This morning, I ran across some geeky musings I jotted down last year after I watched Start Wars VII...
The galaxy was a brighter place because Han Solo was in it. He was full of surprises, and he had most of the best lines. He was confident to a fault, and got himself into all sorts of ridiculous scrapes, yet somehow he always got back out of them.
But the scene on the catwalk of the Star Killer wasn't a ridiculous scrape. It was a bridge over a yawning chasm, and in Star Wars, those are serious business, whether it's the epic fight scene with Darth Maul in Episode I, the confrontation between Luke and Vader in Episode V, or their rematch at the end of Episode VI. Bridges are where Good looks Evil in the eye and tries not to flinch. Where people choose what side they're really on. Good usually prevails, but not always. Fathers, or father figures, often get mortally wounded at those junctures. Han Solo seemed to sense all of that before he took his first step onto the catwalk in Episode VII, but he did it anyway because he felt his son was worth the gamble.
LEIA: He certainly has courage.
LUKE: What good will it do us if he gets himself killed?
(Episode IV: A New Hope)
2 comments:
That scene was really heart-wrenching.
Yeah--it kind of ruined the film for Phillip the first time he watched it, and it's still a part I prefer to skip. I kind of feel like Luke mourning Obiwan in Star Wars 4: "I can't believe he's really gone."
I guess that's yet another dead giveaway that I'm a geek: I mourn fictional characters I really care about, because they almost feel real to me. Another dead giveaway is that part of me hopes that Han will come back as a Force ghost and haunt his son (even though an even geekier part of my brain reminds me that only Jedi can do that).
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