How 'Solo' Ruins One Of The Best Moments In 'Star Wars'
After its release, Solo got some well-deserved flak for how it spent a decent amount of its runtime unnecessarily explaining how popular elements of the Star Wars series came to be as opposed to, y'know, writing an engaging story. We learned how Han got the surname "Solo." (He wasn't born with it; he's a loner!). We learned what "parsecs" measure. (Distance, not time!) We learned why the Millennium Falcon's onboard computer was such an asshole to C-3PO that one time. (It houses the mind of an asshole droid!) We even learned where Han got his trademark blaster from, as if that's a thing anyone outside of Wookieepedia's editorial board cares about.
This clumsy approach to retroactively making the canon "make sense" is still continuing thanks to Jon Kasdan -- one of the writers of Solo -- releasing a cornucopia of factoids and notes about the movie on Twitter.
It's an interesting list to read if you liked Solo, but check out this early entry about how Han escapes from the clutches of the criminal overlord Lady Proxima:
"OF COURSE Han told Leia the story of how he and Qi'ra broke out of the Den of the White Worms and that's what gave Leia the idea to pull a real thermal detonator when disguised as the bounty hunter Boushh in Jabba's Palace in ROTJ."
If you don't have the original trilogy memorized, he's referring to the scene in Return Of The Jedi wherein a disguised Leia threatens Jabba the Hutt with a thermal detonator in order to force him into buying Chewbacca (it makes sense in context). It's a great scene, not only because it briefly turns the movie all Reservoir Dogs, but also because it demonstrates how much of a badass Leia is. It's an arc that starts with her saving Han and Luke in A New Hope ("Into the garbage chute, fly boy!"), graduates to her using her latent Force abilities to save Luke again in Empire Strikes Back, and culminates in her walking into the hideout of the universe's biggest crime lord and threatening to blow his ass to kingdom come if he doesn't do what she says.
But oh wait, it turns out she got the idea from her space beau all along, not from the depths of her crazy guerrilla warfare mindset -- an explanation that makes even less sense when you consider that A) there's no way the writers of Solo weren't influenced by this scene (grandfatherparadoxwhat), and B) it's trying to lite-trademark the idea of using bombs to threaten people into doing things. We can't wait for Solo 2, in which a childhood flashback reveals that Han invented the concept of gunfire.
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