The headline may smack a bit of hyperbole, but there’s little doubt that the arrival of Ron Howard on Solo: A Star Wars Story righted the ship and helped steer the production to a satisfying conclusion. The Telegraph look at this, and the role of the Kessel Run in the story, an element that director Ron Howard was determined to get right.
The one thing Ron Howard wanted to get right about Star Wars was the Kessel Run. In the original 1977 film, Harrison Ford’s Han Solo boasted of having navigated this apparently deadly hyperspace route in “less than 12 parsecs”. But in the Solo spin-off, audiences would get to see the escapade first-hand – and discover it hadn’t been quite the breeze Han’s vague offhand bluster had implied.
“The idea that you’d heard him casually bragging about this thing, and then would discover what a near miss it had been, and all the obstacles he’d had to outwit – I loved that,” Howard enthuses. “I just liked the idea that everything was far more complicated than he would ever dare let on afterwards.”
