Another day another TOMATO SLAM from our roving team of Rotten Tomatoes Tomatometer certified critics. In this episode, Ray and Wade disagree on the merits of “Solo: A STAR WARS Story” as well as whether to follow the “AP Style Manual” when citing film titles. As we begin, Ray is seated before his computer, looking perplexed, as usual…
Ray Greene writes:
I guess I’ll start the ball rolling by stating I really did try hard to approach SOLO: A STAR WARS STORY with an open mind. Yeah the trade papers told me it was a troubled movie because the studio fired its original directors mid-production, and yes there were the usual extensive middle of the shoot rewrites that seem to be the default on all the Disney era STAR WARS projects. That’s life in modern Hollywood, a town where the suits are more empowered than Irving Thalberg or L. B. Mayer ever dreamed they’d be.
But Ron Howard is a reliable old hand who became a bigtime director when he made WILLOW for George Lucas thirty years ago, he reveres and understands the Lucas universe, and he’s been palling around with Harrison Ford since AMERICAN GRAFFITTI days. So what could go wrong?
A lot as it turns out. Aside from one absolutely classic action scene–the “train robbery” on the mining drone, which I’m sure we’ll talk more of later–and a couple of intriguing plot twists about Han Solo’s early life that go entirely unexplored, I’d go so far as to call this movie a noisy, expensive timewaster, with little of the charm and none of the pop opera resonance this franchise is known for.
I actually felt kind of sorry for Alden Ehrenreich. Harrison Ford is a once in a generation kind of movie star–he’s a star because he’s unique, because he brings something to the screen you just can’t find anywhere else–and his pairing with the perfect role in STAR WARS is a once in a century kind of meeting between the right actor and the right part.
So it’s hard to describe the particular alchemy at work in the original Han Solo, but I’ll try: I think it’s the mating of Harrison Ford’s drawling, oddly laconic, Gary Cooper energy with a frenetic action character that made Solo Prime so memorable.
Han Solo was essentially the original movie’s comic relief–the everyman in stasis at the center of a whirling world of action-packed chaos. He’s like Buster Keaton standing deadpan and immovable as an entire town gets blown down around him–simultaneously a celebration of the American screen’s squint eyed cowpoke ideal of unflappable heroism and a send-up of it (after all, Han Solo’s best friend is basically a giant stuffed animal).
Above all, Harrison Ford’s Han Solo is self-contained–a space opera John Wayne, a rugged individualist with a ray gun. He doesn’t need us, and he doesn’t want our love, which is why the audience yearns for him to get together with Leia so badly–they want to see his solitude breached.
Alden Ehrenreich’s Solo is like a teenager with his first crush: not only does he want our love, we–the audience–are all he can seem to think about.
Watching him grin, smirk and winnow like a young colt, I was reminded, as I have been so often in my recent moviegoing, of just how baldly, blandly, tragically generic this era of film stars is. There have been jokes about how interchangeable all the big screen “Chris’s” are, with Chris Pine trying to take ownership over the gag in an SNL monlogue by parsing what separates him from Chris Pratt and Chris Hemsworth.
The gag was lame (and unfair to Chris Pratt) but the point is a real one. These interchangeable pretty boys, with their carefully scripted vulnerabilities, great teeth and studio gym biceps become harder and harder to tell apart, let alone root for. And Alden Ehrenreich is one more beefcake link in the chain. If Harrison Ford’s Solo puts you in mind of Gary Cooper and Randolph Scott, Alden Ehrenreich makes you think of the western performances by the 50s teenage crush actors like Ricky Nelson and Fabian.
I guess this is what happens when CPAs run a creative enterprise like a movie studio. In his universally acceptable dreaminess and broad likability, Alden Ehrenreich is a walking hedge, a human limitation of risk. It’s the movie star as politician. And that’s not what I go to movies for.
But I digress. Which means it’s time to pass the ball. Over to you, gentlemen….
Wade Major writes:
I largely agree with almost all of your points, Ray, though I think I liked the film better than you on several counts.
As I’m not especially fond of the “Star Wars” universe to begin with, “fan service” doesn’t mean much to me. “Empire” was the last, and perhaps the only film that genuinely enthralled me and I’ve been waiting ever since for something that measured up. It was a clinic in how to deliver fan service without being enslaved by it, basically using it to garnish something that was fresh and new with just enough of the old and familiar.
I don’t think “Solo” comes anywhere near that accomplishment, but it comes nearer than anything I’ve seen since, with the possible exception of “Episode III” which has its moments. Like the best stuff in the “Star Wars” films, it riffs on other genres and films — Westerns, World War I movies, samurai movies — and has enough of the Kasdan touch, thanks to Larry and his son Jonathan’s script — that I could swallow the obligatory fan service without choking on it.
I loved the train robbery — especially the marauders who seem to come in sideways from a “Mad Max” movie — and I enjoyed the broad strokes of the larcenous storyline, though the setup is much better than the payoffs which end up cascading needlessly through some sloppy double-triple-quadruple-crossing switchbacking reversals and Geordi La Forge-style hyper-technical jargon to invent needlessly complex dilemmas requiring even more needlessly complex solutions.
As a tangential “Star Wars Story,” however, I found “Solo” vastly superior to “Rogue One” which damn near put me to sleep with the repetitive action drudgery of the Imperial Walkers-in-Tahiti finale. I didn’t care about anyone in that movie. I did in this. I found the romance with Emilia Clarke compelling and I even warmed to Woody Harrelson as Tobias Beckett, presumably Han’s kinda sorta mentor. And I liked the open-ended conclusion suggesting further development to get us from “here” to “there.”
But all that said, I have real ambivalence about this new tendency in movies generally to fill in backstory which prior films intentionally left vague. Han Solo has always been a compelling figure in large part because so much of his past is shrouded or suspect. He’s one of those people who has “done things” and we’re supposed to leave it at that and let our imaginations fly. Likewise James Bond — until “Spectre” retconned a silly neo-Blbilcal backstory about Bond and Blofeld being “brothers.” I didn’t need that. It’s enough that Bond is Bond and Blofeld is Blofeld. I don’t need more.
Likewise, even though “back stories” and the revelation thereof is the stuff of “Star Wars” lore, I didn’t need to find out how Han and Chewy met, I didn’t need to know how old Chewbacca is, I didn’t need to know how they meet Lando (though Donald Glover cuts a dashing Billy Dee Williams), I didn’t need to find out how they came into possession of the Millennium Falcon etc.
None of that makes the prior films more enjoyable, none of that makes this film especially enjoyable. All of it may make prior films less enjoyable.
Mark Keizer has a litmus test he always raises for sequels of this type, which is whether we’d be equally enthralled by the film on its own merits without the inherited nostalgia of what came before. I would say that with the exception of “Empire,” that hasn’t been true for any “Star Wars” film ever – the whole universe has been riding on the fumes of the original film for over four decades. It’s certainly not true for this film.
But Ron Howard is a good enough craftsman that “Solo” still works well enough to make it worth recommending. There’s also a bit of Ron Howard fan service here that I found more enjoyable than the “Star Wars” fan service — the obligatory cameo by Clint Howard, and the welcome surprise of “Willow”’s own Warwick Davis in a small supporting role. But it’s also too easy to see the seams between his material and what was shot before he came on board. Some of it is seamless, much of it isn’t.
Ehrenreich I can forgive — he does the best he can, stepping into unfillable shoes, much like the cast of the rebooted “Star Trek.” Once you accept the Sisyphean task for what it is, you can kind of roll with it.
My only other real gripe, I suppose, is with the way that Disney seems to be emulating an old school Studio System model where the same people and “types” keep showing up in their various “universes.” Paul Bettany is too closely associated with Marvel these days, as is Jon Favreau whose voicing of the four-armed Rio is just too close to Bradley Cooper’s Rocket Raccoon in “Guardians of the Galaxy.” It actually forced me start making mental comparisons between Ehrenreich and Chris Pratt — and we’re back to the SNL bit.
Maybe audiences of the 1930s didn’t mind seeing the same six people show up in every Warner Bros. movie, but today’s audiences expect — and deserve — firmer delineation between departments.
So, yeah. I didn’t love it. I didn’t hate it. Parts of it enthralled. Parts of it bugged. I was entertained, but feel no compelling desire to see it again, though I’m happily on the hook for where they take it in the next film. So chalk it up as a modest success in my book.
Tim Cogshell writes:
Ray Greene writes:
Re: The next film: I dunno. I think Disney may surprise themselves by proving the STAR WARS “universe” is a collapsing one over time. THE LAST JEDI did a lot less business than THE FORCE AWAKENS (though both were huge) and despite the enhanced fan awareness and the inevitable reboot curiosity factor, I will be only a little bit surprised if this film underperforms the previous “A STAR WARS Story” ROGUE ONE.
The trendlines for Disney’s Marvel franchise titles on the other hand are up and up–BLACK PANTHER is now the top-grossing individual superhero movie ever released in North America, INFINITY WARS is globally the top grossing comic book movie of all time (and is possibly on its way to outgrossing any STAR WARS movie ever released).
Despite Disney’s desire to build them out similarly, STAR WARS isn’t Marvel, a microstudio which can enliven the tedium of repetition by drawing on a vast array of road-tested characters and recombine them with fresh results. This still comparatively young STAR WARS cycle is already borrowing from itself, and that’s never a good sign. BIG FAT SPOILER ALERT: The MALTESE FALCON-like twists at the end of SOLO essentially rejigger the character geometry so that you have the exact boy-meets-girl-meets-conflicted-villainy syntax of THE LAST JEDI, only with the genders reversed.
If the comic book mentality infuses both franchises, the advantage goes to Marvel, because they get to adapt stories from decades worth of film-ready plotlines created by true greats of comic book style storytelling like Marv Wolfman and Stan Lee.
STAR WARS can seem modernish thanks to all the hardware, but it isn’t even science fiction really (hence all the borrowings on display in SOLO, mostly from Westerns, including THE WILD BUNCH for the train robbery and THE GOOD THE BAD AND THE UGLY for the 3-way duel at the climax). SOLO’s ideas of action were generated by the b-movie and serials units at Republic and Universal Pictures in the 1940s, and its central devices feel antique–car chases and gunfights basically, but souped up with tech and art direction.
There are moments in this movie where the heroes are pinned yet again against the gangway of a spaceship that has to leave RIGHT NOW while firing lasers at the baddies where I thought, “Wow. There are real limits to how much of this stuff I can watch.”
Wade Major writes:
re: Borrowing: It started doing that already with the first JJ film in episode seven. Lucas even criticized them for doing as much. That’s not just a mark of lack of imagination and corporate risk-aversion — it’s a slavish devotion to fan service on the belief that fans just want to see old stuff rehashed ad infinitum. It’s a fundamental lack of trust in the material.
CPAs are ruining everything.
re: the relative robustness of the Marvel and Star Wars Universes: I would agree. There’s another facet as well — Marvel is godfathered by Kevin Feige who is a dyed in the wool Marvel nerd who is passionate about the whole universe. He’s an executive auteur. Maybe the first time that’s ever happened on this level. It’s his mark that’s all over these films.
Who’s running Lucasfilm? Kathleen Kennedy. Does she have a passion for them? Not in the least. It’s a job. If JJ were running the company it might be different, but JJ doesn’t want to be an executive.
I find the Marvel universe utterly ridiculous, but they do keep it fresh enough for all the reasons you enumerate. But even that’s going to hit a wall at a certain stage. But by then Bob Iger will be old and retired and cashed out, so what does he care?
The future, I say, still belongs to the new studios — and not necessarily Netflix. I think we’re in the Thomas Edison moment of streaming. The Warners, Paramounts, Universals, Columbias of this new era have yet to manifest themselves. Just like 25 years ago when all this tech stuff was starting there was no Google or Facebook.
In ten years it’ll be a whole new media landscape.
Ray Greene writes:
re: Borrowing: I don’t mean the new Disney “Star Wars” series is imitating the originals–I think that’s a given (no more giant space beasties!). I mean it’s imitating ITSELF. In other words (BIG FAT SPOILER ALERT REVISITED) the one major new character thing they did in the post-Abrams STAR WARS films is they started hinting at a Romeo and Juliet thing across the dividing lines of the “good” and “bad” use of the Force. We have that here again, but without the Force.
Ventriloquism from the original George Lucas productions is a given–don’t even get me started on Lando’s Spartacist female robot navigator/co-pilot L3-37, a character so shrilly miscalculated Tim Cogshell turned to me during the screening and said, “I think we’re in Jar Jar Binks territory here…”
But L3-37 is there in part because there needs to be a new robot. Every movie. And while I admire the sentiment of having a forceful and feminist-ish female character, like all the purely CG characters since Disney took hold of these movies, L3-37 (as well as Jon Favreau’s monkey-like Rio) is paced as if she’s in a Pixar movie–ramped up ro 1.5x normal speed, chattering at a mile a minute. And that makes her hard to follow and even harder to care about.
I’ve held off on Lando because I knew Tim had some thoughts there, but let me just say: I think Donal Glover is a great choice for the character, and I think he’s somewhat poorly used, but with a suggestion of more and better to come.