Mined from the notebooks, October 6, 2018. Posted Saturday morning, October 27.
They’ve got a good feeling about this: Chewie (Joonas Suatano) and Han Solo (Alden Ehrenreich) together again for the first time in “Solo: A Star Wars Story” pieced together more than it was directed by Ron Howard.
I thought “Solo” was fun. Fun enough. More fun than I expected, at any rate. I’d have enjoyed it more if it had been in color.
Seriously. For at least the first two-thirds of the movie, all the incessant fights and chases take place in the dark or against backgrounds of smoke and fog, the scenes illuminated in flashes by flashes from explosions, headlights on crashing and wildly careening flying cars and trucks, and random shots of windows and other sources of ambient light. Made me wonder if director Ron Howard had watched “Dawn of Justice” too many times and learned the wrong lessons from Zack Snyder’s aesthetic aversion to light and color. But maybe it was symbolic. The closer Han got to “Episode IV”---and Luke and Leia---the brighter and more colorful Howard’s palette became. The first burst of vivid color I took note of came in the first scene aboard the Millennium Falcon.
It’s kind of like “The Wizard of Oz”, except that most of the movie’s set in a dark, dreary, gloomy, cheerless Kansas. This might have been more visually interesting---or at least less annoying---if the plot was as clear as the atmosphere isn’t and so much of the movie---the parts in color and the parts in mud, ash, soot, storm cloud gray and dust cloud brown, and exhaust-blackened snow white---wasn’t a relentless series of chases in which randomly appearing villains, monsters, and hostile forces of nature threaten to shoot, crush, burn, shred, beat up, blow up, and devour our heroes as they run about willy-nilly in frantic pursuit of various MacGuffins while managing to avoid becoming characters trapped in an actual story.
The fact is Howard was probably doing the best he could with what was already on hand when he was brought in to direct in place of the original co-directors Phil Lord and Chris Miller who were fired by LucasFilm producer Kathleen Kennedy for...reasons, with the movie close to completion, and his task was to tighten things up and brighten them up, in tone and in spirit as well as in imagery. I don’t know the particulars, and I’m not really interested, but I’d bet that whatever’s light-hearted, amusing, and visible is Howard’s doing and that he’s most responsible for the last third of the movie which takes place in parts of the galaxy where the suns shine. After wrapping up that, he went back and pasted into the doom and gloom tinged first two thirds moments of humor, passages of dialog, and a few characters that were more consistent with if not the original Star Wars trilogy then at least “The Force Awakens” and “The Last Jedi”.
This would explain why two of the most interesting supporting characters are suddenly just there with no exposition explaining how they got there or who they are, and why when they’re arbitrarily killed off, victims of their having no more place in the plot, such as it is, nobody mourns them or misses them or even refers to them except as sticks that helped beat the plot along.
I’ve said we don’t need a young Han Solo story because we already have one. It’s called “Episode IV”. And we don’t need his backstory because he doesn’t have one. Not one that matters. The one he’s given in “Solo” is pretty much the same one he had in the old expanded universe---learned to fly at the Academy, helped Chewie escape from slavery, went to work for Jabba the Hutt---and it’s not very deep, complex, or compelling. I never liked the bit about his having learned his piloting skills at the Academy anyway. It seems more fitting that he had have learned how to fly on the fly and became a great pilot the way Junior Johnson became a great driver, running from the Revenooers. He didn’t need some instructor at the Academy to teach him. He taught himself the tricks he needed to escape pursuit as he needed them. Whatever and amazing maneuvers he’s able to pull off are due to his having to pull them off. He says as much to Rey in “The Force Awakens.” She asks him if the trick he’s about to try is possible and he says that he never asks himself that question until after he’s done it.
So his having gone to the Academy isn’t needed to explain anything. The thing it does explain or, rather, shows, is something that doesn’t need to be shown---he has a rebellious streak.
But what I really didn’t like about it was that I suspected it was meant to show he was a closet idealist.
He left the Academy---or got himself thrown out---not just because he hated following orders and obeying the rules, but also because he came to hate the Empire on principle.
I like to think that Han is what he appears to be when we first meet him. A totally self-interested and self-serving cynic. When he asks Obi-wan “What’s in it for me?” he’s asking the first question he asks anyone who’s looking to hire him, and it’s the only question whose answer carries real weight with him. He is the pirate Lando affectionately greets him as. And never mind Captains Blood and Jack Sparrow, pirates are not good guys or good guys.
Han’s story, then---the chain of events that will change him, which is what stories do to their main characters---doesn’t begin until he starts to get to know Luke and fall in love with Leia. He changes because of them and for them. His story is the story of a not necessarily bad but definitely not a good man, an anti-hero if not a villain, who becomes a hero through love, friendship, and commitment to a noble cause.
Before that story begins, he hasn’t had a story. He’s just had adventures, all of which repeat the same plot---Han sees a way to make money, events or people get in the way of his making money, things get complicated, he gets into trouble, he gets into more trouble, he tries to talk his way out of it, he fails, so he blasts his way out of it. We didn’t need a movie to show that, although a TV series might have been fun.
Pretty much, though, that’s all that happens in “Solo”, several times over. Fortunately, the movie doesn’t show him to be a closet idealist. But it does show him to be a romantic. Which would be fine if he stayed the same age he is at the beginning of “Solo”----I think about seventeen---but he doesn’t. Years pass. I’m not sure how many but enough that he’s not a kid anymore by the end. So we’re left with Han as a full-fledged adult, who’s still as chipper and optimistic----”I’ve got a good feeling about this,” he says at a point where his future self would say the opposite.---as he was when he was a teenager. This means that the sequels have to be about how he became the hard-bitten and selfish cynic Luke and Obi-wan meet in the Mos Eisley cantina. I have a bad feeling it’s going to involve a girl and a broken-heart.
If there are sequels. Disney seems to have put the kibosh on there being a Solo series.
At any rate, in the original trilogy Han’s story is his learning how to be a good person. If “Solo” becomes canon, then that changes to his learning that he has always been a good person, he was just looking for the right cause to champion and the love of a good woman to inspire him.
So “Solo” isn’t a movie Star Wars fans or moviegoers in general needed. But no movie is truly needed. A movie justifies its own making by being good, and there are many ways for a movie to do that and several ways “Solo” doesn’t. One of the most effective ways is for the movie to tell an interesting story, either visually or narratively, usually both.
Another way is to have good actors making their characters compelling.
I became a fan of Alden Ehrenreich when I saw him in “Hail, Caesar!” and I’ve been rooting for him to become a star. “Solo” won’t hurt his progress to stardom, but I’m not sure it will help him all that much. He’s not bad in the part. In fact, he’s pretty good, but he’s not Harrison Ford, which isn’t his fault, of course, but the comparison is unavoidable. (Actually, at Ehrenreich’s age, Ford wasn’t yet Harrison Ford. He was just a gangly juvenile nobody except Francis Ford Coppola knew what to do with, and Coppola used him as a villain’s prissy henchman. Ford came into his own with his cameo in “American Graffiti”. So Ehrenreich’s got time.) Through much of Ehrenreich’s time on screen, I amused myself imagining a young Harrison Ford delivering Ehrenreich’s lines.
Ehrenreich was most enjoyable in the part when I ignored that that part was Han Solo and imagined he was playing a new Star Wars character, a cocky, wisecracking, young adventurer who happened to be a lot like Han Solo but not as irritable or doomed to tragedy. As a matter of fact, I wish somebody at Disney had thought of that and said “You know, this character is more like Han’s kid brother or, better yet, one of the dozens of bastards Han probably fathered in his buccaneer days! Let’s make that movie!”
Woody Harrelson is good too as Han’s mentor in crime, but his part’s terribly underwritten and he isn’t given much vital to do until the end. Up to then, he and Ehrenreich seem to be having fun cosplaying their own improvised Star Wars adventure without caring if their characters or performances are truly integral to the Star Wars saga.
But if this was Chewie’s movie, the tag line would be “Joonas Suatano is Chewbacca!”
Emilia Clarke as Han’s love interest and “Solo’s” femme fatale---she has to be a femme fatale. There can only be one good woman in Han Solo’s life---seems lost without her white hair and dragons. Paul Bettany probably made a mistake, underplaying the villain instead of hamming it up in a way that would have saved the character as a character as opposed to a plot device and movie trope, a stock “civilized” villain out of a lesser Bond film.
Thandie Newton is fine in the little time she’s on screen but the quality of her performance is a continual reminder she doesn’t have a real character to play or a place in the plot that matters.
Erin Kellyman is onscreen too short a time too, but her character, some sort of vaguely defined warrior princess, seems like it would be integral to the story if “Solo” had a coherent one and like she belongs in the Star Wars canon. I’d like to see her make a return, perhaps as Rey’s early mentor and role model---as Rey’s mother, even, if Kylo Ren is lying in “The Last Jedi” about Rey’s parents having been nobodies---or, if Disney makes the prequels to “Rogue One” I think should be made, as the hero whose example and teaching saves Jyn Urso from following in the path of the mad terrorist Saw Gerrera
Jon Favreau and Linda Hunt do some funny voice work, but both of them disappear quickly and without a trace. Phoebe Waller-Bridge, however, as the droid who’s developed a tender heart and set of revolutionary political ideals, is another example of why voice acting and motion capture performances are Oscar-worthy displays of talent.
And then there’s Donald Glover as the young Lando Calrissian.
In the trailer for “Solo”, Glover’s shown only briefly, but he jumps off the screen at me, pretty much the way Harrison Ford did in “American Graffiti”.
He was the main---actually only---reason I looked forward to “Solo”. I wanted to see what he was going to do with Lando.
Turns out, not much, but because he’s not given much to do. “Solo” uses him mainly as comic relief and to show how Han became the owner of the Millennium Falcon, something else we didn’t need to see---Han and Lando’s short exchange in “The Empire Strikes Back” takes care of everything we need to know and does a better job of it because the scene’s left to our imagination and it’s easily and vividly imagined. When you feel like doing more, said W.C. Fields used to say, do less.
But there’s a Star Wars Story that “needs” to be told.
“Calrissian”!
Han makes it up as he goes. (Yes, I know. That’s Indy’s line. But it’s Lucas’s. It’s Ford’s. So it’s Han’s too, even if, as far as I recall, he never says it in those words.) Lando is someone else who makes it up as he goes. But he does it more intelligently and more successfully. He doesn’t just talk himself out of trouble. He talks himself into clover. We don’t have to guess how Han happened to be in Mos Eisley. But how the devil did Lando end up running Cloud City?
It happened because Lando is someone who always fails upward.
That’s his movie or TV series. Like Han’s, his adventures would have the same plot but with the difference that at the end of each adventure his situation changes for the better if not necessarily to his liking.
Ok. I’m done making this up as I go. To sum up: “Solo” is a visual and narrative mess that doesn’t justify itself as a Star Wars Story mainly because it fails to tell a story, Alden Ehrenreich isn’t Harrison Ford but he’s a likeable rogue and is most convincing as Han Solo when you forget that he’s supposed to be Han Solo. Donald Glover’s in it and he’s on the brink of becoming one of those actors who makes movies better just by his being in them. (See “Spider-Man: Homecoming”.) I don’t know what Ron Howard was given to work with when he signed on, but he had what must have been the maddening job of un-making his predecessor’s Star Wars story while at the same time making a Star Wars story more to his employers’ liking and in keeping with their probably cliched vision, the result being that he couldn’t make his own Star Wars story or anybody’s Star Wars story or any story at all. Still, I had fun watching it. I just wouldn’t watch it again.
One final note.
“Solo” is “needed” in one way.
It answers the question once and for all whether or not Han shoots first.
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“Solo: A Star Wars Story” directed by Ron Howard, written by Jonathan Kasdan and Lawrence Kasdan. Starring Alden Ehrenreich, Emilia Clarke, Woody Harrelson, Thandie Newton, Paul Bettany, Erin Kellyman, Joonas Suatano, and Donald Glover. Rated PG-13. Available on DVD and Blu-ray and to watch instantly at Amazon.
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