Spoilers, obviously...
Have you seen the latest effort in the revived Star Wars saga yet?
Solo: A Star Wars Story tells the story of iconic rogue Han Solo -
who is actually part-Irish, apparently - as he cuts his teeth en route to becoming the most famous scoundrel in the galaxy.
Our own Rory Cashin reckons that Solo is
the perfect Star Wars movie for people who don't necessarily like Star Wars movies, while
one scene in particular proved quite jaw-dropping for fans.
Last chance to not get spoiled right here...
So yeah, who saw that coming?
Darth Maul, he of 'looking really cool but not doing a whole lot before getting cut in two in the Phantom Menace' fame, is somehow back, still alive, and possibly set to be a Star Wars antagonist once more.
Fans of the extended Star Wars universe of books and cartoons and so on may not have been too surprised at Maul's resurrection, given that the character did pop back up along the way in the non-film adventures.
Still, it's safe to say that nobody really called him showing up at the end of Solo.
https://youtu.be/jPEYpryMp2s
Clip via Star Wars
In a new interview with
Slashfilm, director Ron Howard, who "lobbied hard" for the surprise reveal, has shed some light on a face-off between he and Emilia Clarke's Qi'ra that was "initially written in a rather generic way."
"[The script] just sort of said 'Boss'," recalls Howard. "And I thought when I came in, I assumed they knew who it was and they were just keeping it under wraps. And they didn’t. But Maul was listed as one of the candidates. And I lobbied hard for that. I thought that made a lot of sense to me. I found that character to be really effective.
"And I knew for a fact, without asking directly and giving anything away, my son Reed who just turned 31, who’s a dedicated Star Wars fan, he’s a golfer. He’s not in the business. Dedicated Star Wars fan. I just whispered that possibility and he just thought that would be incredibly cool.
"And so for that generation, I thought, well that was gonna be a pretty interesting idea. And doing a little more research and understanding sort of how the character had worked elsewhere, I thought it was good. The writers were on board with that, but then we actually shot it twice. We did it once, and then we realised, it wasn’t quite Maul enough yet."
Howard goes on to note that he added Maul having a lightsaber "and intensified it."
Co-writer Jonathan Kasdan, meanwhile, joked about the possibilities of working on the Maul character in future films.
"We spent a lot of time thinking about, well, now we get to really do his mechanical lower half and when you go back and look at the movie more and more, you see this really elaborate bit of design they did within there," says Kasdan.
"I’m ready to write an entire movie about his bottom half and how it all works. His intestinal tract."
