As unnecessary prequels go, "Solo: A Star Wars Story" isn't bad. It's
not great, either, though—and despite spirited performances, knockabout
humor, and a few surprising or rousing bits, there's something a bit too
programmed about the whole thing. It has certain marks to hit, and it
makes absolutely sure you know that it's hitting them. Everything that
you expect to see visualized in "Solo," based on your experience with
previously stated "Star Wars"
mythology, gets served up on a silver platter, from young Han Solo's
first meeting with Chewbacca to Han winning the Millennium Falcon in a
card game from its original owner, Lando Calrissian, and making the
Kessel Run in less than 12 parsecs (that parsecs are a unit of distance,
not time, is properly explained at last), to the fact that Wookiees
hate to lose at three-dimensional chess and are strong enough to rip
people's arms from their sockets. We also get to see what some of our
favorites were like when they were younger (Donald Glover's Lando walks
off with the movie). It's fan service of a high order.
Solo: A Star Wars Story (2018)
Director:
Ron HowardStars:
Whether you consider that a bonus or plus will depend on what you
want from a "Star Wars" movie. In some ways, this movie is the antidote
to the sort of "Star Wars" movie that viewers who despised the
prankishly irreverent and oddly introspective "The Last Jedi" seem to
have wanted: one where the payoffs to setups are italicized so that
nobody can miss them, artistic license is subordinated to brand
management, and every reference, no matter how small, that was so
lovingly memorized by devotees of the franchise is placed under a
spotlight for the audience's recognition and self-congratulation.
It's
checklist mythology, but thankfully served up with enough panache to
make the trip engaging. There are also quite a few scenes that fill out
the "Star Wars" universe in ways that only tangentially have to do with
Han Solo, Chewbacca, and other established characters (I'd rather not
say which ones, because a couple of them are genuinely delightful).
These tend to be the most engrossing sections of "Solo" because they
treat your eye to vistas that you probably haven't encountered before,
unless you're familiar with the older cultural sources that the
filmmakers are raiding for inspiration—and even then, director Ron Howard (replacing Phil Lord and Christopher Miller) freshens them up and makes them feel lived-in.
We meet young Han (Alden Ehrenreich) and his girlfriend and partner-in-crime Qi'ra (Emilia Clarke)
on a mining planet that's completely covered by industrial structures
and runs on forced labor, some of it involving children; the
charcoal-smudged visuals, narrow streets and alleys, and hardbitten
street urchins with English accents add up to high-tech Charles Dickens.
When Han signs up for the Imperial Navy but ends up serving in the
infantry in a pointless campaign where he meets his future smuggling
partners Val (Thandie Newton) and Tobias (Woody Harrelson),
the images of suicidal cavalry charges and muddy trenches are straight
out of a World War I picture like "All Quiet on the Western Front" or "Paths of Glory."
A heist of a fuel train—more like a mountain monorail that seems to
slither around the peaks like a metal snake—evokes an old Western where
cowboys jump from horses onto the sides of locomotives. And so on.
The character of Han Solo was introduced back in 1977 (pre-George Lucas
digital revisions) gouging an old man and a farm boy for as much money
as he could get, then pre-emptively murdering a a bounty hunter in plain
view of bar patrons. Nothing in this film is as daring as those
choices—as played by Harrison Ford,
Solo was a borderline antihero and the only major character in the
original trilogy who had a dangerous edge, albeit one that Lucas and
company immediately began sanding down—and as young Solo, Alden
Ehrenriech doesn't convince as a cocky young pilot and smuggler who's
been prematurely soured by a hard-knock life.
Or at least he doesn't convince as this particular
smuggler. He's likable and does "confident" and "smug" very well, but
if this film was determined to cast an actor who didn't look or sound
all that much like Harrison Ford (which is a totally legitimate and
defensible thing to do, don't get me wrong; a straight-up imitation
would've been awful) it might've been a good idea to cast somebody who
at least seemed as if he could eventually turn into the Han that we met in "A New Hope," as Lucas did when he hired Ewan McGregor
to play young Obi-Wan Kenobi in the prequel trilogy. McGregor
miraculously managed to maintain physical and vocal continuity with the
role's original inhabitant, Alec Guinness,
while still giving his own performance. Ehrenreich achieves that second
thing here, but not so dazzlingly that you forget to obsess over the
first.
Some mysterious harmony ought to occur in a movie
that constantly and very obviously tries to connect with its brand even
as its lead actor does his own thing (mostly; the flirtatious grin is
pleasingly Fordian), but the two impulses seem at odds with each other
here. Was Howard expending so much effort bringing weight, maturity and
sincerity to a movie that was at risk of turning goofy and glib under
Lord and Miller that he didn't have the mental bandwidth left to focus
on the actors? Some of the performers make a strong impression
(particularly the alert and reactive Glover, who McGregors the part in a
big way, and Phoebe Waller-bridge as the voice of Lando's copilot,
L3-37, a robot fighting to abolish machine slavery).
But others seem a bit lost at times. Clarke's character has many
layers, but none of them quite seem connected to each other, and she
comes across as much too nice to do some of the things she ends up
doing. Newton, one of the stars of "Westworld," doesn't get much screen
time, and Harrelson, one of those incorrigible kleptomaniac scene
stealers, doesn't give us anything that we couldn't have gotten from any
other fiftysomething character actor who can twirl a gun, crack wise,
and smirk. Paul Bettany's crime boss Dryden Vos might be the first major
player in a "Star Wars" movie to make no impression at all, but the
actor was probably doing the best he could under the circumstances; he
replaced Michael Kenneth Williams,
who was not available for reshoots and was originally cast as a CGI
character, so he was probably playing somebody who had to be rewritten
on the fly without damaging the surrounding narrative architecture. (A
documentary about this film's production troubles would almost certainly
be more fascinating than the film itself.) Some of the unthinking
racism that damaged “The Phantom Menace” returns here as well—you’ll
know it when you see it—and the longer the film goes on,?the clearer it
becomes that “Solo,” like many a “Star Wars” film before it, is not too
interested in women.
I say all this with lifelong love for a film
series, and in recognition of the challenges this project faced. "Solo"
is in a unique and tricky position. Since taking over "Star Wars,"
Disney has tried to Marvel-ize Lucas' universe, extending the
Skywalker-centric main storyline and filling it out with one-offs that
flesh out stories that are adjacent to it. Whatever you thought of
"Rogue One" as entertainment (I loved it), it managed to concoct a story
with its own internal philosophy, style and feeling, and when you
compare it with "Solo," you realize that a big part of what made it work
was its lack of connection to famous characters who couldn't be killed
off. Except for Grand Moff Tarkin, who was basically a bunch of Peter
Cushing-shaped pixels, none of the major players were people we knew;
most of them were characters we'd never heard of, the grunts and
redshirts of the galactic war, and that meant anything could happen to
them, and that the film didn't have to set aside a certain amount of
space for enacting things we'd heard about but never seen dramatized.
"Solo"
doesn't have as much maneuvering room. It's not the first "Star Wars"
film to visualize the pasts of characters that we'd spent time with in
other incarnations—the prequel trilogy gave us a lot of information
about Anakin Skywalker, aka the future Darth Vader, as well as Obi-Wan
Kenobi, Yoda, Palpatine and others—but it is the first "Star Wars" movie
that often feels as if it exists mainly to supply visuals for scenarios
that fans have long daydreamed about, or read about in "Star Wars"
supplementary texts. And even the greatest of filmmakers aren't likely
to be able to give us images, performances and moments that exceed the
ones we've been imagining forever. The bits that land tend to be ones
that come out of nowhere and that have their own excitingly new
emotional temperature, such as L3-37’s righteous ecstasy when she gets
to free some fellow machines, and her frustration with Lando, whom she
fancies even though he takes her for granted and is, shall we say, not
compatible.
"Solo" is hauntingly effective in a very specific way: it gives you a
strong sense of Han Solo and Chewbacca's friendship: how it formed, how
it solidified, and what it gave to each of them. Now that we've seen
the full arc of Solo's life, the innocent joy of discovery that's
present in every scene between the two of them acquires a sorrowful
undertow. Chewbacca, we learn, was already 180 when he met Han. I'm not
sure about Wookiee years-to-human years conversion, but the sheer amount
of time that the big walking carpet has spent in the universe flips our
perception of the friendship and makes us think differently about "The
Force Awakens," where Han is an old man nearing the end of his run. If
the entirety were as charming and unexpectedly haunting as the
friendship between Han and Chewie, "Solo" might've been a classic. As
is, it’s a frictionless trip down memory lane.
Board the Millennium Falcon and journey to a galaxy far, far away in 'Solo: A Star Wars Story,' an adventure with the most beloved scoundrel in the galaxy. Through a series of daring escapades deep within a dark and dangerous criminal underworld, Han Solo meets his mighty future copilot Chewbacca and encounters the notorious gambler Lando Calrissian, in a journey that will set the course of one of the Star Wars saga's most unlikely heroes. Written by Walt Disney Studios
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