Solo: A Star Wars Story - 10 Fan Service Moments That Will Make You Groan
Sometimes nodding and winking at the past is far from a good thing.
The modern reinvention of the Star Wars franchise has made a lot of money off the back of nostalgia. In 2015, the franchise's triumphant return in The Force Awakens mined the goodwill of fans to the tune of two billion dollars at the worldwide box office, while first spin-off Rogue One transported audiences to a world that was different, but familiar, and littered with references to the original Star Wars movies.
That same sense of nostalgia and fan service is at play in Solo: A Star Wars Story, which takes everyone's favourite character from the original Star Wars trilogy and gives him a superhero-style origin tale. It's a film that delights in winking and nodding at dialogue from the past, while filling in backstory gaps with all of the subtlety of a blaster shot to the face.
On the surface, Solo is a decent enough adventure movie with some fun action sequences and a good line in comedy that mostly works. However, there are elements of its script that land like enormous lead balloons, evoking the past in ways that come across as a little too obvious, bringing the movie to a grinding halt.
There are, of course, spoilers ahead.
10. Chewbacca Learns Dejarik
One of the first scenes involving Chewbacca in Star Wars: A New Hope sees him playing the chess-like board game Dejarik aboard the Millennium Falcon. R2-D2 is winning the game, but Han Solo suggests that Wookiees are bad losers and are known to pull people's arms out of their sockets in rage. C-3PO then advises Artoo to "let the Wookiee win".
In Solo: A Star Wars Story, soon after the gang of thieves join forces with Lando Calrissian and climb aboard the Falcon, Chewbacca and the group's ringleader Tobias Beckett are shown playing the game. Beckett, in one of many clear nods to the film's conclusion, advises Chewbacca that people are predictable and that a good player sees a number of moves in the future.
This is a scene that exists in Solo: A Star Wars Story solely as a nod to one of the most memorable moments in A New Hope. The idea of Beckett as a manipulator and a predictor of human behaviour had already been established elsewhere, so the appearance of the Dejarik board is merely included for fans to recognise.