“Hokey religions and ancient weapons are no match for a good blaster at your side, kid…”
That’s Han Solo there, explaining to the young Luke Skywalker why he has no time for the Force and its mystic ways during the lull of Star Wars: A New Hope. In fact, we imagine even Darth Vader would find Han’s lack of faith quite disturbing…
Be that as it may, Jonathan and Lawrence Kasdan, the screenwriters responsible for the newly-released Solo: A Star Wars Story, touched on the Force-agnostic Han while speaking to the folks over at Cinema Blend. Simply put, the galaxy’s greatest smuggler endured a long, meandering road to adulthood, during which time he encountered some of the most wretched and vile beings in the entire universe. Here’s looking at you, Jabba…
It’s for this reason that Han Solo was always disillusioned by the “religious wars” that threatened to engulf Lucasfilm’s far-away galaxy, as he was too busy making ends meet within the franchise’s criminal underbelly to fret over spirituality.
That’s something Jonathan Kasdan echoed during that chat with Cinema Blend, where the screenwriter even name-dropped Straight Outta Compton as inspiration, creatively speaking.
Religious wars. To people like myself are just mystifying that people would be willing to die for beliefs that, to me, are so far fetched that I could never even dream of. One of the things that we talked about early with Solo, I was particularly energized after seeing Straight Outta Compton, I have to say personally. Yeah because we thought about the idea that Han would be like those young guys, who grew up in a real inner city and was really a child of the inner city. It was tough and survival was the priority and there wasn’t access to world events, in this case, galactic events. He was living a life of survival in the streets and scrambling to find a place to sleep every night.
Bouncing off that, Solo screenwriter and all-around franchise veteran Lawrence Kasdan pinpointed Han’s natural cynicism as a means of protecting himself from the wider world.
When he claws his way out of that the last thing he’s gonna relate to is ‘you know, there’s this spiritual… Fuck that, I just got out here where I can breathe and eat.’
Solo: A Star Wars Story is now playing all across the galaxy (our review), though it hasn’t exactly set the world alight in the way Disney would’ve hoped…
