I love The Last Jedi and Laura Dern as Vice Admiral Holdo, so I was excited when I finally saw her Black Series prototype last year. I had concerns about the fit of her soft goods dress and subsequent dodgy pics from Hasbro did not allay those concerns, but I was hopeful that I would be able to adjust the look when I got it in hand. Let’s take a look at Vice Admiral Holdo!
Well…a wiser fella than myself once said, “sometimes you eat the bear and sometimes the bear…well, he eats you”.
Now I’m no expert in eastern philosophy but I take that quote to roughly mean you win some and you lose some and that’s the case with Holdo here. There is a lot that I like about this figure, so I’ll start there.
I think the head sculpt is dynamite. Light it on fire, blow shit up, dynamite. The sculpts have always been good in this line, but having the eyes line up better to the sculpt and have more subtle detail brings these figures to life. It think the face printing could stand to be slightly darker, but I still like a whole heck of a lot.
It’s almost startling how much better the head sculpt looks on this figure when I put her next to the recent General Leia figure. They definitely made me want a figure of Leia from The Last Jedi even more.
I also absolutely love the sculpt work on her hair. It’s got a great bouncy pile of curl feel and the purple paint wash highlights all that great detail. I also really like sculpted parts of the dress. It captures the silky, drapey, but clingy feel of the dress in the movie.
The gun is an appropriate and nicely sculpted accessory and I like the attention they paid to sculpting her rings and braclets. They even sculpted her hands a little longer than the usual figure hands to match Dern’s hands better. That stuff is all great. What I don’t love is the soft goods.
I’m not really for or against soft goods on figures as a rule, I think sometimes they work and sometimes they don’t. I can see what they tried to do here and they got close, but it doesn’t quite hit the mark for me. The fit feels off. It should be tighter around the middle and the scoop neck should be lower and the sleeve holes smaller.
While it looks better than it did in the packaging, the shape is a little too floppy an it really needs to be cinched up around the waist as it was quite clingy in the movie. I think it would have worked better as a single sculpted overlay piece, especially since they decided to cripple leg movement anyway with a Y mounted hip joint.
Yep. They brought back the 45 degree hip that we saw in Padme and unfortunately Holdo can’t really move her legs forward without spreading them really wide. That coupled with tiny feet with shallow peg holes make her a tough poser too.
I was also kind of bummed that she only gets a 90 degree bend in the elbow as it precluded some poses I wanted to do.
This one is a tough one for me. I wanted to like it, I adore pieces, but there are a lot of problems. I do also like that she will be a nice pop of color on a mostly black, white, and brown The Last Jedi shelf.
I may try to do a little cinching on the dress with some thread and a needle, but I can’t recommend this figure unless you’re a super Holdo fan or an expert in miniature dress tailoring.
Finally, please, Hasbro, do not use those Y hips ever again. Thank you.
