Editorial Staff
A few minutes before Ron Howard’s credit, “Solo : Star Wars Story” lets rip with a giant surprise cameo that, as far as I can gather from online comments, folks either love or hate.
While the character of Darth Maul had a deceptively small part in George Lucas’s “The Phantom Menace”, falling to his death – after being sliced in two – down a reactor shaft, the character remains one of the most popular villains in the Jude Law of the “Star Wars” universe. Thanks to the writing staff on animated series “The Clone Wars”, Maul lived to see another day – now getting about with a couple of mechanical legs.
Fact that the cerise-painted villain turns in “Solo” suggests that writers Lawrence Kasdan and Jon Kasdan purposely connect “Clone Wars” – and later, “Star Wars : Rebels” – to the Han Solo prequel. But how did the idea of using Maul (who is physically played by Ray Park and voiced by former “Smallville” actor Sam Witwer) come about?
“I was, like, ‘What? I thought he got cut in half! That usually does you in,'” Lawrence Kasdan told The LA Times.
Kasdan’s son and fellow writer, Jonathan Kasdan, elaborated a bit on Maul and how he ended up in the “Solo” script.
“He’s a character that, like Darth Vader, worked on a primal level for people,” said Jonathan. “He touches on something fundamental in our psyche, and in those three [prequel] movies he, to me, was the most powerful bit of psychological imagery.”
“I think that’s why fans were drawn to him and why the canon was eager to tell more stories about him,” Jonathan continued. “In a galaxy populated with very dangerous people, he’s always been in the top group of dangerous people. So the opportunity to put him in the movie and give him the element of these mechanical legs, which rhyme with Luke’s mechanical hand – it seemed like it could work.”
In a separate interview with ComicBook.com, the younger Kasdan paid credit where credit’s due. “I loved that they took him and went an interesting place with him in Rebels, and in Clone Wars, and just sort of to expand on the myth of that character, and the idea that he survived. Rebels set us in a timeframe where we were sort of in the clear, and they were allowed to sort of do what they wanted with the Shadow Collective, with the whole, you know, backstory that they were playing with, and his movement into crime that would leave us in a clear zone, so that, by the time this movie happened, it was gray where he was.”
Fans are speculating what Maul’s appearance in “Solo” means, and what it might mean for potential “Star Wars” films like a “Solo” sequel or the rumored “Obi Wan Kenobi” movie, but one thing seems certain : We’re going to be seeing a lot more of the horned scoundrel.
