Solo: A Star Wars Story (2018)

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.

Solo: A Star Wars Story is rated PG-13 for “sequences of sci-fi action/violence.” Directed by Ron Howard. Written by Jonathan Kasdan and Lawrence Kasdan. Starring Alden Ehrenreich, Woody Harrelson, Emilia Clarke, Donald Glover, Phoebe Waller-Bridge, Joonas Suotamo, and Paul Bettany.

Inferno (2016)

Let’s be very clear about one thing: although the Dan Brown “Robert Langdon” series has always tried to be Indiana Jones for the art history crowd, I can’t say that the films have been as first-rate as Raiders of the Lost Ark or as transcendently resplendent as Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade. (The books do manage to capture a striking breakneck pace for prose, such that I do have a hard time putting them down, though I now wonder how much of that is due to the fact that each chapter ends on a cliffhanger.) At any rate, I liked The Da Vinci Code and Angels & Demons well enough at the time, playing along with the outlandish plots and high-profile performances, but Inferno is the third and hopefully last in the series, a spiral of utter rubbish that manages to be muddy, dull, and unpalatably preposterous.

Tom Hanks is back as Robert Langdon, the jack-of-all-trades academic whose expertise on Dante Alighieri is brought to bear when a dead futurist (Ben Foster) releases a warning that a plague will be unleashed on the world, bringing about an apocalypse intended to curb the earth’s growing population. Felicity Jones, late of Rogue One, plays Sienna Brooks, Langdon’s physician who becomes embroiled in the hunt for the plague after treating an amnesiac Langdon for an unremembered head injury.

I read Inferno a whole year and several dozen other books ago, so my memory of it is a little fuzzy, but I recall at least modestly enjoying it, even if the ending was utter claptrap. The good news, I suppose, is that the ending has changed for the film version, although a good number of things have also changed, evidently because they’d simply take too long. There are whole subplots excised from the novel, and while I’ll never be the guy who says a movie must match the book verbatim, the effect of these omissions is such that the movie starts to crumble into procedure. Rather than follow the puzzle-box mentality of the previous films, where it seemed clearer why we had to go from Point A to Point B, plotlines don’t materialize so much as arrive like leaden parachutists. There’s a particularly egregious moment – well, two, now that I think of it – where the film “reveals” that something we thought we’d seen was actually something else all along, and although I remember those moments coming off a little more effectively in the novel, the film deposits them with minimal buildup and next-to-no fanfare, as if to say, “Oh, time for the twist. Here you go.”

Part of the reason the film doesn’t feel like it’s following a strain of logic is that it’s not comprised of puzzle pieces weaved from preexisting artwork so much as Dan Brown has come up with his own maze, a path devised by the film’s antagonist to lead to the plague – which is inherently nutty, because if the goal is to release a plague, a plague which would be time-released whether you find it or not, why on earth would you point a colossal neon sign in its direction? Why put a ticking clock on the thing? Moreover, why tell anyone at all? This sort of plot works better when it’s an ancient mystery designed to be read by the initiated, but it’s a bit of a headscratcher why this story exists in the first place, other than to give Tom Hanks something to do for two hours; heaven knows Langdon is a busy enough man, a career symbologist with a newfound expertise in Dante studies alongside a reputation that draws the World Health Organization to enlist his help.

And speaking of the World Health Organization, hold onto your plague masks, because there’s a ludicrous diversion from the novel in that the film posits a foregoing romantic relationship between Langdon and the WHO’s director (Sidse Babett Knudsen, who you might recognize from her stint on Westworld). I’m not miffed that screenwriter David Koepp has expanded the role of this character or even tried to humanize Langdon a little beyond being a human decoder ring. But in a franchise that has seemed to pride itself on outlandish leaps in logic, this one takes the cake because it contributes nothing to the plot and goes literally nowhere, approaching character development but turning tail and thinking better of it.

As I recall, the first two Robert Langdon films had some semblance of suspense, some air of mystery that demanded solving. Inferno, however, ends up fairly boilerplate, with an attempt to reinvent the formula by giving Langdon amnesia and forcing him to piece it together along with us, but the payoffs are increasingly absurd and the twists uninspired. With Hanks at 60 and director Ron Howard joining that galaxy far, far away, it might be better to let Inferno burn out the franchise before a geriatric Langdon is called upon to solve the dispiriting mystery of who stole his oatmeal from the retirement home.

Inferno is rated PG-13 for “sequences of action and violence, disturbing images, some language, thematic elements and brief sensuality.” Directed by Ron Howard. Written by David Koepp. Based on the novel by Dan Brown. Starring Tom Hanks, Felicity Jones, Omar Sy, Irrfan Khan, Sidse Babett Knudsen, and Ben Foster.

Monday at the Movies - April 23, 2012

Welcome to Week Seventeen of “Monday at the Movies.” We take a break from The Godfather franchise, and – in honor of the impending arrival of Arrested Development, Season 4 – we join director Ron Howard for a controversial book adaptation.

The Da Vinci Code (2006) – I was a bit of a Holy Grail nut in high school, mostly because of Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade marathons. I was a fan of Dan Brown’s novel, but I took it with a grain of salt because I never believed in the idea of the grail as a Christological bloodline (the cup is a more compelling and textually supported artifact). With Ron Howard directing the film adaptation, I enjoyed it immensely the first time around, appreciating the combination of Indiana Jones meets National Treasure. But on this most recent rewatch I found myself less enamored with the movie. Here we follow Tom Hanks as Robert Langdon in his move to solve the murder of a Louvre curator, which quickly embroils him in a centuries-old struggle between secret societies over the mystery of the Holy Grail; with Ian McKellen at his side and Alfred Molina against him, it’s a first-rate cast. McKellen in particular was a treat for me since I forgot he was in it, but he imbues Sir Leigh Teabing with enough eccentricity to make the character more than just a flat exposition machine. Unfortunately, the movie relies a lot on extreme leaps of logic that seem to work better in prose; I wasn’t convinced that Hanks was piecing together so much of the puzzle in his head, where the Robert Langdon in my head would have been able. My other major critique of this film is that Ron Howard isn’t an action director, as many of the “intense” action sequences fall flat; he is, however, an expert with jump scenes, as I found myself startled at several moments. But as I recall, many of these grievances are rectified by 2009’s Angels and Demons.

With one Robert Langdon feature down, stay tuned for more reviews of this franchise. But for now, that does it for this week’s edition of “Monday at the Movies.” We’ll see you here next week!