Tuesday, May 10, 2016

Rocket Raccoon and Han Solo



The young Han Solo has been cast for the film to feature the early years of the Star Wars'  hero.  I am not familiar with the work of Alden Ehrenreich, but he sure has his work cut out for him.  As cool as seeing a movie about Han and Chewie in their smuggling prime may sound, comparison to Harrison Ford's iconic performance will be unavoidable, and it will take some doing for the new guy to make the role his own.

14 comments:

  1. I just finally saw Guardians of the Galaxy a week or two ago (I've never seen the comic), and I think this would be a great pairing. It would likewise be interesting to see the interactions with Chewie and Groot, with each other of course but also with each other's partners.

    I'm no more familiar with Alden Ehrenreich than you (less so; this is the first time I've even seen that name). Still, when I think of someone taking over a role and really taking it, I think of Anne Hathaway's brilliant turn as Agent 99 in 2008's Get Smart. In many ways she channeled Barbara Feldon in her performance, but still made the role her own. The same can be said of most of the cast in the Star Trek reboot (Zoe Saldana makes her Uhura into a very different character from Nichelle Nichols -- though that's the only negative thing I've ever seen in Zoe's acting). So how will Alden do? Hopefully he'll take the same approach.

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  2. Retrieving a stolen gem almost seems like more of a job for Indiana Jones than for Han Solo....

    This brings up an interesting point however. Now that Disney owns both Marvel Comics and Star Wars, i wonder if we will ever see any interaction between these two universes. I remember after the Guardians movie came out there was a lot of speculation over who Star-Lord's father might be. Being the crossover lover that I am, I thought it would be cool if it turned out that Peter Quill's father was either Luke or a pre-Darth Vader Anakin Skywalker....

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  3. I would really like to see this crossover.

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  4. Ross: Are we talking about a cameo appearance of a somewhat younger Han in the upcoming prequel ROGUE ONE?

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  5. No Han is getting his own movie.

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  6. Thanks. :-)

    As for the tag line in today's cove? I'm going to wildly guess that the truth is that, one night, during the search for Han's carbonite-frozen form (while they were still unaware of their true heritage)...

    ...Luke and Leia "consoled" each other.

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  7. I'm curious -- where is the mongoose (otter? ferret?) with the bling from originally? Thanks!

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  8. From the same image as Han Solo by the great Joe Jusko

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  9. I still feel it is a mistake for Disney to be making a "Young Solo" movie, for the very reason that Ford's performance is so iconic that the new guy - no matter how good he is - is never going to measure up. Literary characters - Hamlet, Holmes, Bond, Tarzan, Superman, Frankenstein's Monster, even Rooster Cogburn as it turned out a few years back - can go through a multitude of different actors offering their own interpretations of the characters, both on stage and screen. But Solo is a character created specifically for the cinema, and interpreted there so famously and so perfectly by one actor, and thus anyone else's interpretation is going to suffer by comparison. Case in point: Perry King, a talented actor who in fact was one of the actors who auditioned for the Solo role and eventually DID get to play Han on the NPR radio adaptation of Star Wars. As talented as King is, and as much as I've enjoyed him in other projects over the years ("Riptide" was one of my favorite TV shows of its era), his performance as Solo on the radio show just never did anything for me. It didn't ring true, and though I am a huge fan of OTR in general and the SW adaptation in particular, King's performance has always stood out as a weak link for me.

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  10. Sonofjack: Nah. Peter's father is Goofy!

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  11. @jrp041: All I know is that the species is called Selonian. And while they might be mustelid in origin, their society is matriarchal like a beehive.

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  12. "Ferrets,why did it have to be ferrets?"
    ;)

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  13. I don't get the kerfuffle over a different actor playing Han Solo. Multiple actors have portrayed Harrison Ford's other iconic screen character Indiana Jones and multiple actors have portrayed Star Wars' other iconic character Darth Vader. The franchises continued just fine.

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  14. The kerfuffle is George Lucas' undeniably bad habit of fixing what was never broken! For instance: the original, forward-facing explosion of Death Star I was definitely a lot better than the ret-con done to SWANH's re-release in 1997.

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