11 Reasons You're Wrong About Solo: A Star Wars Story
5. The Heist Sequence Is One Of The Franchise's Most Inventive
Lucasfilm
Between Ant-Man, Baby Driver and the upcoming all-women Oceans film, the heist genre is making a bit of a comeback. Its influence is also felt in Solo, which delivers not just one heist sequence, but two!
The first, which caps off the film's opening act, revolves around a train hauling Coaxium on the planet Vandor. It twists, turns, and forces those perched above to hang on for dear life - and with Beckett et al. hooked on with cables, chased down by a bunch of magnet-wearing stormtroopers, the action is enthralling from start to finish.
Shootouts, lightsaber duels and space-bound dogfights have all featured heavily throughout the franchise, but never has a sequence been as refreshing as this. The famous pod-race from The Phantom Menace comes close, but when it comes to creating an innovative action scene, the Vandor Heist has to be up there with the franchise's best.
WhatCulture's very own resident movie guy, Ewan has been working in the content creation biz for over 10 years now, having started as a freelance contributor to WhatCulture Gaming all the way back in 2015. After graduating with a First-Class Honours in History from Northumbria University in 2017 (where he won a prize for a totally killer dissertation on the Watergate years), Ewan took on the role of Comics Editor at WhatCulture and quickly developed WhatCulture Comics into one of the biggest superhero-focused channels on YouTube. He followed this with a brief hiatus at Screen Rant in 2021, where he worked across the Gaming and Film sections as a writer and editor, before returning to WhatCulture as a Senior Content Producer / Presenter in 2023. He started his own podcast, We Love Dad Movies, in 2022, and has contributed several written pieces to the Eisner-nominated comics website Shelfdust as well.
In his current role, Ewan incorporates his love of cinema, comic books, and history into written pieces and video essays for WhatCulture's Film & TV channel, as well as WhatCulture Gaming and WhatCulture Horror, with a particular focus on nineties-era Dad Movies, old school Westerns, and Golden Age Hollywood Noir. John Carpenter is his fave, and he thinks Batman Beyond should never have been cancelled. If that's your vibe, you'll probably like his stuff.
