Disney. 2018. Science Fiction. 135 minutes.
About halfway through Solo: A Star Wars Story, stylish space pirate and card sharp Lando Calrissian (Donald Glover) lounges in his beloved Millennium Falcon and speaks into some sort of holographic Dictaphone, regaling it with one of his previous adventures, which he collective calls the “Calrissian Chronicles.” Upon hearing those words, you’ll have to excuse a person for rolling his or her eyes at Disney’s presumed attempt to plant the seed for a future film series, or maybe an ABC television show about the swashbuckling – or maybe lightsaber-buckling – exploits of a teenage Lando.
And why wouldn’t hardened cynicism and charges of mercenary intent be our response to such nonsense? After Disney spent $4 billion to acquire Lucasfilm, they spent, by some reports, another $250 million on this movie, which is based on random snippets of dialogue spoken over 40 years ago. When Han bragged in 1977’s Star Wars that the Millennium Falcon “made the Kessel Run in less than 12 parsecs,” were you wondering how he was able to accomplish such an incredible feat? Upon exiting The Empire Strikes Back 38 years ago, were you really dying for details on the card game where Han won the Falcon? And did you have any reason to believe that Han Solo was not the character’s birth name?
Part of the magic of the original trilogy (as opposed to the prequels, which swapped out magic for cumbersome talk of trade routes) was not knowing the answer to those questions. We either filled in the blanks with our imagination or remained wholly content in the knowledge that the lives of these characters began before the movies began, and that was not only okay, it made Luke, Han, Leia, Lando, and everyone else more real.
Well, nuts to that: Disney plans on delivering a new Star Wars something or other every year and since the core ennealogy (I learned a new word!) can only yield so much RIO, we get background-filling offshoots like 2016’s rather exciting WWII spy mission update, Rogue One: A Star Wars Story, which is also based on a snippet of dialogue spoken over 40 years ago, but it’s the first Star Wars film since The Empire Strikes Back to feel like it was made by actual adults. Solo is also subtitled A Star Wars Story which, this time, feels like an attempt to lessen our expectations.
Indeed, considering the film’s well-chronicled behind the scenes troubles, a lessening of expectations would not be out of order. We’ll never truly know why original directors Phil Lord and Christopher Miller (21 Jump Street) were fired, but you have to give Star Wars overlord Kathleen Kennedy credit for even hiring them. The impulse to take creative risks with a Mount Rushmore franchise outside its primary I-IX is a noble one. But if Lord and Miller were axed, as reports claim, with only weeks left to shoot, why did Kennedy wait so long? What did she expect from the directors of The Lego Movie? And, most importantly in terms of the final product, is the hiring of the workmanlike, risk-averse director Ron Howard a case of overcorrecting?
Luckily, the Howard we get here is not the one who cut his teeth on Roger Corman’s 1977 B-movie chase comedy Grand Theft Auto. Instead, it’s the one who directed George Lucas’ 1988 fantasy hit Willow and surprised us all with 2013’s exhilarating race car drama Rush. Witness Solo’s first action scene on the planet Corellia, where runaways are conscripted into mining coaxium, a powerful spaceship fuel whose main purpose is threatening to explode whenever a scene lacks tension. Young Han (Alden Ehrenreich) has stolen a vial of coaxium and, along with girlfriend Qi’ra (Emilia Clarke), is flying about in a stolen landspeeder with plans of using the coaxium to bribe their way off the planet. As the chase wears on, the landspeeder and its pursuers gliding inches above the roadway, note the cool industrial greys of the grungy mining complex set upon the water. And as Han makes it off Corellia by hastily enlisting in the Imperial Army, leaving Qi’ra behind, we’re taken by urban interiors that feel like authentic, populated areas, not a Pinewood Studios soundstage overrun by extras. Solo is, at its best, a more textured-looking Star Wars film, with credit going to Howard and his ace DP Bradford Young (Arrival).
Because this is not a Holy Trinity Star Wars sequel, the stakes refreshingly don’t involve the fate of a galaxy far, far away. Instead, the stakes involve the fate of a galaxy much, much closer, where in Burbank, California, Disney suits are praying that Ehrenreich will succeed in convincing audiences that he’ll grow up to become Harrison Ford’s version of Han Solo. Expanding on Ray Greene’s thoughts in our TomatoSlam, that Ehrenreich (Hail, Caesar!) fails to accomplish this is not entirely the terrific young actor’s fault. The character, as written by franchise veteran Lawrence Kasdan and his son, Jonathan, is not a proto-version of Princess Leia’s eventual BF, one who will change and mature over the course of many presumed sequels. He is rather the same wise-cracking rogue, just younger. Given that limitation, Ehrenreich has the right amount of cocksure, Western gunslinger swagger, and Ford-ian ability to huff and point at whomever is annoying him. And when Han smiles as the Falcon goes into hyperdrive for the first time, damn it if we’re not smiling, too.
Ehrenreich’s main job is to answer your questions about Han’s origins, the ones you never thought to ask, while escorting us through a moderately tasty heist picture. Three years after his escape from Corellia, Han serves as a grunt in the Imperial Army, dreaming of being a pilot and reuniting with Qi’ra. In the trenches, he befriends eventual mentor Tobias Beckett (Woody Harrelson, doing what he does) and his main squeeze, Val (Thandie Newton, wasted). Together they go AWOL and try to steal a load of coaxium from an elevated train running through a vertiginous mountain pass. It’s an absolutely crackerjack sequence that represents, alas, the highlight of the picture.
When that plan goes south, the group finds itself in the doghouse with “big shot gangster” Dryden Vos, who is played by Paul Bettany after about an hour skimming The Oily Villain Handbook. But Han, of course, has a plan, one that builds to a rather loud and confusing trip into a vortex or a maelstrom or some sort of large, intergalactic space hole.
Solo: A Star Wars Story is fine, but it’s weighed down by its pressing desire to not be bad. One senses that completing production was the primary accomplishment to the exclusion of those virtues that made Star Wars and The Empire Strikes Back so transporting. Such delight we felt in 1977, bearing witness to a timeless myth. Such obligation we feel in 2018, bearing witness to another slab of big studio product. That devolutionary process really started with the prequels, which were disheartening in a manner and style that felt singularly George Lucas. It was disappointment with an auteur’s stamp. Solo is a more heartbreaking disappointment because it’s so generic, an average adventure lumped in with hundreds of other average adventures, distinguished only by our love for the main character.
This is keenly felt in the film’s relationships, especially the one between Han and Qi’ra. It’s too thinly drawn and Ehrenreich and Clarke (whose appeal as a big screen heroine I simply don’t understand) have little chemistry. Donald Glover cuts a dashing figure but his character feels underused, as if no one was entirely sure what to do with him besides lose a game of cards.
Ultimately, the best relationship is between Han and Chewbacca. Because Chewy can only speak in growls, we add meaning to his angry, plaintive or joyful wails. And, unlike the rest of a film so intent on filling in every blank, our idea of what this unlikely pair is expressing to each other is way more emotionally resonant than whatever Howard and Co. could create.
But the most intriguing, if not revolutionary, relationship is never fully explored. I’m willing to bet credits to coaxium that Lord and Miller were responsible for the forward-thinking suggestion that Lando was romantically involved with his droid. Solo‘s oddest exchange involves droid L3-37 (voiced by Phoebe Waller-Bridge) discussing with Qi’ra, in terms that wouldn’t feel out of place in an Amy Schumer comedy, the possibility of getting more serious with Lando if only she was into him that way. Although L3-37’s feminism-inspired pleas for robot equality is a joke that never lands, this one scene is the film’s most telling, for it gives us a glimpse of the bonkers little Star Wars riff this could have been, then decided not to be. For this last minute lack of gall, we should blame The Force: the force of corporate pressure, the force of fan-servicing, the force-feeding of Star Wars product down our collective gullets, and the force of anti-creative interests that took a film that tried to reach for the stars and dragged it down to earth.