Peter Fenzel, Mark Lee, and Matthew Wrather overthink Solo, which is actually four movies about the legendary smuggler.
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Episode 517: Nobody Solo Actually Hans
On the Overthinking It Podcast, we tackle “Solo,” the new Star Wars anthology film about everyone’s favorite flyboy.
3 Comments on “Episode 517: Nobody Solo Actually Hans”
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It is perhaps indicative of one the major problems with the film that none of you even mention Alden Ehrenreich’s name until over halfway through the podcast.
Thank you for watching Solo so I don’t have to. This one goes into the “Wait until it comes to Netflix” category.
As long as Disney is churning SW prequels, how about a film about a certain teenage princess? Leia goes from beloved adopted princess to a leader in the Rebellion. How did THAT happen? She is Force positive. She is ultimately tortured by her own father and makes out with her twin brother. Now there’s a backstory worth exploring. Millie Bobby Brown has been suggested for the role.
I’m glad that someone else remembers when Star Wars was less SEER-ious art and a vague meditation on mythology than 1930s adventure serial. To me, that’s always been where the franchise was at its best.
I haven’t seen Solo, but it occurs to me in listening to the podcast that the entire Star Wars franchise might be too gun-shy about expanding the universe. While “Return of the Jedi” does keep the story moving, it rehashes a lot of “A New Hope.” Then, the prequels (especially “The Phantom Menace”) draws a clear border around the timeline, to the absurd extent of a virgin birth to tell us to NEVER look further back than the main characters; a universe that felt lived-in and infinite got reduced to a couple of generations.
And, notably, exploration has been punished at the box office, partly because the franchise has a lot of fans who are…let’s say “problematic.”
So, now, the movies almost feel like pastiche, a series of people having bad feelings about things, willful ignorance of probability, whining droids, planet-killers, and so forth.
Which is all to say that it’d be really nice if Marvel could breathe some new life into its little universe and grow it some, rather than tweaking the same ship in a bottle. And if we must flesh out every detail of the hundred-ish years in the timeline, yeah, let’s maybe have some backstory about the lives of the folks who aren’t straight white guys. Or maybe go with that article that talks about how the Republic was probably really inhabited by bee-people (https://www.tor.com/2014/04/30/every-human-in-star-wars-is-really-a-humanoid-bee/), which I guess is no longer really feasible.