Chewbacca, the overlooked hero of the Star Wars films

Cathy has complained that my review of The Last Jedi didn't mention Chewbacca once. Chewie is one of her favourite characters, and although this sounds insulting, she likes it when I remark on the comparisons between them. Like Cathy, Chewie is loyal, dependable, smart, isn't overly talkative, and is very strong.

Trading card pose!

Sadly, Chewie is also frequently overlooked. It's a famous running gag that there is no medal for the wookiee at the end of Star Wars: A New Hope. Surely with all the different edits that have happened to that poor, oft-butchered film, they could have put in a sequence where a medal is dropped round his neck and then CGI-d onto him when he says 'RRRRAAAAWWWRRRR' at the end. (Trivia quiz answer - he is the last character to speak in A New Hope.)

Then in The Force Awakens, he sees his long-time buddy / boss / best friend killed in front of him, but when the Millennium Falcon lands back at the resistance base, Princess Leia, who had hugged him earlier as if they were besties, ignores him and hugs Rey instead. Rey, who she has hardly heard anything about, much less never met. Surely, Chewie deserved the hug more. Cathy was sort of outraged about how he was snubbed here. Although I have suggested that maybe Chewie was concerned about the grievously injured Finn at the time. I'm sure once Finn was in sick bay, Chewie would have got the hug he needed, probably off-screen, because he's a proud wookiee and doesn't want people to see him grieving. (Cathy isn't buying any of my explanations, by the way.)

So, does Chewie deserve more respect from the Star Wars writers? I think so. Chronologically we first see him in Episode III, fighting to protect his home world of Kashyyyk. He is part of Yoda's honour guard, helping the old jedi survive Order 66. In A New Hope, he sets up the deal with Obi Wan to get him and Luke passage to Alderaan. In Empire, Han entrusts Leia to him. In Return of the Jedi, he wears shackles to give Leia a reason to enter Jabba the Hutt's court in a rescue attempt to spring Han.

Throughout the movies, we see him as Han's conscience. In A New Hope, Han gruffly tells Chewie that he knows what he's doing as he loads the rebel money onto the Falcon. Clearly Chewie wants them to stick around and help the attack on the Death Star. In The Force Awakens, he gives away Han's bluffing when Han is trying to lie his way out of a showdown with the gangs he has taken money from.

"I know what I'm doing!"

He's not just Han's conscience though. He is loyal to a fault. When Han starts running down a Death Star corridor after a squad of stormtroopers, he doesn't hesitate and follows them. In the Special Edition of A New Hope, Han finds Jabba and various goons at his ship (including Boba Fett on some sort of retainer), and Chewie is there and ready to back him up. Chewie is the pretend captive when Luke and Han go looking for the Princess. He follows Han out of the Falcon to look for mynocks. As I mentioned he ends up in Jabba's dungeon, where he holds onto Han like a protective mother when the two are reunited. There's no question he's going to Endor even though Han hasn't volunteered him and he's clearly annoyed that Han wanted to protect him. And so on, and so forth. No wonder he ends up hunting rathtars.

And he does have key parts to play in The Last Jedi. First he gets Luke's attention by kicking in the door of his hut. That's played for laughs in the film, but lets not overlook his commitment to supporting Rey after Han's death - even to the point of kicking in the door of the last known jedi master at the risk of seriously angering him. Then he shows off some badass piloting skills to evade the First Order TIE fighters over Crait and play as much a role in saving the last few sparks of the Resistance as Rey did. And he even managed to do that with a ship that seems to have become infested with porgs that get in the way at inconvenient moments. It's not the first time he has piloted the Falcon at key moments. He was the wookiee ex machina who saved Rey and Finn as Starkiller Base shattered around them at the end of Episode VII. (He really should have got that hug!)

I think the case is made for Chewie being the overlooked hero. Literally, on-screen in A New Hope and The Force Awakens, and generally in the trilogy. With a Han Solo spin off movie due this summer, we can only hope that Chewie gets to play a major role.

The Lego Batman Movie - a semi-critical review (with some spoilers) from someone who loves Lego

The term AFOL (Adult Fan of Lego) is becoming more prominent, and certainly there seem to be more of us around now. Gone are the days when I would wonder round the Lego Shop in town looking sheepishly at all the lovely Lego sets and hoping no one thought I was a weirdo for not having kids in tow. Lego is now a semi-respectable hobby for grown ups too.

A lot of this is down to The Lego Movie that came out a couple of years ago and catapulted Lego back into the wider public eye. I thought The Lego Movie was a great film, and it would probably make it into my top ten animated films that even people who don't like cartoons would like. But it did that off a funny script, an interesting storyline, and the right number of in-jokes - not too many to make non-Lego fans feel like outsiders, but enough to make me smile to myself. Benny's broken helmet strap, the blink and you'll miss it references to Fabuland, that sort of thing.

Batman was one of the surprise supporting characters from The Lego Movie. He was a funny version of the well-known comic book and movie character. His comment about only building using black or very dark grey and his love of his self-penned thrash metal squeezed the pips of humour out of the Batman mythos, but all in the service of The Lego Movie's story.

As a result, I was looking forward to The Lego Batman Movie. But this is a case of where a supporting character can't really carry a whole movie. Cathy has told me of a conversation she had with our friend Tom about this, where they talked about the lower quality of the film Minions in comparison to Despicable Me where they first appeared. The Minions are funny little sideshow characters in Despicable Me. They struggled when carrying a whole film. And in this case Batman suffers the same fate.

The film is funny. There are moments that really amused me. The way they trawled the DC Comics archive for all the stupidest villains for a villain ensemble was funny. Calendar Man, anyone? Kite Man? The Eraser, who looks like a pencil? These are all real and really hilarious. There was a flashback sequence with tableaux from almost all the Batman films in franchise history, which was very cool. Alfred dons an Adam West era outfit and says he misses the sixties. At one point Batman warns Robin they are going to hit the bad guys so hard that words will appear in the air, and sure enough TV Batman style 'KA-POW' explodes into life when he punches a baddie. There's a can of shark repellent. All good gags. All made me laugh.

But there was still a hollowness to it. At the end of the day this was just a mickey-take of Batman - something that has been done before many, many times. We know the story of Batman. Bruce Wayne. Dick Grayson. Barbara Gordon. These are all people we know. When Batman appeared in The Lego Movie, he was a new kind of Batman, He was Lego Batman. And we didn't know him. He was WildStyle's unreliable boyfriend and a bit of a douche. But he was a new character to learn about and relate to.

Batman in The Lego Batman Movie isn't new. He isn't even the Batman we knew from The Lego Movie. He's an amalgam of all the Batmen we have known before. Gotham City isn't new. It's just Gotham City made out of computer generated Lego. The Joker isn't new. We've seen him before and he was more interesting when he was played by Jack Nicholson, Heath Ledger or Jared Leto.

There is a break with tradition in that the Joker enlists some other villains trapped in the "Phantom Zone"; all of them villains with a Warner Bros licence. It is amusing watching Sauron as the lidless eye rampaging through Gotham, or the great white shark from Amity Beach recruited to the cause of evil.(But is 'Jaws' evil? That's a conundrum worth discussing. It's just a shark doing what sharks are reputed to do.) But we have seen unlikely team-ups before, in The Lego Movie, for example, with cameos from Chewbacca and Lando Calrissian, and Gandalf and Dumbledore sitting next to each other.

Overall, what made The Lego Movie work was it was about Lego, but also about a whole lot more. The Lego Batman Movie isn't really about Lego. It's just using Lego as a medium to poke affectionate fun at a franchise that has been pastiched to death in recent years, and whose own 'serious' films are bordering on self-parody now. No amount of clever in-jokes, smartly done animation or witty lines delivered in perfect comic timing by Will Arnett could raise this film to the level of The Lego Movie.

It certainly doesn't suck, but The Lego Batman Movie needed more Lego and less Batman.

USA & Canada 2016 - Watching the Boston Red Sox on Star Wars night

One of the things on my list of things I wanted to do before we set off on our trip was go to Fenway Park and see the Boston Red Sox play. When we started looking at tickets we realised we could go on Star Wars night. Well, naturally, that had to be done! (Plus they were playing the Oakland Athletics, who pioneered 'Moneyball' ten years ago, so they were worth seeing.)

We took a tour of Fenway Park in the afternoon. It took about an hour and I would very much recommend it as something to do in Boston. Although our guide told us it was much better in the sunshine we had, than in the rain the visitors had the day before.

One of the first stops on the tour was the area we were going to be sitting in that night. Our friendly tour guide told us they were the original vintage 1932 wooden seats from when that stand was built. Decent view, though.

Speaking of our tour guide, I'm embarrassed to say I've forgotten his name, but he was great. As you would expect he seemed to know everything you could possibly know about the ball park.

Fenway Park has a high wall on one side of the outfield known as the Green Monster after it was painted green to mute glare from the floodlights. There are seats on top of it.

The Red Sox's mascot is called Wally. He's a Green Monster too.

The lone red seat you can just about make out here marks the home run that has been hit the furthest distance and stayed inside the ball park. Apparently it brained the guy who was sitting there when it was whacked several decades ago. (Click on the photo to make it larger!)

It being Star Wars night, there were plenty of people dressed up to bring a bit of a galaxy far, far away home to Boston. We had to pose with these two. Cathy insisted.

Remember Wally the Green Monster? He was up for the occasion too, dressing up as a Jedi.

And picking a fight with Darth Vader and his evil henchmen.

It's well worth just wondering around Fenway Park. There's tons to see. Like an array of old logos on one wall. I wonder why they didn't keep the batting sock?

There was also a baseball shaped golf cart to play on.

One of the the big things about baseball is the amount and variety of stadium food you can buy, brought direct to your seat by vendors. But this was the first time I've seen a food vendor carrying round clam chowder.

We had a pretty good view of the action when the game started.

The Athletics raced into an early lead, but a disastrous fourth inning saw them start with a 4-1 lead and end with a 7-4 deficit. The final score was 14-7 to the Red Sox. The crowd emptied out as the scoreboard proclaimed the win.

Star Wars: The Force Awakens - 5 likes, loves and mehs

SPOILER WARNING

Seriously. I'm going to talk about the plot of Star Wars: The Force Awakens.

Still here? OK then. The first paragraph is a bit of waffle just to push any spoilers below the line.

So, some of my predictions were reasonably close to what actually was in the film. I was very nervous going to see it. Star Wars means a lot to me - I have had an emotional connection with it ever since seeing Return of the Jedi. So I wanted The Force Awakens to be good. I had high hopes but was overcome mainly with relief after seeing it for the first time. I've now seen it twice and it was just as good second time around, although it seemed to go faster when I knew what was coming. I plan to see it again at some point. I imagine there will be other people watching it a few times - this probably explains the record-breaking opening weekend take.

So, as a review, here are 5 things I loved about the film, 5 things I liked and 5 things that were a bit 'meh'.

Five things I loved

1) Rey.
She was a great character. Not a princess in need of rescuing. Clever, resourceful, outspoken, independent ("Stop taking my hand," she shouts at one point when Finn does the 'hero' thing and grabs her hand as they run away from bad guys.) Clearly she will be the pivotal lead in the next two planned films. Her "That's lucky" when Finn tells her how he escaped from tentacled alien monsters is probably the best line in the film. And she speaks Wookiee and astromech droid.

2) 'Human' stormtroopers. 
Finn is a stormtrooper affected by the carnage of his first battle and a comrade dying in his arms. After he turns against the First Order, other troopers take it personally as a betrayal. Which they would. The stormtroopers are actually characters here. Again, one of the best moments is when two of them are aware an angry Kylo Ren is smashing up a room and do an about face to patrol in another direction. Comedy, but also showing a bit more smarts than previously.

3) Han and Chewie.
The greatest on-screen partnership of all time? Probably not. But great to see them back in their element (trouble). I liked the idea they had been hunting for the stolen Millennium Falcon. The 'Chewie, we're home' line from the trailer worked well in the film. The pair's conversations - you only ever hear Solo's side, but you know Chewie is correcting his lies - are very funny. As with he original films, Han gets all the best lines.

4) BB-8.
I wasn't sure about BB-8 beforehand. I suspected he might be another Jar-Jar - just an annoying comedy character. Instead he captured the spirit of the original films, which also concentrate on the travails of the droids. His 'thumbs up' to Finn caused plenty of laughter in the screening we were in on the first night. Overall he worked really well as a small droid with big personality.

5) The nod-backs.
There were plenty of these - Finn finds the training remote in a store box on the Millennium Falcon while looking for a first aid kit. Admiral Ackbar and Nien Nunb get walk-on parts. For the first time a Bothan is shown on-screen. There's a bar full of various scoundrels and low-life with a band playing. It's not Figrin D'an and the Modal Nodes, but it's reminiscent.

Five things I liked

1) The continuation of the story.
Most of this is told in minor details dropped into conversations. We get that Luke tried to refound the Jedi order. That Han and Leia's force-sensitive son Ben joined the order, but was corrupted by 'Lord Snowke' and became Kylo, leader of the Knights of Ren. As Kylo Ren he is now seeking to restore the work of his grandfather, Darth Vader. Han and Leia's relationship broke down at some point - possibly because of Ben's fall to the dark side. Luke, meanwhile, blamed himself and set off on a quest to find the first Jedi Temple. It is the search for Luke that provides the 'quest' for this story as he is needed to lead the fight against the First Order.

There isn't a huge amount of detail there. Who are the Knights of Ren? Where did Lord Snowke, the Supreme Leader of the First Order, come from? How did he corrupt Ben Solo? There are lots of unanswered questions, before we even get to the new characters. Although, you don't need the force to know that Rey is somehow also going to be related to the Skywalker family.

2) Battles.
There are several land and space battles, with a conspicuous lack of the CGI that made the prequels look like computer games at times. Obviously the usual tropes apply. Heroes are immune to blaster fire or explosions, while stormtroopers may as well have targets printed on their chests. What is noticeable is that we have a strormtrooper death scene involving blood - a real person has died - but Saving Private Ryan this is not. Anyway, the battle scenes add to the overall action content of the movie, which probably has fewer slow scenes than any of the first six episodes.

3) The humour.
Rey and Finn, Han and Chewie, Han and Rey ("Are you offering me a job?" "I'm thinking about it.") Han and Leia ("And don't say the Death Star") Han and Finn ("Sanitation!?!?") C-3PO popping up as an awkward, dorky interruption during a 'moment'. There are good lines aplenty and sparks between all the main characters. Even the tentacled monsters loose on a spaceship segment is played for laughs. I also liked the bodged escape in a TIE Fighter.

4) The ending.
I predict the jury will be out on this, but I liked the ending. It sets up the next film well and we end with Rey appealing for help with an expression of hope and wonder and fear on her face. Did I mention that I love Rey?

5) The different stormtroopers.
We get different uniforms in the stormtrooper squads, there are flametroopers, snowtroopers, and so on. We even see some different hardware with one stormtrooper using a hand to hand electric hammer thing for close combat.

And five things that left me a bit meh

1) Chewie gets left out again.
So this is really Cathy's comment, but after Chewie and Rey return with an injured Finn and no Han to the Resistance base, Leia hugs Rey and ignores Chewie. Come on. Chewie has been Han's sidekick for 40 years at this point. Surely she should have consoled him first, not some girl she's never met before. I have tried to persaude Cathy (and myself) that this would happen offscreen as Chewie is a private Wookiee and wouldn't want to grieve publicly. But we're not buying it. It's the whole 'Why doesn't Chewie get a medal?' from the end of Star Wars all over again.

2) Captain Phasma
Billed heavily before the film as a key character, she gets a couple of scenes and is then left unused. She is even disposed of off-screen. Hopefully she will be back in Episode VIII with a grudge against Finn. I felt this was a missed opportunity.

3) Kylo Ren's mask.
It was initially hinted at that he wore this to hide some disfigurement. But he doesn't. It just seems to be for effect. And it was a bit crap really.

4) The Supreme Leader / Lord Snowke
Who is this guy? Why is he so badly disfigured? Is he human? Who really cares. At this point, the trope of having a fearsome leader you have to go and cower in front of has been overdone, not least in the Star Wars universe. But the Supreme Leader really reminded me of Thanos in the Marvel Comics films. He sits there being all scary like, but doesn't seem to actually do anything himself.

5) Han's death.
I honestly always felt Han Solo would die in a blaze of glory. Yes, the scene is emotional, even though you know he is doomed as soon as he steps on the bridge. It does feel there is a possibility that Ben will relent and renounce the dark side. But you know it's not going to happen. I heard one comment that this scene is unsatisfying because it feels like Han is suckered in, but I think that's unfair on him really. Ben is caught on the cusp of fully succumbing to the Dark Side and Han is there with him. One note, though, Chewie wings Ben with a bowcaster bolt while Ben is on the bridge. Now, given that previously the bowcaster was blowing stormtrooper up, surely that was a much smaller hit than it should have been. Ben should have at least lost a leg.

6) And a bonus one...
As mentioned throughout this long post, there are lots of unanswered questions. How did Maz get Luke's lightsaber?  (What happened to her by the way? She just seems to disappear.) What's the deal with the map and the missing piece - what kind of cartography is that? Why does Rey go to find Luke at the end and not Leia?

There are also lots of the usual plot holes. Veteran movie critic Roger Ebert has pointed out that given the size of Starkiller Base the way the main characters seem to cross paths so easily, it may as well have been a submarine. I've already mentioned how stormtroopers are easily picked off while heroes can dodge through strafing TIE Fighter attacks. But this is Star Wars. It's always been like that. It's one of the reasons I love it so much. Because it isn't real; it's make-believe. We can suspend the scepticism and suspicion that cloud our days and just enjoy ourselves.

And then, maybe, the force will be with us.

You have to watch this!

Irony Boy sent me the link to this video, which goes to show how having too much time on your hands ain't necessarily a bad thing. I particularly like Lego Chewie's entrance.