Solo: A Star Wars Story
Directed by: Ron Howard
Written by: Lawrence & Jonathan Kasdan
Starring: Alden Ehrenreich, Woody Harrelson, Emilia Clarke, Joonas Suotamo, Donald Glover, Phoebe Waller-Bridge, Paul Bettany, Thandie Newton, Warwick Davis, Clint Howard, Andrew Jack, Linda Hunt
Action/Adventure/Fantasy - 135 min Reviewed by Charlie Juhl on 21 May 2018
Written by: Lawrence & Jonathan Kasdan
Starring: Alden Ehrenreich, Woody Harrelson, Emilia Clarke, Joonas Suotamo, Donald Glover, Phoebe Waller-Bridge, Paul Bettany, Thandie Newton, Warwick Davis, Clint Howard, Andrew Jack, Linda Hunt
Action/Adventure/Fantasy - 135 min Reviewed by Charlie Juhl on 21 May 2018
It is and is not the Star Wars you grew up on. Here are characters with names you know and look, there’s the Millennium Falcon. However, there are no Jedi, no force, no lightsabers, and no big bang John Williams soundtrack accompanying a word crawl to set the scene. It’s not wrong; it’s just different. Rogue One: A Star Wars Story didn’t sport any Jedi either, but it felt closer to the main storyline because there was depth. Do not confuse a high body count for depth; otherwise, some of the Rambo franchise may be considered the most weighty films ever made. I mean, the story had oomph. Solo: A Star Wars Story has a truck load of whiz-bangs and an overload of fanboy homages to later films in the chronology, but it sticks to a lighter action/adventure atmosphere. Replacement director Ron Howard took George Lucas’s advice to heart, “Always remember, this is for 12 year-olds.”
Disney abruptly fired the original directing duo, Christopher Miller and Phil Lord of The LEGO Movie fame, over creative differences. Was their version too light, too dark? No idea. I have a hard time believing it was too light. Disney brought on Ron Howard to ‘save’ the film and here is a director where for every Apollo 13 on his resume, there is an Inferno, Cocoon, and Splash. An alleged Miller/Lord director’s cut will probably morph into an urban legend, but at the very least, as time passes, I hope we learn why Disney opted to shift gears midway through filming. Regardless of who defines the visuals and creates the fantastic worlds, the script is the most familiar character in the film.
Disney abruptly fired the original directing duo, Christopher Miller and Phil Lord of The LEGO Movie fame, over creative differences. Was their version too light, too dark? No idea. I have a hard time believing it was too light. Disney brought on Ron Howard to ‘save’ the film and here is a director where for every Apollo 13 on his resume, there is an Inferno, Cocoon, and Splash. An alleged Miller/Lord director’s cut will probably morph into an urban legend, but at the very least, as time passes, I hope we learn why Disney opted to shift gears midway through filming. Regardless of who defines the visuals and creates the fantastic worlds, the script is the most familiar character in the film.
Father/son writing team, Lawrence and Johnathan Kasdan, mined the original trilogy, of which Lawrence wrote The Empire Strikes Back and Return of the Jedi, for clues. Many events young Harrison Ford mentioned such as the Kessel run or winning the Millennium Falcon fair and square from that scoundrel Lando Calrissian are front and center scenes. More obscure easter eggs like Chewbacca losing at monster chess and the prospect of jobs on Tatooine also pop up. None of it feels unnecessarily wedged in, but it is not as organic as either the Rogue One or Last Jedi scripts. Most of all, Solo is a prequel with definite boundaries and limitations because we all know the future. It is an origin story of a character the audience knows will help bring down an Empire, marry a princess, father a son, and be murdered by that very son.
Long before any of that happens, Han Solo (Alden Ehrenreich, Hail, Caesar!) hustles through a tough life as a con artist sharpening his street-smarts before he can use them to get himself and his girlfriend, Qi’ra (Emilia Clarke, Terminator Genisys), out of service to some very creepy looking mob bosses. Han Solo's story begins as an Oliver Twist life; Han is one of a multitude of exploited children eeking out a nothing existence in servitude to a Fagin-like master. The Han Solo paradox is even though he lives by his wits and pulls off the occasional scam to better his short-term prospects, Han Solo is fundamentally good. He would to like to erase it or grow out of it, but we as an almost omniscient audience who know Solo’s future, know he will never ditch his inner good guy even though he may suffer a brief distraction every now and again.
Solo: A Star Wars Story follows Han’s internal tug-of-war. Finally front and center out of the shadow of Luke Skywalker and Rey, this is Han’s right of passage journey. Will he fight for the Empire busy enslaving and pillaging the galaxy? Will he join a bandit gang and enrich himself through the pain and suffering of others? Or, will he discover his own path which is a sort of middle way through the extremes? While Han receives title billing, Solo is also an origin story for the supporting characters who also pop up in his hemisphere later on. The curious meeting and partnership of Han and Chewbacca (Joonas Suotamo) occurs as well as the appearance of the swashbuckling, cool, handsome, and most of all charismatic Lando Calrissian (Donald Glover, The Martian).
We barely got to know Lando in Episodes V and VI, but Glover gets to dig deeper and show us what makes Lando tick. Lando’s right-hand man is actually a droid, L3-37 (Phoebe Waller-Bridge, The Iron Lady). Reminding us of K-2SO from Rogue One, L3-37 continues the trend of having the audience empathize and root for a three-dimensional droid. C-3PO and R2-D2 were slapstick sidekicks in the original movies. They made us laugh, but we never invested in them. K-2SO and L3-37, on the other hand, harbor motivations and are frequently more human than the flesh and blood souls around them. Han, Lando, Qi’ra, and a shifty bandit, Tobias Beckett (Woody Harrelson, Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri), form an ad hoc group to pull off an impossible heist boosting hyper-fuel from a remote planet, a location as hard to reach as it will be to escape from. It is the equivalent of trying to steal barrels of highly explosive oil from Saudi Arabia.
Beckett and his crew of misfits show there is a sort of honor among thieves - to a point. All of the key relationships, Han/Chewie, Han/Lando, Han/Beckett, and especially Han/Qi’ra, are complicated by callous human nature, suspect love, and bitter disappointment. Han will learn life is multiple shades of grey rather than black-and-white through pain and loss which will shape the rest of his life. The audience’s relationship to Han has also changed throughout the decades and sequels. In 1977, Han was a quirky sidekick full of braggadocio and swagger. We’ve come around on him since as he aged, softened, and met his tragic end. However, he will always be the sarcastic pilot who made the Kessel run not in a unit of time, but in a unit of distance - 12 parsecs. Solo addresses those fan questions which must have antagonized countless late night nerd sessions for middle school kids in the late 70s/early 80s. Disney, Ron Howard, and millions of middle-aged film-goers are all hoping their inner 12 year-olds will approve.
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