HAN SOLO: The Redemption That Saved The Galaxy

“I’m a '60s, West Coast, liberal, radical, artsy, dyed-in-the-wool 99 percenter before there was such a thing.”
George Lucas in The New York Times Magazine (20120117) - “George Lucas Is Ready to Roll the Credits”

And so …

The Blaze (20151216) - “Star Wars: Why ‘Han Shot First’ Debate Is Still Important”

“For almost 20 years, this has been a hot button topic for fans. But it really is an important topic, and here’s why. … What George Lucas knew in 1977 and seems to have forgotten – mostly due to his Hollywood liberal programming – is … Han Solo has an arc. He goes from a not-so-nice character in a seedy bar, to a reluctant hero, and finally to the heroic character … While Luke fires the fatal shot, that shot never would have been fired had Han Solo not decided to come back and help his friend. … Yes, George, we do want Han Solo to be a cold-blooded killer, but not because we’re blood thirsty. It’s because we want his character to be important to the story, and for that his arc must remain intact.”

The words of another movie, Legend, come to mind …
“… Together they will learn there can be no good without evil… No love without hate… No heaven without hell… No light without darkness.”
… and George Lucas, in his bitter leftist politics, would ultimately deny Han Solo his redemption. But this is the secret of why Star Wars became so popular. Han Solo showed us more than him saving himself by risking all for his friends. It was an arch-type to show hope for our own redemption.

Bravo, Han Solo. Bravo!

Nope. If anything conservative “Hollywood programming” would have had Solo shoot second - at least that’s how it would have been done in the code days. But this is not a political issue and never was. Move along.

I was doing a Star Wars comics podcast with a few buddies for about six months last year (we got biblically behind the release schedule, but we’re hoping to retool the format and relaunch it some time in the coming weeks, but who knows), and at a certain point we got to discussing how crazy Tatooine’s stand your ground laws must be. Only tangentially related, but it’s always fun to apply real-world thinking to this kind of thing.

I think that Tatooine was a lawless frontier type planet was kind of the point. It was supposed to be like the old west. Just look at the sand people and the jawas. They make their living off of banditry and thievery.

He keeps Gringo in conversation all the while having a gun pointed at him from under the table.
At any point Han could have shot Gringo.
He only shoots when the green guy tells him he is about to murder him for cash and steal his ship.

This is how Cold Blooded Han would go:

GRINGO : Going somewhere Solo?
HAN : Yeah
HAN SHOOTS GRINGO IN THE FACE, THROWS A COIN TO THE BAR KEEP.

HAN : Sorry about the mess

SpilkaBilka said:

Sigh.

Han was never cold-blooded and firing on Greedo first doesn’t make him cold-blooded either. It was self-defense. Greedo was pointing a gun at him and essentially said, “I’m going to kill you.”

This!

When you’re looking down the barrel of somebody’s gun, you have to use any means necessary to get out of that situation with your life. How was this ever even a controversy?

If anything makes Han even remotely cold-blooded, it would be his cynical remark towards the bartender. But the act itself would be perfectly alright in most civilized countries. He’d probably only have to visit a space-police station to fill out a report, but I guess that is a Special Edition addition we will never see…