Go ahead an insert the RonBurgandy.meme right here as this new Star Wars shit has escalated quickly.
Yesterday brought the absolute confirmation of something we pretty much already knew, in the form of the Disney head cheese confirming that singular character films were coming from the Star Wars universe, and that Lawrence Kasdan and Simon Kinsberg are working on them. Yoda has been the most rumored name so far, but today EW adds to that.
It would seem –if EWs rumors source from anywhere more legitimate than, say, their own assholes– that franchise favorites Han Solo and Boba Fett are up for solo adventures. Not only that, but these adventures would take place before and during the original trilogy- Solo’s film would likely be an origin of sorts, while the Boba Fett story would take place between OT films.
Guys, this shit is so so dangerous.
I actually have a fair amount of faith in new Lucasfilm shepherd Kathleen Kennedy, but surely Disney and co. have to see the danger in repeating the prequel’s mistakes. With a new trilogy you can blaze forward- hire good people, tell new stories, integrate older elements selectively and with an appropriate addition of age. The films looking and feeling different will be much easier to swallow. But plunging back into the film and optical-effects and plywood production design universe that Lucas oversaw… no good. This is all without even getting into the problems that come when you start rooting strands of dialogue and stories fixed in people’s imaginations into flesh and blood movies. Who the fuck really needs to see the Kessel Run or watch Garret Hedlund* win a CGI Millenium Falcon off Lando in a card game? Have Star Wars fans not been burned by this shit enough? Do these people need to be reminded of the Patton Oswalt routine just the one more time?
Star Wars is as built on feelings and textures and the eccentricities of its time as it is on stories and costumes- trying to add to that with movies that will look, smell, taste, and feel differently will be tough to make work, as evidenced by AN ENTIRE TRILOGY OF PREQUEL FILMS. Granted, the Boba Fett story would me much easier to pull off with a truly visionary and invested director behind it, but the Han Solo film sounds like a bad idea, top to bottom.
That’s what was so great about the Snyder samurai/jedi film that was bandied about and then shot down- it could take place anywhere in the timeline and be isolated.
Maybe it’s just me. I’m really not much of a diehard Star Wars fan. I don’t even really remember seeing the special editions in theaters, and yet I still feel I have some understanding of what makes the original trilogy a classic, the prequel trilogy a disaster, and the prospects of these solo films so dubious.
How do you feel about this chewers? What young actor could pull off a Han Solo in his early days? What director would be best suited for a bounty hunter story a long time ago, far far away? Joe Johnston claims to want the job, and he’s got some kind of dibs having designed the guy’s armor. But do we really want the guy who made the ugliest Marvel movie with the most clunky FX and thin filmmaking to tackle a classic Star Wars character?
Is it time to pull a Travolta at the end of Broken Arrow, to stand up, spread our arms and take what’s aimed at us?
*Admittedly, Hedlund would not be a bad choice, if you’ve seen his non-Tron work.
18 comments
”Star Wars is as built on feelings and textures and the eccentricities of its time as it is on stories and costumes- trying to add to that with movies that will look, smell, taste, and feel differently will be tough to make work, as evidenced by AN ENTIRE TRILOGY OF PREQUEL FILMS. ” yet the vast majority of video games managed to do it acceptably. i dont buy that its that hard.
So have novels, comic books, and toys. It’s different when it is a linear motion picture, claiming all the fanfare, formatting, and canonography of being A Star Wars Film. They’re going to look different, the costumes will be made differently, sets built differently- all with modern slickness and shaprness and detail. It’s unavoidable for a film made in 2014 or whatever. Video games actually have the luxury of sticking with all of the original design choices and textures more tightly, along with having the luxury of being in a different format There’s an insulating distance that comes with that.
I’d love to see a standalone film set in Jabba the Hutt’s corner of the SW universe. Just think THE GODFATHER with a giant slug monster substituting for Marlon Brando. (Don’t start with the wisecracks, Brando wasn’t a giant slug monster yet.)
But please, leave Han alone.
Fett could be ok because you could get Temeura Morrison to play him. That could be awesome (especially if you’ve seen Once Were Warriors). Yoda would have to be all CGI and that’s shit, but at least you still have Frank Oz. Han Solo is Harrison Ford and that’s that. It’s old Han or it’s no Han.
I’d watch a Tarantino Boba Fett flick all day.
I don’t want to see a Han Solo adventure that shows us a bunch of things about him I already know, but I wouldn’t mind seeing the character in an independent adventure with no ties to the OT. Maybe that’s because the Han Solo trilogy novels were favorites of mine as a kid. (The worst Han Solo film Idea – show what happened to him between Empire and RotJ. 2 hours of Carbonite block Han!)
I don’t get the whole “Boba Fett” thing though. Why is this a remotely interesting character? He speaks like 3 lines in the whole series. Who cares.
The only difference between this approach and the Marvel movies is that these jump back in time. I really don’t see a problem, unless they’re so obsessed with continuity tie-ins and Easter eggs that they forget to be fun.
And if they don’t try to be epic. A one off story of a random job of Han Solo’s that goes wrong or of Boba Fett hunting someone down could be fun.
That’s a bit like saying period films are impossible to make, which of course is not the case. How many films set in the Victorian-era look and have the feel of what we know as Victorian England?
People just need to care enough to make it work.
That makes no sense. Period films replicate an actual time and place, with more detail only serving to make the recreation more convincing.
Trying to replicate the feeling of a movie, which constructed a false reality from visual tricks is not the same. Even if you did sets and effects with exactly the same techniques, they would not look the same when captured with modern cameras, the images graded with modern sensibilities. There’s no chance the aesthetic of the original trilogy will be maintained, so anything attempting to play with those specific characters during those specific stories will stick out like a sore thumb.
Am I the only one thinking that this sounds like they’re taking potential story arcs from the (seemingly) aborted TV series and expanding them into movies instead?
And yeah…OT-set films starring main characters? Bad, bad idea. Fett you might be able to get away with, if you divorce it just enough from the events of the OT (Maybe tell the story of the “No Disintegrations” imperative from Vader…who am I kidding? Of COURSE they’ll show that…). A Vader cameo wouldn’t be sacrilege. Yoda might even be workable if it’s significantly PRE Prequels. But Solo? No way in heck that’s not going to be a disaster.
I would amend, it -might- be possible to make a decent CG-animated movie for Solo with Ford providing the voice work, but live action? Just don’t see it….
Unless of course it’s designed to pave the way for a remake of the Original Trilogy….
Maybe Han Solo could travel back in time and meet the rest of the original cast when they were all younger. Old Han’s actions would change the original timeline. Obi-Wan kills Vader. Luke turns to the dark side and swears to kill Obi-Wan for killing his dad. Then Kahn shows up and becomes the new Sith apprentice. The possibilities are endless….
But, the actual Victorian age no longer exists, it must be ‘recreated’.
Does anyone now, or ever, really fret over the vast aesthetic differences between the original Star Trek series and all the fims and TV series (with and without the original cast) that followed?
There are all ready clear aesthetic differences between A New Hope, Empire and ROTJ but they didn’t stop people believing it was the same story. Ep. IV looks far more like a 70’s film than ROTJ and is even grainier.
Most of the ‘false reality’ of OT Star Wars came from the ‘real’ sets and costumes.The aesthetic only jars when you have full CGI scenes butt-joined to scenes of actuality or when everything is shot against blue/green-screen preventing an audience from actually engaging with the action on-screen and the poor actors trying to act.
They don’t need to look exactly the same in film grain or FX, what they do require the same sentiment and attitude to design and character; very important qualities the prequels completely forgot. The prequels lost us as an audience, that’s really what the problem was.
Whether they shoot on film with the same grain texture is not really the issue and I think it’s a case of not seeing the wood for the trees. (It would be nice if they did shoot on film though).
Could we stop bashing Joe Johnston with bullshit criticism, please?
I thought the set design of the Prometheus interior did a good job of feeling like it belonged in the same universe as the Nostromo.
Same logic, no?
That entirely fair, and a great example of sort of matching technology while still advancing visuals, or at least bridging an aesthetic gap. The problem being that we’re talking about bridging relatively similar and limited environment- the insides of specific ships. In this case scale will make that a much tougher trick to pull off.
And that’s not to say it’s not possibly to do in a satisfying way, at all, in any universe. I’m just sadly confident that won’t be the case.
Opinions man, we’ve all got them. I’m not being an asshole- I genuinely think Captain America is a shit movie that squanders a lot of great elements, actors, and 1st act work. Most of the problems I see can be laid at Johnston’s feet, and they’re not hard to spot.
Oop. I correct myself. This guy could be young Han Solo. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bba_wPdLxp4&feature=share
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