Solo: A Star Wars Story

In HD!

Edited by Tuckerscreator on Sep 10th 2018 at 12:24:07 PM

Deleted scene from Solo of Han in the Imperial Navy.

Another, from the chase on Corellia, in which it had to be snakes.

Edited by Tuckerscreator on Sep 13th 2018 at 10:22:41 AM

In the navy!
You can fly to outer space!
In the navy!
And shoot the rebels in the face!
In the navy!
Come on, imperials, make a stand!
In the navy! In the navy!
And oppress your fellow man!

Fun scene, though I can see why they changed it. Mimban already shows him as a maverick in the face of Imperial control. Plus, the scene makes Han look way more incompetent than he really should.

This is significantly less important, I suppose, but the first thing I thought of also was how in Lost Stars is was established that the Empire does appreciate a degree of maverick behavior if it produces results within acceptable parameters. So Han must've really screwed up (and, I mean, crashing a fighter inside a hangar is pretty bad ).

Indeed. I recall once pointing out that Han is depicted in Solo as oddly "genetically endowed" as the best at flying, rather than actually learning his skills along the way. I wondered if an Imperial Navy scene might've mitigated that, but this one doesn't really since he's basically portrayed the same pilot as ever.

I really do like this movies take on Solo and I'm glad to see a little more of it.

Han's ability as a pilot is weird. I can't decide if he's a guy with bad ideas and great luck, or a guy with great ideas but bad luck.

According to the writer of Solo, Thandie Newton was "too good" for the movie.

To be more specific, writer Jonathan Kasdan made multiple twitter posts with pictures of 53 points regarding both the production of the movie and how it eventually turned out. One of which commenting on Thandie Newton being a Dead Star Walking.

I'm mostly fascinated in that this is the first time anyone has pointed out which scenes were specifically Lord and Miller in origin, he refers to them as C&P, which took me a minute to figure out. This includes Chewbacca's introduction and Han speaking in Chewie's language to get him to calm down, Lando's closet filled with capes (which was meant to call back to a similar scene with Han and Leia in TESB) and the speeder chase on Corellia (which seemed to be at least partially reshot with Ron Howard).

For me it is mostly fun to see the writing process and he gives an interesting look into a lot of things that evolved over time, added or deleted. For people saying Maul was tacked on at the end, he points out the NAME Crimson Dawn, items in the trophy room and the Teras Kasi reference was intended as a foreshadow. The flying fortress was originally a castle. They also really wanted more of Han as an Imperial Pilot, but felt the story didn't really get started until Han and Chewie meet up.

People are saying Maul was tacked on? Really? I mean... maybe if you don't know anything about Legends or the new EU, it can be a surprise, but even if all that goes over your head it was emphasized over and over that while Q'ra is scared of Dryden, she is absolutely terrified of the man above him.

And if you are familiar with both Legends and the new EU, on a rewatch there's a lot of absolutely blatant foreshadowing. Q'ra knowing a martial art that Maul is most famous for springs to mind.

I even saw it coming!

There's a new in-universe book, Tales from Vandor, out by continuity guru and reference book god Jason Fry, and with it we've got some juicy recanonizations: Shadows of the Empire's protagonist Dash Rendar, Han's droid buddy Bollux from his '80s novel trilogy, and Lando's trilogy is mentioned as a story he tells people, but nobody really believes him.

I think the big problem with the story is it moves too fast. We don't get to know characters well before they're dead.

Yeah, Rogue One had that same problem.

A number of people felt that Mauls appearance was Continuity Lockout and detrimental to the story for that reason, Mauls survival from TPM is known by fans of the shows but casual viewers were understandably confused. Kasdan was making the point that Maul was not tacked on for shock value but a natural continuation of the stories from the series and was deliberately woven into the story that way.

^ It has been an issue with a lot of blockbusters, including the modern Star Wars movies. To be an Epic is to include a lot of locations, but if it's not clear on how the location contributes to the story then they all start to blend together meaninglessly. Characters decide on the next location because the plot demands it, rather than choosing the best option to acconplish their goal.

ROTS has the most planet jumping of all the movies (Order 66 shows at least 6 different planets), but it fit within the story of a war winding down. TPM only visits three planets, but some felt that Tatooines introduction was rushed, leaving it unclear why the characters stopped there. TLJ is also rather sparse on the locations, but Canto Bight was so poorly justified it was a drag on the plot.

And Canto Blight probably could have been cut infavor of just sending Finn and Rose onto the First Order Ship and establish that location earlier.

Its also a matter of timing. Phantom Menace and Revenge of the Sith and those movies have a longer period of time that they take place during like over a period of a week or even months. TLJ takes place within a very specific period of time that is fairly short. So having less locations is better for the plot.

Canto Blight didn't feel like it worked because the Rebellion Ship Plot has a tension placed on 'We can't escape and leave while the First Order ship is about to run us down', but Finn and Rose can jump ship, go to another planet, come back, and sneak onto the First Order ship within a matter of hours.

It doesn't... mesh well. I think the themes they were trying to build in Canto Blight and through Rose could have been built up on the First Order.

Themes built on Canto Bight: persistence of oppressive systems through war profiteers, responsibility to remain fighting for good regardless of flaws in both sides, children as hope for a new future, inability to break the system in a day, virtue in upstaging it even for just a day.

I don't see how all those would've been fit crammed into the Supremacy fight. The ending of the film would not be the same.

It's foreshadowing for how Holdo's plan also relies on smaller ships sliding under the radar.

Edited by Tuckerscreator on Sep 17th 2018 at 8:27:22 AM

Canto Bight as a concept feeds into the apparent theme of the Sequel Trilogy of these battles continuing on and on while nothing changes, and the universe stagnates all the while. The whole idea that people are taking advantage of the endless conflict and feeding off of it for the detriment of the galaxy is possibly the strongest thing TLJ built on top of TFA's foundation (that movie having started the theme with Maz), and while that whole sequence could absolutely use a rework or some kind to make it more relevant to the rest of the story (it is, as it stands, admittedly a diamond amid padding), outright cutting it is the worst path that "fix" could take.

TBH, if the sequel trilogy had less "the Empire vs the Rebellion again" and instead put more effort into that kind of worldbuilding (rather than just throwing it in there), it would probably be a lot better off.

Edited by KnownUnknown on Sep 17th 2018 at 8:39:29 AM

The premises and themes behind Canto Bight are fine, but it broke the Closed Circle to even have this adventure. Obviously removing Canto Bight and focusing on an infiltration of the Supremacy would require massive script changes, but that is all part of story development. Did you know that Syndrome wasn't the original villain for The Incredibles. He was a Starter Villian for the Cold Open, but everyone gravitated towards him more than the intended villain, who was behind the Super Registration Act.

Edited by KJMackley on Sep 17th 2018 at 8:52:24 AM

Star Wars, to be fair, has never been a series that likes a Closed Circle. It's an adventure series, and will always want its characters to leave where they are, break from chains and explore new horizons on the remotest edges of the galaxy before they can go home, rather than the opposite.

The problem is that either Rian Johnson isn't great at approaching that kind of story, or he isn't great at balancing the adventure element with the grounding dramatic element - either way, the attempt to do so resulted in both being diminished. There's also the quickly-becoming-standard problem with the current set of Star Wars movies in that there's an obvious attempt to repeatedly throw in X series tropes even if it doesn't make an awful lot of sense - often not even making effort to work them into the plot regardless.

Wrong thread?

Edited by KnownUnknown on Sep 17th 2018 at 9:02:32 AM

An issue is that while they want the directors to have complete freedom, it comes at a price of giving them only one movie, so they are throwing everything they can at it, hoping something will stick. Johnson and company couldn't decide on which storyline to follow, so they put in everything even if it didn't make sense. I think the same thing happened with TFA, where Abrams included all the old Star Wars references (droid with valuable intel, planet killer weapon, trench run) because he was a kid in the sandbox reenacting his favorite movie bits and wasn't sure he would get the opportunity to do another one at the time (the same things are evident in his Star Trek movies).

And a Closed Circle is not really at odds with world building, if anything it enhances it. Seeing more of Ahch To architecture, the inner workings of the Supremacy and Raddus, complex space battle chess games and the hard-metal environment of Crait wouldn't exactly feel like a bunch of close-ups of people in a single room. I didn't find the world building of Canto Bight all that compelling anyway, which is why I find it less than useful.

^ It's an example of how stories change over their development, as Brad Bird's original idea evolved to fit a new narrative altogether. Some would say the original villain was vital to making the Super Registration Act plot work, when it turned out to be the less interesting path. I'm saying the same thing about Canto Bight. Every storyteller needs to be ready to eliminate their favorite scene.

Edited by KJMackley on Sep 17th 2018 at 9:21:36 AM

The question of whether films go through changes in development and whether any specific film should and why or why not, regardless of conclusion, are two very different conversations.

Just because one story changed significantly partway in development doesn't mean every single one must. Every film goes through significant changes in development. Some more than others, some for different reasons than others.

Simply pointing that out doesn't really change anything. For all we know, TLJ could have gone through major changes in development itself. Heck, the reasoning and circumstances behind the change to Syndrome are so distinct from what we're talking about that I'd even go as far as to say it's irrelevant - which is why I assumed you posted it in the wrong thread.

I didn't say it was. I said, genre and narrative wise, the Star Was films don't typically go for that trope and instead favors other kinds of stories.

A Closed Circle - the characters staying in one situation and trying to figure out how to fight or think their way out - is something you might see out of Star Trek, which is often built on that kind of isolation and singular enviromnent. Star Wars, with its basis in pulp adventure and (arguably) folkloric fantasy, tends to be more mobile conceptually. It's more the type to have other characters stuck in a situation and base the plot on how the main characters will get to them in the first place. While Star Wars films have had Closed Circles in the past, they tend to be minor and more used to punctuate larger adventures.

Edited by KnownUnknown on Sep 17th 2018 at 10:48:30 AM

Also the "closed circle" idea doesn't HAVE to mean the end of everything. The conflicts in the PT, OT, and Solo for example are pretty different from each other, yet still feel natural and justify the "Star WARS" name.

So the ST didn't HAVE to do the "Empire vs. Rebellion/OT conflict" all over again to justify it either. They just needed to come up with their own new/different type of conflict that was interesting in it's own right. I mean Legends managed to do it after all.

I'm accusing Canto Bight of being a first draft idea that should have been weeded out as the story went down a different direction. This is not an isolated thing but happens to the vast majority of stories, and I pointed out a beloved film that had to go in a direction opposite of the directors first instincts.

The movie doesn't really use Closed Circle in the trope sense (it's a Stern Chase, making is so the location is theoretically changing constantly), but what I'm discussing is an extension of a much greater storytelling principle, often referred to as the Unity of Space or Continuity of Place, maybe others. The basic idea is that you don't change locations for the sake of changing location, the longer you develop the setting your characters are in the stronger the narrative will be. You can have one location or a dozen, so long as the end goal is clear that with every location change you are maintaining the unity of space.

In TLJ the ease with how characters change locations cripples the core conflict, because the core conflict is "We are being hunted down and can't escape." This narrative flaw hinges on Canto Bight, as in every respect it's a divergence from the main conflict (even accounting for the technobabble reasons for going there, the entire plotline implodes and does nothing to resolve the problem) which is why I see it as such a waste of time.

And that's a huge assumption. It's just as possible that it was a later draft decision that was added to the initial first draft ideas.

As for the example, again, whether it should have been weeded out and whether it could have been weeded out are two completely different things. A director being willing to completely change their story doesn't, inherently, make that director better at making movines, especially when the reasons for changing said story vary dramatically from example to example.

It's not a huge assumption to say that this happens all the time. I would say it's a bigger assumption to claim it was someone elses idea or that Canto Bight came as a natural extension of the main story. TLJ has all the same hallmarks of movies like Transformers, Pirates of the Caribbean movies, Amazing Spider Man 2 in that there are too many plotlines that don't progress the story and too many ideas that don't have any resolution. So when people said that Rian Johnson had full control I sincerely doubt that, or at least he made a lot of compromises to maintain the belief that he did have full control.

The assumption you made wasn't that the movie was changed in mid-development. It was supposing the very specific idea that Canto Bight was an early relic that was never erased, then treating it as fact. There's little evidence to suggest that that, specifically, was the creative process that went into its existence.

It doesn't become likely that what you assume was true just because there isn't evidence that it's not.

My point is that both are complete guesses. It's just as likely that it was part of the natural development process as it was a remnant of an earlier idea, but most likely of all that neither of us will ever be able to claim it was either.

Edited by KnownUnknown on Sep 18th 2018 at 12:13:29 PM