2018 | rated PG-13 | starring Alden Ehrenreich, Woody Harrelson, Emilia Clarke, Donald Glover, Thandie Newton | directed by Ron Howard | 2hrs 15mins |
Studio Pitch: Han Solo’s backstory – because Star Wars fans love elaborate backstories.
Remember in aliens-on-Earth pop culture like ALF or ET, the threat was always that the government would find, catch and dissect the aliens, killing them in the process of finding out what made them tick. At this stage in the game, that is pretty much what Disney has done with Star Wars. A series once held in high regard, comfortably on an alter of scif-fi fantasy movie history has been brought back to life by a lazy studio assembling products to cash in on nostalgia and turned into a yearly franchise that harvests out every piece of it to satisfy an audience with an equally guilty bottomless appetite for sequels, prequels and spin-offs. The prequels and spin-offs offered a chance to expand the Star Wars universe in creative new directions with different colors, textures and tones to create a rich overall world. Instead we’re getting rehashes.
I say that also with the caveat that I kind of loved the first prequel, Rogue One, a stand-alone film that proved you can make a film in this universe and twist up the formula a bit, not have all the characters related to each other and give it a downbeat ending. It was the first Star Wars movie since Return of the Jedi that felt lived in and gritty instead of a bunch of actors standing before green screens talking to tennis balls. Well, that polished shine is back with Solo: A Star Wars Story, the inevitable prequel origin story for Harrison Ford’s renegade wild card smuggler Han Solo directed by Ron Howard. While Force Awakens had the reboot stench of going back to the familiar and Rogue One had a Where’s Waldo quality that littered the film with recognizable universe trademarks, Solo is particularly egregious in how it strip-mines every word Harrison Ford ever said in these films to simply recreate their origin on the screen. A mining that has been going on for decades in fan fiction and spin-offs. Solo is a joyless, creatively bankrupt movie adaptation of a Wikipedia page, based almost entirely on Ford’s line in A New Hope: The Falcon is the only ship to make the Kessel Run in under 12 parsecs.
The story is as prequelly as it gets, a straight line from one expected prequel plot point to another: Han (Alden Ehrenreich) and Chewbacca’s meeting, Han and Lando’s (Donald Glover) meeting, Han’s street trash origins on Corellia (a Dickensian re-creation we spend very little time on) and of course the spice mines of Kessel. It’s all here, just as fans have extrapolated for years without a single surprise or original invention to be revealed. The motive for Han’s fall in with cargo thieves (Woody Harrelson and Thandie Newton) – to reunite with his young love interest Qi’ra (Emilia Clarke, bridging the large overlap between Star Wars and Game of Thrones fans). The source of all the fetch-quests the movie sends him on: an explosive hyperfuel Coaxium. Han cares for Qi’ra, but the script also ties Qi’ra to Han’s entire world view of relationships with everyone in the movie giving him their unsolicited opinion about the weakness or benefit of living life alone and trusting others. Mixed in here is the token villain (Paul Bettany) who occupies 2 scenes and poses no threat, the token robot named L3 (voiced by Phoebe Waller-Bridge of Broadchurch) who protests against robot exploitation and equal robo-rights (the movie’s best idea), a giant space monster and Cloud Riders, a tribe of warriors chasing the Coaxium.
At almost 2 and a half hours the movie is waaay too long for what is essentially a heist film and the pace juts mechanically in starts and stops with each set piece, eventually waking up and finding some excitement in the Kessel run sequence. Then there is the lighting. It seems in an effort to make the movie look grittier in post they just turned down the tint. The opening scenes on Corellia look so dark and murky they are almost unwatchable. It would have been nice if this were a deliberate stab at turning a Star Wars story into a neo film noir, but nothing else in the movie points to that. With studios turning the technical aspects over to artists who have this stuff down to an assembly line science, it’s a shocking and rare thing for a big studio movie to visually look as bad as Solo looks. The performances are all around pretty weak. Nobody is really playing a character here, and lacking material to work with, they are doing impressions. Some impressions are passable (Ehrenreich) and some are sport on – Glover’s Lando Calrissian is so good it’s about the best thing in the movie.
It’s hard not to look at this movie out of the shadow of the last flagship film, Riann Johnson’s The Last Jedi. You’d think that the main trilogy would be where the studio would want to play it safe and the spin-offs would be where they would want to encourage experimentation, but exactly the opposite is happening. Johnson’s film burned down conventions from the series in weird and brazen ways that have sent fans in a rage (though I suspect it’s future might be more like Alien 3, an initially hated movie that looks better when the entire series is put together), meanwhile Rogue One and Solo hired indie directors to do their thing, then fired them for doing their thing and reshot the films to something more safe and streamlined. While Ron Howard is hardly a hack, he’s a safe director who makes safe movies. We may never know what Phil Lord and Christopher Miller had in mind for Solo before they got the boot, but given their consistent output of irreverent quality (I’m a huge fan) and their rumored proposal of “21 Jump Street in space”, it sounds like their version would have been exactly the kick in the pants this franchise needs to shock it back into some creativity. The Star Wars universe is a big one, just apparently not big enough for some irreverent comedy or anything else we haven’t already seen before.
#ReleasetheLordandMillerCut
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