Did we need a standalone Han Solo movie in the Star
Wars universe? No, no we didn’t. But no one asked me, and in the
grand scheme of things, unnecessary as it is, we could have done much worse
than Solo: A Star Wars Story. Granted, we also could have done
much better. It’s a wildly mixed bag, but with the utter chaos behind the
scenes—the ousting of directors Chris Lord and Phil Miller 2/3 of the way
through production, the recasting, the rewrites, the reshoots—worse was always
on the table as a very real possibility.
When Lucasfilm first announced the Star WarsStory movies, I was down with the idea of standalone films that
examine heretofore unexplored corners of that far, far away galaxy. There’s so
much room to move and so many stories to tell, not just the tale of the
Skywalker clan, their crew, and the Jedi. I’m not as into the idea of using
them to rehash characters we already know (I sure as hell don’t want a Boba
Fett movie). But despite what I want, we’re getting Solo: A Star Wars
Story next month. And there’s another new trailer.
Watching Ron Howard’s new thriller,
Inferno, I couldn’t help but mentally compare Tom Hanks’
adventurous Harvard symbology professor and puzzle enthusiast, Robert Langdon,
to Matthew McConaughey’s Wooderson from Dazed and Confused.
He keeps getting older, but his youngish, brown-haired female sidekicks stay
(roughly) the same age.
If you’ve ever wanted to watch Thor and Spider-Man battle a
giant, angry whale, Ron Howard’s In the Heart of the Sea is
as close as you’re going to get. The movie stars Chris Hemsworth and Tom
Holland—the God of Thunder and Web-Slinger from Marvel’s Cinematic Universe,
respectively—as olde timey New England Whalers, and in reality it isn’t so much
them fighting a pissed off whale is it is them routinely getting thrashed by
one.
It’s difficult to find an opponent worthy of battling Thor,
he is, after all, a god. But a giant whale may just do the trick, and that’s
what you get in the first trailer for Ron Howard’s In the Heart of the
Sea.
