Author: Kristopher Tapley / Source: Variety
SPOILER WARNING: If you have not seen “Solo: A Star Wars Story” and you’re wary of spoilers, look away. Look away now!
For a movie packed with action set pieces and dazzling special effects, the most hair-raising moment of “Solo: A Star Wars Story” comes near the end in a much quieter scene, when a fan-favorite character appears on the big screen, via hologram, for the first time since 1999.
“Star Wars” films are built on revelations that someone bigger and badder is pulling the strings behind the scenes, from the emergence of Emperor Palpatine in “The Empire Strikes Back” to the introduction of Supreme Leader Snoke in “The Force Awakens.” So it’s hardly a surprise that a nefarious player would be lurking in the shadows of the underworld depicted in “Solo.”
That player turns out to be Darth Maul, a bold move by writers Lawrence and Jonathan Kasdan considering the character was last seen by most audiences tumbling — bisected, courtesy of Obi-Wan Kenobi’s lightsaber — down an exhaust shaft at the end of “The Phantom Menace” nearly two decades ago.
“That was something I was hoping to lay in very early,” Jonathan Kasdan says. “We were doing it very subtly. I wanted to build toward the idea that this crime syndicate that they were involved with was much bigger than this Dryden Vos character [played by Paul Bettany]. This scary guy wasn’t even in charge and there was someone much scarier above him, so we were looking at who could be that guy.”
Plugged-in “Star Wars” fans know that Maul survived his halving at the hands of Kenobi and saw his story expanded on television in the “Clone Wars” animated series.
However, not everyone who sees the movies is aware of that 2011 resurrection, so Maul’s appearance in “Solo” — played once again by actor Ray Park — is sure to confound. But familiarity with the series, and with Maul’s subsequent reprise in the franchise’s other recent animated show, “Rebels,” is what paved the way for Kasdan to implement the character. Given that seedy-underbelly backdrop of the film, he fits the proceedings perfectly.“Maul had gone into this criminal underworld and this particular period in his life was left vague and gray in the canon,” Kasdan says. “That gave us an opening to say, ‘OK, can we use that character, and if so, does he fit really nicely into a world of scary people?’”
It also builds some further complexity into the character of Qi’ra (played by Emilia Clarke), who reports to Maul in the scene, opening the door for further adventures in this particular branch of the “Star Wars”…
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