett-movie-coming-from-james-mangold

― groovypanda, 25. maj 2018 13:34 (two days ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

That is some tiresome bullshit. Can we please not?

― El Tomboto, 25. maj 2018 13:37 (two days ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

Don't worry, Mangold will inevitably be replaced by Ron Howard or JJ Abrams.

Enjoyable in parts - mainly the train heist and lots of Chewie - but AE didn't once register as Han for me. DG, on the other hand, ran with the Lando role. Thought the L3 stuff shoehorned in ("Give me some space" - c'mon ) and tonally the entire thing jumped from feelink like a part of the Star Wars 'verse and other times like they ran out of visual/character ideas and went bland on purpose (Bettany's bad guy just really boring down to the character's look).

I really enjoyed the nostalgic/high adventure style of this.
When he and Kira get split up there’s a loose Ellis Island feel to the staging. And. Han’s war-time experience gives a light nod to an earlier style of warfare, fighting-in-place WW1 tactics (trench warfare etc).
That sense of time & place the makes it perfect that his first job is a train heist. Of course! I got a kick out of that, it just all felt right.
Vos’s ship’s deco vibe with the sleek streamlined interiors & round windows, etc, and the jazz party scene gives a sense of that with the all of the long gowns, satins & furs & metallics etc.

It’s not *specifically* that period, obv much more muddied than i’m making out - maybe they were going for mcm rather than 20’s but it just felt visually they were def going for a much more nostalgic look & that fit with the lighter tone of the whole movie for me.

Loved Glover, obv. And, I thought Alden wotsisname did a great job as Solo overall. It took me a little to warm up but he won me over. He’s not as gobsmackingly handsome or as charming as Ford but he inhabits all that behaviour really well to give the same feeling overall somehow? idk.

Thought this was bad. Actors were all fine but the story just blew goats

is this han as much of a wheedly, bitter, sarcastic man-child as Real Han was?

he has more optimism

hi. does this movie have nar shaddaa

xxpost With added vocal fry

Several stray thoughts while I wait for everyone to get on my level:

back when this was first announced Kennedy (I believe) made some comment about how we would find out how 'Han Solo got his name'. Me, a wise man, said 'ah yes a wonderful turn of phrase!' and the rest of the people on the internet, foolish people, were like 'HIS NAME ISN'T HAN SOLO?' and Kennedy had to be like 'NO! Not literally! It means how he became the Han Solo, renowned scoundrel, not how he became named Han Solo.'

Then, fifteen minutes into this movie "You name shall be Solo."

Also the goddamn golden idol from Raiders in the background of Paul Bettany's lair.

Also the goddamn gun assembly scene.

Also we don't see this hotshot pilot even fly until the second hour. We cut all the way out of him washing out of Imperial Flight School.

Suppose what people say is true and that Howard re-shot 80% of the movie. That means 20% of the movie is still the other dudes' work. If those numbers are right then anyone who says they can't tell which parts RH shot and which parts the other dudes shot are in denial, or fooling themselves, and, frankly, I would have rather watched THAT movie

Chewbacca was MVP in this

Don't worry, Mangold will inevitably be replaced by Ron Howard or JJ Abrams.

Nah, Mangold plays well with studios.

unlike fierce indie auteurs Lord & Miller

...anyone who says they can't tell which parts RH shot and which parts the other dudes shot are in denial, or fooling themselves

There's at least a third possibility, which is that some people aren't familiar enough with the work of Howard and/or Lord & Miller to be able to distinguish them that way. That describes me, and probably 90+ percent of this movie's audience.

Which parts do you think were left over from the Lord & Miller version?

@sic, there are degrees between indie auteurs and completely malleable studio lapdogs.

there’s also a fourth option which is stanning for whoever got fired as the preferred director

(i’m not saying you guys do it every time this happens but you do it every time this happens)

I mean, one of them is Ron Howard, so.

Also, I think even people who are suspicious of JJ breathed a sigh of relief when Trevorrow got the sack.

Basically all the funny parts/parts that were remotely interesting

hated this so much. deeply lazy, almost completely charmless (DG and Chewie keep it afloat). More Jack Burton than Han Solo. And I love Jack Burton, but come on.

"Also the goddamn golden idol from Raiders in the background of Paul Bettany's lair."

didn't catch that at all.

the accidentally starting of a droid uprising, followed by the droids facilitating a slave labor uprising, was surprisingly slim on exposition but a nice set piece.

(i’m not saying you guys do it every time this happens but you do it every time this happens)

VegemorbsGrrl

Also the goddamn golden idol from Raiders in the background of Paul Bettany's lair.

A crystal skull of sorts too, which had everyone cheering on sight because of the unanimous love and admiration for Indy IV.

there's another theory that the crystal skull is a ref to the old canon novels

"More Jack Burton than Han Solo."

I fail to see how this is remotely an insult.

I thought this was pretty entertaining with basically few of the ponderous bits which have made other Star Wars a bit of a chore (it probably went a ten or so minutes too long, too many double-crosses, too much exposition, etc, and I could have done wo the big CRIMINALS are actually EVIL reveal, but really these are minor complaints in grand scheme of big budget films like this).

For those complaining it's entirely workman-like, I don't think The Last Jedi was a couple of stunning visuals aside really that much better for having an artier director.

it's not an insult. in a different movie it might even have been fun.

More I think about it the biggest flaw in this thing wasn't Ron Howard as director or too much kowtowing to fanboy wishes or a bunch of other things that made this a "just okay" Sw flick. It's Ehrenreich. He wasn't the right choice to embody this role, poor guy, and it shows. Han Solo shouldn't be a bland dude around which the other characters revolve. I think it would've been cool if they'd gone with him having all the arrogant charm etc. etc. cranked to 1000 and then, over the course of things, having him tune it down to more familiar levels. But Ehrenreich seems to only be able to make weird approximations of Ford's facial expressions and mannerisms and when he isn't doing that he barely registers onscreen.

Not bad - for me the worst part of the film was Kira just happening to appear on one of the billion planets in the galaxy where Solo happens to be.

Suspension of disbelief is one thing, but I get properly removed from the film with stuff like that. They don't even go crazy with like "oh my god, I can't believe it's you here, what are the bloody odds?".

Oh right enough - Solo "never tell me the odds"

This was fun fluff

Makes me _really_ want to see the stuff Lord & Miller shot

"Han Solo shouldn't be a bland dude around which the other characters revolve. I think it would've been cool if they'd gone with him having all the arrogant charm etc. etc. cranked to 1000 and then, over the course of things, having him tune it down to more familiar levels. "

see i think the script just doesnt give him (Han or Ehrenreich) anything to do. the story itself is so weak and the character so thinly written that no one has anything to hang on to.

Haven't seen this yet and most likely won't, but I read an interesting discussion of it in the WaPo:

https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/act-four/wp/2018/05/28/if-you-grew-up-on-star-wars-how-does-solo-hold-up/

Also in the WaPo:

NEVER TELL Han Solo the odds. And, given the woeful opening of “Solo: A Star Wars Story,” Han might have a bad feeling about a few other less-than-stellar numbers, too.

“Solo” defied weeks of industry projections by landing below even conservative estimates, which had the first Skywalker-free Star Wars feature film opening in the ballpark of $130 million for the Memorial Day weekend.

Disney/Lucasfilm’s “Solo” instead had a $103 million domestic debut for the four-day holiday and grossed $84.8 million for the standard three-day weekend — or barely one-third of what Disney’s first Star Wars reboot, “The Force Awakens,” opened to ($248 million) less than three years ago.

Noted in the piece:

“Solo” is the first Disney Star Wars film not to open during the winter holidays and the first to open just five months after the previous Star Wars film.

Bad press, bad movie, word travels fast? I think it has very little to do with the timing or spacing of the opening weekend

The discussion of Revenge of the Sith in that piece gets at something that has really bugged me with the reception of Solo: There are SOOOO many blockbuster franchises, and they're SOOOO formulaic, but instead of criticizing the model it has led people to praise the most minuscule of differences. So Revenge of the Sith is sorta good because the violence is pretty frightening for a blockbuster. Solo is kinda ok because it's the first Star War in a while that doesn't end with a large space battle. Etc, etc. It's kinda different for a Star Wars film. But that doesn't matter, it just means it's not what people love about Star Wars, while also not being THAT different.

Sorry, rant. But it has been annoying me these last few days.

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