Han's Dice

It's a momento of something that Han once held.

Yeah, I mean after a person's passing how many times have we've seen the value of an item go up? To many times. I bet Leia didn't care about Han's stupid dice before, but after? It's something she can hold that meant something to Han.

 

Yeah, no, I get that. I do.
But even so, I totally grasped that those were Solo's dice.

My wife, who never liked Star Wars before TFA, got that those dice represented Han because of the context. It's in the Falcon, Luke's looking sad, he picks them up and stares at them all sad.
That came across pretty clear; I thought it worked very well - much better than if Luke just sat there and stared at the dashboard. We needed something for Luke to look at and interact with, and short of Luke strangely finding a picture of Han, this was a pretty good work around to that problem.

This is the first I've ever even thought of it not making sense to anyone what was going on.

I mean, if folks don't like it; OK, cool I guess.
But it wasn't a problem to anyone that I know, and that's all I can speak for...and the folks I know are um...yeah, they are not Star Wars nuts.
I'm pretty much the only Star Wars fan in my social circle. Others like it well enough as part of pop-culture, but they don't know what Fett's armor is called, and usually refer to the Falcon as, "Han's ship". Some even say, "Laser swords", because they forget the name, "light saber".
Some even, at one point, thought that Kylo was Vader's son. So we're not talking about Star Wars aficionados here.

I don't think we had to have the answer as to why they mattered; all that really mattered was that it was something in the Falcon that Luke clearly recalled and in the context, it was (at least to everyone I know) clear that Luke was thinking of Han when he was looking at them.

I mean, even if you're entirely illiterate in Star Wars, what do you interpret Luke to be doing in that moment?
He's at Han's ship, shortly after asking, "Where's Han?", he's sad, moping, and he picks up the dice. What did people assume exactly? That Luke was feeling sad for Han and was just all, "Oh! Dice! I love DnD!"?

I just don't really understand the confusion, even if you don't know that those are Han's dice.

Cheers,
Jayson

 

Again, it's not that there is confusion. It's clear they are Han's dice. It's just that for them holding such special meaning to the characters, you would expect there to be some special meaning to the audience as well, beyond just the fact that they belonged to him. They could have used any object that was his really, which is why I used the baseball analogy. It's oddly specific.

 

Yeah, they could have used any object...and they did.

His dice.

So what's the problem?
It's simple: they needed something to stand in place of Han since Han wasn't there for Luke to have a moment with.

OK, no dice.
So what then?

Cheers,
Jayson

 

I just don't know what you write in the moment instead?
OK; no objects since the idea is that no object really is ever Han, other than what he had when he died, so that's not available.

So what do you write for Luke's Han moment; how do you make it intimate?

Cheers,
Jayson

 

I think you're misunderstanding me. I don't have a problem with the scene, it more or less worked. It's Han's dice and its a memento of his life. I get that, and I wasn't trying to argue the scene doesn't work. I was merely commenting that they could integrated them into the overall story better, for example by introducing them in TFA or by having them have a more personal meaning in Solo.

 

Well, but see, here's the thing...you're thinking hindsight 20/20, and yeah, sure - we could have had a moment where

Rey sits down in the cockpit next to Han. Han hangs his dice up. Rey looks at the dice, and then at Han quizzically.

HAN
(nodding at the dice)
Luck. We're gonna need it.
​

Han fiddles with the controls.

HAN
(Mumbling to himself)
Seem to always need it.​

But that didn't happen in TFA, and Rian Johnson had a strange condition to deal with in front of him.
There was a moment in TFA, but it was a deleted scene.


But...it was cut, so, again, Rian didn't have anything, but he did have this idea sifting around thanks to it being shot in TFA (even if it was cut).

See, TFA wiped out Han without Luke being around to say goodbye. Leia got her variation of it, but Luke was entirely absent, so Luke's Han moment was never given.

Now TLJ was stuck having to deal with this, and it, honestly, wasn't really what the film was about; TFA was about the loss of Han (in part), not TLJ.
Worse still, as mentioned, Abrams left nothing for Rian to employ as an icon for Han that was wide out in the open, short of the Falcon, and I think we can all agree that it's a bit hard to have an intimate and sorrowful farewell moment of remembrance touching a space ship since you can't really focus on any one thing as the object of Luke's focus.

Further, Luke's way out on an island in the middle of no where and the only thing Abrams brought to Luke was the Falcon. So then Rian's sitting there trying to figure out how in the hell to swing a moment for Luke that at least shows that he cares about Han passing more than asking where he was, since it wasn't addressed, and the tool box that he was handed to build with was basically balsa wood, scrap sawdust, one hammer, and two used screws.

So, without playing hind-sight 20/20 on TFA and sitting there pretending that we're writing TLJ for a moment...what exactly do we do here?
How do you make it any better than it was?

From TLJ's point of starting, since getting them in TFA isn't an option, how exactly do we make them more part of the story in some manner that makes them mean something useful to the audience more than they were, without Han around, and without distracting from an already very crowed script that is TLJ?

If I take those dice out, I'm at a loss for Luke's Han moment, and if I try to force them to be more focused on than they were, then it seems to start getting hokey and forced really quickly. I could hear it now, "Yeah, we get it, those are Han's, they meant something special, why did we need all that time on dice instead of more time with Phasma?"

I mean, even having Luke pick them up and say, "Han", seems too much and reduces the emotion of the moment.
Having Luke hand them to Leia and say,

LUKE
Wish me luck.

LEIA
(looking at the dice and nodding)
Han always loved these things; no idea why.

LUKE
Despite what he said, he was superstitious.
He did believe.

LEIA
(smirking sadly in memory, and then looking at the remaining members of the resistance)
Only in hope.​

I mean, sure, but it feels - again - pretty forced to try to shove something like this in there instead of a sweet moment that's silently implying these kinds of thoughts.

I don't know, man, I think it's fine and not a big deal.
It also gave something for Solo to play with. If we answered everything in TLJ, not only would it be pretty clunky, it would remove the ability for Solo to take that on.

Which, we still don't actually know the origin of those dice. All we do know is that the visual dictionary's explanation is not the reason because they're not from Han winning the Falcon, but he starts Solo with them so we still have the "origin of Han's dice" story left to hear - they're growing into their own little character over time.

A lot of Star Wars, for quite a while, is going to be "retcon"-fest - that's just the way it's going to be.
The Boba film is definitely going to be that, and if the Obi movie goes forward, that will as well.

So even if it was light weight in TLJ for some folks, like things in the prequels to the OT, further films will add that weight so it means more along the way.

*shrug* I'm going to go eat some popcorn and watch TLJ (we just got back from Solo with the kids a few hours ago - they loved it - and there's a call for TLJ time now. ).

Cheers,
Jayson

 

The dice in Star Wars were only intended as a nod to George Lucas's popular 1973 film, American Graffiti, and as good luck symbol as to try and echo a past success in the new 1977 film, Star Wars. American Graffiti was a retrospective film about Amercan teenage car culture in small town1950's California. During that era, it became a craze with teenagers to hang fuzzy dice in their cars.

People are reading too much importance and significance about their usage in the Star Wars universe. The dice are merely a nod to an earlier George Lucas film.

Fluffy Dice became popular in the UK for the first time in the early 1980's, when fluffy dice were seen hung from the rear view mirror in Derrick "Del Boy" Trotter's car in the BBC comedy, Only Fools And Horses. Since then, fluffy dice have always been considered kitch, a bit vulgar and lower class in the UK.

 

To me the most interesting part played by the dice was that Han gave them to Qi'ra and she still had them after all that time had passed. Whatever they may have meant to Han, they clearly had great significance to Qi'ra. I wonder more about where they went with her, what they meant to her, than I do about what they meant to Han. When she gave them back to him, it was a significant scene to me.

In the Lord of the Rings, the One Ring had no previous emotional connection to the story in the Hobbit. It was a simple ring of invisibility. But did the added significance of the One Ring in the Lord of the Rings trilogy draw as much of your ire? Why would you have a problem with taking something somewhat insignificant, and giving it significance? Taking something old, and making it new? Why is adding depth a bad thing?

The thing about art is, it's as deep as your mind goes. "Making more" of something, isn't that a good thing? If I came to your house, and saw a simple, old object sitting on your shelf, and asked "Do you know what this is?" and you reply, "It's just an old object" and I say "Oh it's much more than that. This object..." and I give you some story about the object, I wager you would enjoy the added information, and suddenly the object would be a little more interesting to you. All because of a little backstory.

 

Adding depth is fine. If the dice never appeared in TLJ, or if Solo came first, then it would just be adding depth, and I would have no problem.
The problem is that in TLJ, nobody added depth to the dice. We were supposed to except them as this huge emotional symbol of Han's life, even though we'd only glimpsed them in New Hope. And even some big fans like me didn't make that immediate connection. The problem is that, to get the emotional depth from TLJ, you need to go see Solo. The emotional impact of the immediate story to market the franchise.

The ring functioned fine in the Hobbit with no further explanation. In TLJ, the dice only work if we give them a significance they never have--unless you go see the next movie.

It smells more like marketing than storytelling.

 

For the first portion about meaning and depth that you talk about, we've already addressed in the thread pretty thoroughly (scroll up to https://thecantina.starwarsnewsnet.com/index.php?threads/hans-dice.54951/page-2#post-506501 for the finale of that tangent about meaning), so instead let's focus on the idea of this being a marketing ploy.

The easiest way to test that is two-fold.
One: Look at the marketing for Solo
Two: Look at facts of shooting and writing between films

One: Solo has a pretty noticeably poor marketing campaign; it all but doesn't exist. Further, nowhere has dice been used as the marketing symbol for the film. If it was, like say, the Batman signal or something, then you'd see it plastered everywhere and you would be able to buy Han's dice at your local grocery store to hang in your car - they'd be near the check out because it's just such a simple gag. There's no shirts with Han's dice on them. Apparently no one thought of using the dice as a marketing tool.
I think the lack of any dice centered ad marketing material indicates that no ad campaign was designed around Han's dice.

Two: The reason they exist in TLJ is because Rian needed to give Luke a farewell Han moment, and to do that you should write it intimate and a ship is not intimate - it's not something that you can fit into a single frame with a tight shot of your character (Luke); they're at odds with each other. Now, Rian was writing TLJ while looking at the daily's from TFA. He didn't wait until TFA was all wrapped up to write and start work on TLJ. That would have been physically impossible. TLJ was 123 days of production, and pre-production needed to get ramped up fast. Watch the documentary. It's mind blowing how much work goes into these things - it's anything but easy; hell it's not even hard - no, that's too easy. What it is, is insane. Anyway, so Rian needed something, and in the daily's he would have seen Han hanging the dice in the Falcon as a moment that was originally shot to come right after he shows up on the Falcon and corrects Rey on the Kessel run time. This was cut, probably for time trimming, in the editing room, but Rian already had it in TLJ, so it's not like he's going to just yank it once TFA was completed and that scene was cut in the final edit. By then, he's got too much wrapped around it; he'd basically have to cut Luke's Han farewell entirely and just have Luke walking in the Falcon and doing nothing, and then cut to the next scene...which then, you might as well cut Luke going to the Falcon entirely because the scene has no final sentence (so to speak); it's just Luke hanging out in the Falcon and looking sad...well...he's been sad the entire film, so what's the point? It just becomes unfinished without some focal point. And if you take that out, then you need to take out the scene with Luke and Leia where he hands her the dice, which is no big deal really - even though it's a beautiful moment, it's not like anything in the film falls apart by that, but then you also have to take them out from Kylo picking them up and seeing them disappear, which was used to stir up emotions in Kylo even further because it was not only a symbol that things were slipping out of his control, but it was a reminder of his Father whom he killed to attempt to gain control over himself. I mean, sure, you could cut that, but it's a pretty powerful punch of a moment.

The point here is that it wasn't Disney walking up to RJ and telling him to insert the dice so they could market the upcoming Solo film in TLJ. It was just plain old film making, and it happened to not work for you.
Cool.

Cheers,
Jayson

 

The dice in TLJ represents Kylo's inner conflict. Really has nothing to do with the dice itself, just that Kylo clearly is honing some regret while holding them as they vanish at the end of the film. Just as Luke said to him just prior where he says I will always be with you just like Han. You have an interesting take on the dice. May the force be with you.

 

I just think that if they really wanted the weight of the dice to be felt (whether it be Luke's sadness or Kylo's regret) it should have been something that the audience can also feel for. Han's blaster for instance would be something that both the characters and the audience can understand the emotional connection of.

 

The blaster that was blown to smithereens in TFA along with Han?

How was Rian supposed to work that in?

Cheers,
Jayson

 

I believe that the dice were just an easter egg to American Grafitti and nothing more in ANH. But now with TLJ and Solo, I see the dice as a symbol of Han's character, as many of you have. If there is one word to describe Han, besides cool or badass, I'd say that lucky would be a fitting adjective. I mean who in their right mind would fly into an asteroid field and with a squad of TIE Fighters and a Star Destroyer behind you? That's practically suicide. Han was always a gambler in life: he always took risks and when they should have ended in failure, they almost always ended up working out. The dice represent his ability to take chances and their color symbolize his heart of gold that exists underneath his cocky demeanor.

 

I'm not saying it should have been the blaster, I'm just saying that an item like the blaster would have been more fitting for the emotional impact.