A/V SOLO: A Star Wars Story (untagged spoilers allowed)

The timing for these anonymous leaks is interesting. Back when Lord and Miller were fired, we got a barrage of “Lord and Miller didn’t know what they were doing, the shoot was a disaster, the footage was unusable, Kathleen Kennedy is saving the planet” leaks. Then Ron Howard was hired, and we got a handful of “Ron Howard has righted the ship, this film is perfect now, no disaster here” stories. And then everything went quiet until the press campaign starts and suddenly we’re back to anonymous stories about how Lord and Miller were the worst thing to ever happen to filmmaking but Ron Howard totally saved the day and the film is going to be really good guys.

What I’m saying is that the timing and messaging is consistent with the publicity effort to paint the rather shambolic step of firing the directors most of the way through production and essentially remaking the movie as urgently necessary yet effective and no cause for worry about the finished film. So while no doubt something went wrong during filming, I take the rather extravagant claims of unprecedented chaos with a grain of salt.

 

Coruscant!

 

Too right, how could I forget?

 

Ehhh maybe? I feel if Lucasfilm wanted to really show that they’ve righted the ship they would take the approach of glossing over the whole switch over and avoid bringing up that things may have been disarray early in production. The article doesn’t really give us any new information. Taking all day to get a shot to find in the edit was mentioned when all this broke. It’s all old information that I feel Lucasfilm doesn’t really want discussed.

 

And I'll reiterate: it could very well be that Lord and Miller were trying to go for something different, but that doesn't have a bearing on whether it was working.

 

Haha, take the Warner/DC Justice League playbook? Those fans are not too thrilled with the pathetic attempt to pull the wool over their eyes.

The best thing to do would be to address the issues once, head on, and then refer to your previous statement when it gets brought up again.


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I was never on board with the original directorial choice, but I was willing to give them the benefit of the doubt. "in over their heads" tells me nothing and I would be curious to know more. Kudos to Lord and Miller with the grace with which they have shown throughout this.

 

Well that sort of illustrates the point; the biggest problem with Justice League was ultimately that it was a terrible movie. If it was a GOOD movie then all the drama and the 'who directed what' and the nonsense about a 'purer' version of the film would never have come about. But it was a bad movie which was poorly received by critics and the box office (Albeit better received than BvS by the former), which made all the BTS stuff more relevant.

If Solo does decently at the box office and is reviewed positively overall, then all this BTS stuff will just become trivia that nobody cares about very much. If it doesn't, then no PR strategy is going to work anyway.

 

This doesn't explain anything to me at all--I thought Justice League was quite good. It certainly was better than Batman v Superman where Batman was completely out of character, and I definitely enjoyed it more than The Last Jedi...

As far as Solo, I have a hunch if Howard had been on board from the start, Ingruber might have been cast. He looks so much like Harrison that any differences in acting style would have slid by the audience I think.

Because Alden looks nothing like Ford, the "channeling Harrison through acting" becomes a LOT more important. And since that's a near impossible task, that's where we get this acting coach news etc.

 

Well ok, but the consensus of critics and audiences did not think JL was good. BvS did decently at the box office but appallingly with critics. TLJ did brilliantly with both. That's really my point; when a movie massively underperforms both critically and commercially then we are far more likely to hear lots of stuff about things going wrong behind the scenes afterwards than we are if it does ok at one or the other.

Personally I thought BvS was far, far worse than Justice League - but it did better at the box office so it was less relitigated. (Although there was still a decent bit of that)

 

Anthony Ingruber played young Harrison in Age of Adaline, and I really don't get Harrison vibes from him physical. And his Harrison Ford voice is ridiculous. It'd probably be good on Saturday Night Live or Robot Chicken or something, because I can't take it seriously.

Alden doesn't look or sound like Harrison, but at least it won't be distracting. With Ingruber it would be at the forefront of my mind the entire time that he was doing a Harrison Ford impression. It's not like Chris Pine or Ben Affleck needed to pretend to be Harrison Ford when they played Jack Ryan.

 

I agree. Alden Einreich really doesn't look or sound like he will grow up to be Harrison Ford's Han Solo. Donald Glover isn't as handsome as Billy Dee Williams, but he at least has his smile. That's good. And I'm very impressed. The Chewbacca looks JUST like the OT Chewbacca.

 

With Lando, I've never seen anyone who looks like young Billy Dee Williams. I'd probably have less complaints with Alden's looks if I didn't know Anthony Ingruber existed but now that I know he does, it just feels like a missed opportunity.

 

Lots of people can do a Harrison Ford impression. If that's what anyone wanted, Ingruber is hardly the only person out there. What they wanted was an actor.

 

The name was invented by Zahn, but the idea for the planet comes from Lucas.

Therefore can we still consider it Legends?

 

I did not know that the name came from Zahn

It really shows how Lucas was willing to follow the EU at least to an extent

Edit: Although I would say Corellia is the opposite, as the name came from ANH but the idea comes from the EU

 

I think it shows more how Lucas was willing to go with Rick McCallum, since he was supposedly the one who convinced Lucas to use the name (though the pronunciation changed).

But really, the Coruscant of Zahn came more from McQuarrie's concept art than Lucas. The Coruscant we've known since 1999 is rather different than the planet of McQuarrie and Bantam, which did have mountains, oceans, open space, etc., rather than just being a planetary Manhattan.

 

I dunno, doesn't the Coruscant of the Han Solo Trilogy already have no natural land left at all except the peak of a single mountain or something?

 

If I'm not mistaken, the Illustrated Star Wars Universe by KJA (released in 1995 during the Bantam years) was the first time Coruscant was imagined as a single monolithic city with only a single tiny speck of original land visible - including, ironically enough, a McQuarrie painting of Monument Plaza. I don't recall whether or not any attempt was made to reconcile this with Zahn having Luke gazing out from the Imperial Palace at the "Manarai Mountains" off in the distance.

 

I think Coruscant was always going to be based off Trantor from the Isaac Asimov books.

 

The thing is, no version of Coruscant is really similar to Trantor, whose surface was covered entirely in giant domes, each with its own culture and government, and with the Imperial Palace compound being the only part of the planet not covered by a dome but open to the elements.

 

I was disappointed when years back they authorized a continuation of the Foundation series, only for them to write some prequels/interquels that didn't actually finish the story where Foundation and Earth left off.

 

One of them was written by Rogue Planet's Greg Bear... must have been around the time he wrote Rogue Planet, actually. More on the thread's topic, The Corellian Trilogy author Roger MacBride Allen also wrote a spinoff Foundation trilogy in the 90s.

If I remember right, the New Foundation Trilogy that Bear wrote for even incorporated stuff from Allen's trilogy, making it a sort of EU-like approach to continuity.

 

Someone correct me if I'm wrong, but hasn't every EU planet that's appeared on the big screen so far actually kinda originated with Lucas? Coruscant was the city-covered "Imperial Planet" from the ROTJ early drafts with only the name coming from Zahn; Kashyyyk was from the Holiday Special but was, along with everything else about Chewbacca's family, lovingly crafted by Lucas; Corellia is pretty bona fide EU but Han being "Corellian" is a Lucas thing; and Mimban was originally a bog planet in the early drafts of ANH, according to the making of ESB. Doesn't seem like they're digging into the EU so much as they're digging into early Lucas/McQuarrie concepts.

 

Out of curiosity, I looked up the George Lucas notes on character backstories from The Making of Star Wars. It actually doesn't say what Han's home planet is, but it does state that the Millennium Falcon "is of Corellian design, from Crell.... Crell is a rather grim planet, mostly gaseous. There's no surface to it. The cities are large satellites and they float inside the planet, like in the fog, or in the gas. The inhabitants have wings and can fly. They are like porpoises with wings, but they also have claw-like hands."

So at least in 1977, it seems like Lucas thought that the Corellians were flying porpoises from a world that was more like what became Bespin.

I am curious if any of the other stuff in Han's backstory there (his parents killed in a space battle when he was a kid, picked up by space gypsies, went to the Space Academy at age 12 but kicked out at age 15 when crashing a speeder while racing one of his instructors, spent a few years herding giant lizards with Chewie) will show up in the film.