Solo: A Star Wars Story - 10 Reasons To Be Excited

6. That Western Vibe

Solo A Star Wars Story Showdown
Lucasfilm

In a trailer filled with cool looking shots, the image of Han unholstering his blaster has to be the coolest.

Star Wars has always been a franchise chockfull of different genres (the 1977 original derived its tale from Kurosawa's The Hidden Fortress, and Gareth Edwards' Rogue One bore the echo of many a war film before it), and the Western is one that's held an influence on it from day one. With Han being the cowboy-iest of Star Wars characters (with the only exception being Boba Fett), it makes sense, then, that the Solo story would pay direct homage to it, with the aforementioned shot looking more Sergio Leone, less George Lucas.

And yet, there could yet be another link. In the sequence, we see Solo in a standoff with a blade-sporting villain. The contest should be over once Han draws his weapon, much like how Indiana Jones (another Ford role), dispatched a blade-wielding villain in Steven Spielberg's Raiders of the Lost Ark.

Tenuous though that may be, it's clear that the Solo prequel is following in the footsteps of its predecessors by lifting from plenty of other genres.

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Content Producer/Presenter

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.