This article contains considerable spoilers for Star Wars: The Last Jedi. If you want to go into the film pure as the driven salt on the mining planet of Crait, you should wait until later to read this. Otherwise, join us for some insight on the meaning behind the film’s most emotionally resonant item—and how it could connect to 2018’s Solo: A Star Wars Story.
Midway through the movie, Star Wars: The Last Jedi dishes up a nice, warm dish of franchise nostalgia as Luke Skywalker sets foot on the Millennium Falcon for the first time since 1980’s The Empire Strikes Back. Just before he chats with R2-D2, Luke pulls a pair of golden dice down from the roof of the ship’s cockpit. Die-hard Star Wars fans may know exactly what those dice meant, but his move may confuse more casual watchers.
But these dice, which Han once used to win the Millennium Falcon in the first place, are an important part of the Han Solo legacy and will likely pop up again when Lucasfilm dives back into the smuggler’s origin story next year.
The dice first appeared in A New Hope, then disappeared from the franchise for 38 years before popping up again on Vanity Fair’s Force Awakens cover in 2015. (You can see them swinging between the “V” and the “A.”.) They popped up again in the Annie Leibovitz portrait of Rey and Chewie in the Falcon cockpit in our 2017 Last Jedi cover story. Why did they come and go? Lucasfilm Story Group creative executive Pablo Hidalgo told Vanity Fair earlier this year that as the original trilogy progressed between The Empire Strikes Back and Return of the Jedi, “a lot of people”—including those responsible for dressing the set—“forgot they were there.”
But several years ago, as filmmakers pored over the original designs in order to reconstruct the Falcon for The Force Awakens, they noticed the long-forgotten dice. “I know J.J. [Abrams] was definitely excited to put them in there,” Hidalgo explains, “because it’s detail that certain fans recognize as essential to the Falcon. And others are like, ‘what are you talking about? I didn’t even realize they were up there.’”
The official in-universe story of the dice has been bedeviling fans for decades. Yes, believe it or not, those little accessories have prompted numerous legends. Here’s the official one—probably.
“The story that you would hear if you traveled to cantinas or watering holes around the Star Wars galaxy,” Hidalgo says spinning his yarn, “is that those dice were involved in a game of Corellian Spike—a dice-using version of a card game called sabacc. Rumor has it Han won the Millennium Falcon [from Lando Calrissian] with those dice. Whether or not that’s just bar talk, I can’t say.”
In other words, though we may never have seen Harrison Ford’s version of the character handle those golden dice on film, they’re a token of the Solo legend. Luke handing them to Leia is a touching gesture from brother to sister, a symbol of the fallen man they both loved. The dice also serve as a vexing reminder to Ben (a.k.a. Kylo) of the father he cut down. He handles them briefly before they evaporate as part of Luke’s Force projection illusion.
So, will those dice and that fateful sabacc game be making an appearance in the upcoming Han Solo prequel, starring Alden Ehrenreich as Han and Donald Glover as Lando? Hidalgo laughed knowingly when I asked him this, months ago. “That’s in the future. Ask me a movie from now.”
But after seeing how effectively the dice are used as a reminder of Han in The Last Jedi, it feels even more certain that audiences will watch them roll again in Solo: A Star Wars Story. When they crop up there, Star Wars fans may feel a poignant thrill knowing the sad circumstances that will someday put them in the hands of Luke and Leia, as well as Han’s son and executioner: Kylo Ren.
