It’s always a strange place to be, writing a review after learning that the movie hasn’t resonated with audiences in a big way. Solo: A Star Wars Story proves that you can in fact recast an iconic figure like Harrison Ford with a high degree of success, but it would seem also to prove that audiences aren’t terribly interested in that. I do wonder in what universe an $80-some million opener isn’t a smash (sounds like a lot of dough to me!), but I do feel a twinge of sorrow at the notion that the narrative of Solo might end up being not one of a scrappy against-all-odds winner but one of a misfired also-ran.Alden Ehrenreich stars as Han Solo, desperate to escape the harsh streets of Corellia with his partner (in every sense of the word) Qi’ra (Emilia Clarke). This being a prequel to Star Wars, you know at some point he’s bound to encounter the mammoth Wookiee Chewbacca (Joonas Suotamo) and the roguish gambler Lando Calrissian (Donald Glover), though getting there is half the fun – the other half being Han’s introduction to smuggling, courtesy of heist man Tobias Beckett (Woody Harrelson) and gangster Dryden Vos (Paul Bettany).
Prequels can be tricky territory – heaven knows George Lucas learned that one the hard way – but Solo manages to navigate that terrain as deftly as its titular flyboy might, finding an appealing balance between fan service and genuine surprise. In the case of the former, there is a certain thrill to be had when we sense that Chewbacca is just around the corner or that Han’s about to see the Millennium Falcon for the first time; on the other hand, Solo manages to hold a few tricks up its sleeve, narrative about-faces that feel about as surprising as Vader’s “I am your father” must have seemed in 1980. Despite Beckett’s insistence that “people are predictable,” there are at least two or three genuine shocks in Solo that ought to excite anyone with a modicum of investment in the storytelling of the Star Wars universe, which bodes well for a prequel that may as well spin-off its own spin-offs.
Perhaps the greatest surprise of all is that Solo actually hangs together as a film. We’ve all heard the troubled production history of the film, with director Ron Howard replacing original filmmakers Phil Lord and Chris Miller at as close to the eleventh hour as humanly possible. And having just seen a case of how aft agley these things can gang with last year’s Justice League, where the seams on the reshoots were as transparent as Wonder Woman’s invisible jet, Solo feels like a singular film with a singular vision, a consistent way of looking at the seedy underbelly of Star Wars. Whether we get another Solo movie is almost less important to me than whether Ron Howard gets another shot at the sandbox, with all the Western pioneer grit that gives Star Wars that lived-in feeling. Put another way, it’s a short putt from here to Tatooine in a way that never feels as reiterative as Jakku did, instead feeling much more of a piece with the danger and the dust that made Luke Skywalker so wistful for anything but.
As far as the cast goes, I’ll wager that anything I say here, you’ve probably already heard elsewhere – for one, Ehrenreich acquits himself quite well once you get past the fact that he’s not Harrison Ford. He’snot, true, but neither was Roger Moore entirely Sean Connery as James Bond, though no one raised such a fuss on general principle. We’ve seen recasting before, and Ehrenreich does find the core of Han Solo – clever, hapless, and a sucker for a good cause – to the point where even the most stubborn among us should find him an acceptable substitute for the otherwise unavailable late-70s Ford. Clarke is a welcome new kind of protagonist in a galaxy populated by princesses and queens, while Glover does a masterful riff on Billy Dee Williams as the smoothest operator in the galaxy. Harrelson and Bettany, meanwhile, are just fantastic, with the latter especially giving a performance that just exudes casual menace with every gleeful bite of the scenery.
If the original Star Wars was The Hidden Fortress by way of Alphaville, I think there’s a conversation to be had about which visual languages Solo reappropriates. I don’t want to say too much by way of spoilers, so I’ll just note that the film begins as a Star Wars-ian riff on the outdoor sections of Blade Runner (with what appears to be a Blade Runner take on a Star Wars crawl) before moving into a heist film courtesy of Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom, detouring through the light tunnel sequences from 2001: A Space Odyssey (as scored not by Strauss but by the greatest hits of John Williams), before ultimately cycling back around to the interiors of Blade Runner. Spoiler-phobes can rest easy while the rest of us try to draw points of connection, which I raise not to accuse Howard of any sort of plagiarism – indeed, this may just be my own filmic apophenia – but to note with some curiosity how he may have taken a trick from George Lucas’s own playbook and made a Star Wars film out of a cinematic bricolage.
Ultimately, I think Solo will end up being something of a litmus test for Star Wars fans, telling us more about the moviegoer than the movie itself. For the xenophobes boycotting the film until producer Kathleen Kennedy is fired for the crime of daring to include just a whiff of diversity (both cultural and narrative in The Last Jedi), Solo is a staging ground for protest. For those of us living on planet earth, however, Solo is either a lackluster cash-grab or a fine diversion through a side street in Star Wars. It’s not a game-changer for the saga (though it may contain one, in the very last place you may be expecting it), but I’m of the opinion that these Anthology films – subtitled A Star Wars Story, as Rogue One was – need only be engaging standalones that just so happen to take place in that galaxy far, far away. While we wait for Episode IX to reveal the final fate (for now, at least) of the Skywalker bloodline, Solo is the kind of side-trip that reminds us why we fell in love with Star Wars in the first place.
1 comment:
I agree mostly. I liked the action sequences (the train heist especially), I liked the references (the one reference to the worst Star Wars game of all time made me laugh out loud), I liked Donald Glover as Lando, but overall, very average. It doesn't "ruin the character" as the whiny fanboys say, but I was kinda underwhelmed.
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