Accuracy By Volume: A New Star Wars Movie Every Year, or: 48 Hours In Space

We all know that Star Wars Episode VII (a film as yet to be subtitled, but allow me to pitch one of our old podcast titles: The Fist of Justice) will be coming out in 2015 – a summer that will be so geek supersaturated, between Star Wars, Batman Vs. Superman and Ant Man that I should be allowed to retroactively wedgie the jocks who knocked the The Dark Knight Returns trade paperback out of my hands back in high school.

We also all know that Disney, the new owners of the Star Wars property, not only intends to make more big trilogies, but that they intend to make Star Wars movies that do not fall within the scope of another epic trilogy. But exactly what kind of ancillary movies they intend to make hasn’t really been totally clear. Would they be cartoons for kids? Political dramas? Porn?

Well, according to Disney’s Chief Financial Officer Jay Rasulo, who spoke about Star Wars at an investor’s conference yesterday (Rumors that the second order of business was to ratify Disney’s new corporate mission statement of “Kneel before Zod!” remain unconfirmed), said that those non-trilogy flicks will be prequel stories. Which has historically been a good decision when it comes to Star Wars movies.

And unconfirmed rumor is, that the first prequel will be Han Solo’s origin story.

Oh, shit.

First of all, there’s not much of a doubt that someone’s origin story is coming, just based on Rasulo’s quote:

Rasulo also noted that one “Star Wars” trilogy film or “origin story film” would also appear on the release schedule each year, starting with the seventh installment in the “Star Wars” saga that J.J. Abrams will direct and Disney releases in 2015.

Now, just using process of elimination, that first one almost has to be a Han Solo film. After all, we’ve seen Darth Vader’s and Obi-Wan Kenobi’s origin, and we saw Luke and Leia’s birth, and it’s not hard to fill in the remainder of Luke’s story between birth and Star Wars. And besides: no one needs a two-hour movie of an adolescent fixing moisture vaporators when he’s not staring wistfully into twin suns… and Jesus, no wonder he needed The Force to hit that exhaust port. Luke’s eyes are probably so sun-blasted he can’t see the end of his own nose. And that gets us around the whole “incest kiss” in Empire; the poor hick was probably so sun-blind that he thought he was making out with Chewbacca. Luke was, after all, a farmboy: “Just tuck them Wookie legs into the front of your boots so it can’t get away,” Luke used to say over blue milks at Tosche Station, “That’s good lovin’.” But I think I’m getting a little off point here.

The point is, we’ve seen everyone’s origin except for Han Solo’s, unless they want to go with Wedge Antilles (which I can see… Wedge finds a note under his X-Wing’s windshield wiper in Samuel L. Jackson’s handwriting: “How many days in your life have you been sick?”) or Porkins (“But the sign said ‘All You Can Eat!'”), which seems unlikely. So Han it probably is… which is either a spectacular or a terrible idea.

It is a terrible idea if the writers, producers and eventual director decide to go full Star Wars with the story. Because Star Wars movies (boring trade agreement subplots in the prequels aside) are stories about heroes and villains. And no matter how many time George Lucas decides to use Adobe video tools to make Greedo shoot first, the fact of the matter is that, when we are introduced to Han Solo in Star Wars, he is not a hero.

Han is a criminal scumbag: he’s a smuggler who is in deep to the local crime lords, hanging out in violent dive bars. He returns to the Death Star to save Luke at least partially because he doesn’t want Luke to get the entire reward for destroying the Death Star. The bulk of Han’s story arc in Empire is driven by his attempts to get the hell out so he can pay off Jabba; the only reason he’s caught up in the second two acts of that movie at all are because Chewie is too shitty a mechanic to get the Millennium Falcon running in time to already be gone from Hoth when the Empire shows up.

I don’t want to see a standard Star Wars flick about Han Solo’s origin where they make him some kind of galactic hero; it just doesn’t make character sense. Nobody wants to see that.

A crime story, however, would be a different animal altogether.

If you’re gonna do a young Han Solo movie, I want Goodfellas in space. Show me a young pilot looking for easy money working his way into the local mobs. Hell, you know they’re gonna show The Kessel Run no matter what anyone says, so make it a filthy drug run. Show me that Han did it in less than 12 parsecs – a measure of distance, after all – because he jacked the cargo at gunpoint from some real Robert Rodriguez / Machete-style villains in the middle of deep space, halfway from the pickup point. Make the Kessel Run a gauntlet of not only Empire troops, but other scumbags and highwaymen (spacewaymen? Nah.). Show Chewie as the hired goon he so clearly is in Star Wars, busting the tentacles of some two-bit gambler what owes Jabba six points above the vig. Make Han A Friend Of Ours!

Too much darkness for a kid’s movie? Fine. Let’s have a heist film! Han’s scoping out a casino, casing it to do a simple armed robbery bust-out. While he’s there, he wins the Falcon in a Sabbac game from Lando, who’s the face / front con artist of a crew there to do an actual heist. Suddenly bereft of his getaway freighter, Lando has no choice but to bring this rough armed robber and his completely conspicuous furry hired muscle into the plan. And they hate each other at first, learning to trust and like each other through the course of the job, and boom! Now you’ve got yourself an 80s action buddy flick! 48 Hours meets Oceans Eleven! In space!

But odds are, we won’t get that. We’ll wind up with something where Han has to fight the Empire over some good-guy principle, where the fact that he is a criminal, gut-shooting lowlife is a side note, at best. Because after all, no one has ever seen a six-year-old kid tugging at his mom’s sleeve, begging her to buy him a Henry Hill action figure.

But John Rogers – former Boston comedian and creator of Leverage – if you’re out there, pitch the heist film to Disney. You know you want to, and you know it would be awesome.

(via Variety and Bleeding Cool)