For a film generally remembered as a tonally light and low-stakes entry in the Star Wars franchise, Solo: A Star Wars Story sure features a lot of dead people.
As well as multiple characters biting the dust in the movie’s third act, we also witness the deaths of Val and the multi-armed Rio Durant in one of the film’s earliest action scenes. While co-writer Jonathan Kasdan has expressed some regrets about how this sequence went down, he ultimately thought that killing off these two characters was an effective way of adding a little more weight to the drama, saying:
“We knew that because we had a hero who was not going to die we needed to try to populate the movie with characters that we were invested in. And then, they’re both killed in sort of sudden ways and that gives a little more tension to the relationships he has, you know? Where you think, well, anyone we don’t know if they are in another movie could go.”
Though bumping off two of your heroes isn’t the only way of keeping your audience emotionally invested, it’s certainly one method of establishing a sense of danger in the story. Even if we ultimately know that Han, Chewie, and Lando are going to come out of this journey alive, these early deaths make it clear that most of the movie’s cast aren’t so safe.
As it stands, there’s a good chance that even the surviving players aren’t coming back for another film, since the final death of Solo was the one it suffered at the box office. Since then, Disney has implied that they’ll be slowing down on subsequent projects once they get Star Wars: Episode IX into cinemas on December 20th, 2019. Where once the continued survival of the franchise seemed as predetermined as Han’s future in Solo: A Star Wars Story, it now remains to be seen what shape it’ll take from here.
