One Year Since Solo: a Star Wars Story

Any bad feelings we had about this one were more than justified.

Welcome back to another Star Wars revisit. This time we look at the most recent but already least remembered film in the franchise, Solo. Previous entries: The Phantom Menace, Attack of the Clones, Revenge of the Sith.

In the 27 years I have been on this earth, Solo is the first Star Wars film I simply didn’t like.

There have been worse Star Wars movies, yes. Films with more obvious flaws, more muddled ideas, bad dialogue and bad acting. All the problems you’ve heard about so many times. But all of them still had something worth writing home about. Something distinctive and memorable. Some sort of perspective on the world. A sense that someone wanted to make it for reasons other than simply money. A sense that there was a story worth telling here.

Solo, however, feels like someone ran the numbers and saw who the most popular Star Wars character was, and thought, yes, let’s cash in.

The idea of a “Han Solo origin story” is a strange one when you think about it for longer than the five minutes it presumably took for this thing to get greenlit. Han already had an origin story. It’s about how he went from a selfish smuggler on the edge of the galaxy, a man in it for himself and himself alone, to someone willing to risk his own life to save the rebellion against the Empire. You can watch it in an obscure old ‘70s film called Star Wars. Han’s death in The Force Awakens pays off nearly forty years of storytelling for the character neatly. You can’t have an origin for a character who just becomes Some Guy. This isn’t about how Han Solo becomes “Han Solo, hero of the rebellion”. It’s about how he becomes the guy before he becomes that. You may as well make an Incredible Hulk origin story about how Bruce Banner became a scientist.

If Solo was being honest about the origin story it was telling, it would end with a bitter and jaded Han rejecting the world and deciding he’s in it only for himself. It would be a kind of Better Call Saul for the Star Wars franchise. But that’s hardly a recipe for a broadly appealing popcorn movie. The film thus can’t examine who Han really is, so it instead fixates on the details. Ever wondered about the Kessel Run? It’s here. Wanted to know why the Millennium Falcon has a weird gap at the front? The answer’s in this movie! Curious about how Han got the name “Solo”? I mean, obviously you were not curious about that, you just assumed his parents were the Solos like any rational person would, but you get an explanation here anyway! Solo suffers a familiar problem in contemporary Hollywood in that it prioritises explaining inconsequential details. It feels as though the creative team took a list of “Cinema Sins” style complaints about implausibility around Han and tried to explain them away. None of this matters. None of it. Not one tiny bit.

What does matter, however, is the impact of Han’s journey. A great prequel should deepen the emotional beats from the original films. When Han says “I know” before getting frozen in carbonite, it should hurt that little bit more now that we’ve seen the man he was. And by this measure, Solo fails completely. The main thing we learn about Han is that he was, for the most part, basically the same guy we remember Harrison Ford playing since way back. I would argue it in fact dampens the impact of what happens to him over the course of the original trilogy. In this new casting, Han was always a decent person at his core, who simply needed to bump into the right people in order to shine, rather than a cynical smuggler who became better through the bonds he formed with others. One of the most interesting critiques I’ve read of The Force Awakenswas this idea that it “accidentally creates the idea that there are 'great people' and 'normal people', and Rey's simply one of the better people destined to help everyone else”, which, in the writer’s view, “fundamentally detracts from the straight-up radical proletarian imagery of the previous six films”. This is something that I think applies even more directly to Solo. Han is elevated to being someone uniquely special in this world. There were many poor orphans on Corellia, but only he had what it takes to make it out. For all that the franchise has recently been pushing the idea that “the force is for everyone”, moves like this, to elevate the hero characters over the dregs of the galaxy, totally undercut that message. In The Empire Strikes Back, Yoda criticises Luke for spending his youth thinking about far off adventures instead of what was in front of him. The message of Solo, however, seems to be that Han needed to get the hell out of Corellia because he’s better than those people.

The theme of the film, as much as there is one, seems to be about forging families and finding your tribe in the galaxy. This is so poorly articulated as to make it a waste of time. The nature of being a prequel is that we know Han will not, for the most part, meet the most important people in his life for many years yet, so any lesson he learns here would have to be quickly unlearned. The theme is most strongly pushed in the films most ambitious and least effective element, Phoebe Waller-Bridge’s “droid rights” activist L3-37 (the less said about the pun in the name, the better). Waller-Bridge was cast by the film’s original directors Phil Lord and Chris Miller, before they left the project midway through production as the film was overhauled. If Lord and Miller had a more overtly comedic, more “out there” take in line with the rest of their work, L3 could have been an ideal fit. As it is, she’s way out of keeping with the rest of the film. The question of droid rights is an interesting one, but the film has no interest in taking it seriously, instead viewing it as a punchline. Anything it might have to say on the subject is totally meaningless.

Maybe this is too harsh of me. Perhaps I should just enjoy this silly popcorn movie for what it is. And, in fairness, Solo has some things to recommend. The action scenes are really well directed, with the train heist being a particular highlight. In an age of blander than bland looking Marvel movies, big blockbusters have forgotten how to shoot action, and Solo is some fun here. The cinematography does feel awfully dark, though. I watched this film in its theatrical release and now on blu-ray with a TV that handles black levels pretty well. On every occasion I’ve found certain scenes very difficult to make out. I’m sure it looked great in the incredible screening facilities at Lucasfilm. But if it can’t even pass the muster in a normal cinema, let alone a smaller TV during the day, then I’m sorry but you blew it. From my limited understanding (correct me if I’m wrong on this), there seems to be a principle with music that something should be made to still sound reasonable on low quality speakers. For whatever reason, this doesn’t seem to apply to film and TV. It’s very frustrating.

And what gets me is how this dimly lit cinematography totally cuts against what’s otherwise supposed to be a light and breezy heist film. It’s here where we really need to talk about the production of the film. The narrative has become that Lord and Miller were taken away from the project due to their more interesting, idiosyncratic take not fitting Disney’s very conservative tastes. And there’s certainly some truth to that. But it’s worth remembering that the pair had no hand in the script, here delivered by long time Star Wars scribe Lawrence Kasdan alongside his son Jon. I’ve joked in the past that Kasdan senior surely pushed for his other son, Jumanji: Welcome to the Jungle director Jake Kasdan, to helm this, and thus held a grudge against Lord and Miller for that. And the film spends so much time dealing with forged families, presumably an even stronger theme in the Kasdans’ script, that this might actually be an issue. It seems obvious that the script had a totally different take to Lord and Miller, with Howard being brought in to “fix” it and bring it closer in line with what was on the page. The executives at Lucasfilm and their bosses at Disney, meanwhile, just seemed to want to make sure it felt sufficiently “Star Wars-y” to fit their very narrow view of what the franchise should be. What the film thus feels like is an amalgamation of different, broken approaches that add up to nothing.

Could a singular vision have made something worthwhile here? I’m not convinced. The idea of a Han Solo origin story to me feels like such a misguided idea. There is no story to tell here. Solo feels like a modern Hollywood problem - a need for every franchise to be endlessly expanded - with the most modern Hollywood solution - an origin story filling in meaningless details nobody ever wondered about. The other Star Wars films made under the Disney leadership all had some kind of idea about why the franchise worked. With The Force Awakens, J.J. Abrams thought hard about what made audiences respond so much to the original trilogy and looked to evoke it with a new sense of energy. Rogue One and The Last Jedi both had interesting directors looking to take what they loved about Star Wars growing up and put their own spin on it. But Solo? It knows you like Star Wars. It knows all the things you like about it. But it does not have the faintest idea why you like it. It’s a hollow film from a hollow industry.

Let us never speak of it again.