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

"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

naw I understood the contents of her call with darth maul, my point is that darth maul showing up is the absolute weirdest possible way to resolve her story with han. but of course it's not intended to, it's setup for a sequel, which to me feels like a ripoff after a 2+ hour movie. again, ymmv!

hahaha that occurred to be during the film and I forgot

I feel like, if they didn’t immediately do a blu-ray/digital rerelease of the animated shows explaining Maul’s continued existence following this movie, they’ve failed in marketing

DC you’re overthinking it: she wasn’t obligated to the cartel or enslaved as we thought, she had a soft spot for Han but was ladder climbing the entire time. Having secured her spot, she left his somewhat idealistic (although he thinks he’s just an individualist) ass behind

Fatty Maul wtf

"han/chewie shower scene"

So irony to this is that I jokingly told a couple of people that I was planning to take my 7.5 yo to see this in the theater unless I heard on Common Sense Media that it's 90% titties and Wookie dick so this scene make me chuckle a little bit.

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

Even in universe it's been like 20 some odd years. Plus he's got no legs...

true, now i feel bad

sorry darth maul if you're reading this

mh i think i agree with you but the crimson dawn tattoo/brand on her wrist does seem to suggest some level of compulsion

yeah, it's not a 100% clear situation

movie criminal cartel stuff seldom is, tbh

the nature of how she ends up with crimson dawn is nebulous and almost more troubling for the lack of exposition, imo

either she talked her way in or was trafficked, but both have some serious implications a family franchise might not tackle

She double crossed woody, Bettany, and solo so why not chubs maul too?

not especially a dude you double-cross

can only think of one big one who pulled it off

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??

because you watched it with children?

just giggled/snorted my drink irl at "sorry darth maul if you're reading this"

they need a movie to show how he went from darth, to just maul, and now to.. don maul

somehow he’s tracked down that guy with the schnozz and wings from Episode I to be his consigliere

i look forward to the spinoff movie explaining how watto got his sad-sack hat in between eps 1 and 2

Darth Maul origin film planned for 2024. How’d he get those horns anyway?

Also wtf at wicket the fucking Ewok???

Apparently he played the same character he cameo'd as in the prequels. I was happy to see him! He was in Last Jedi also

all zabrak have those horns