Solo is a very good sci-fi skiffy fantasy wild west space opera
movie.
No-one who grew up playing with toy space ships can fail to enjoy
the big middle section in which a space ship bounces around a gravity
well while almost being eaten by a giant space octopus while trying
to rewire the dead robot's brain into the computer while trying to
feed Plot Devisium into the Warp Drive while being chased by TIE
fighters and Star Destroyers.
My mind is still slightly blown by the fact that I have lived to
see this sort of old school Lensemen pulpery projected onto big huge
screens in shopping centres and other people apart from me evidently
want to watch it. (Outside the cinema in Bristol there is a giant
video screen advertising a movie about a dog show and lady's shaving
razors like in Blade Runner. I could have ordered noodles if I'd
wanted to. Just saying.)
Solo gets the visuals and tone and texture of Star Wars exactly
right. It does this by a process of themes-and-variations: Han starts
out working for a gangster who is quite obviously Jabba the Hutt
without actually being Jabba the Hutt; and ends up on a desert planet
full of picture postcard views that look almost exactly like Tatooine
without actually being Tatooine. And there are three separate
photocopies of The Cantina. I think maybe "sleazy Mexican bar
full of aliens" is simply a Space Opera Trope of which the The
Cantina is merely a particularly memorable example.
It's a big universe and probably there should be planets that look
like Milton Keynes on a wet Friday afternoon and planets populated by
sentient rocks and super-intelligent shades of the colour blue. But
there is a kind of consensus about what Star Wars should look like
and Solo looked like that.
Of course it is ridiculous for anyone other than Harrison Ford to
be Han Solo. It was ridiculous for anyone other than Sean Connery to
be James Bond, until it wasn't; and ridiculous for anyone other than
William Hartnell to be Doctor Who, until it wasn't. I don't know if I
quite believed that the young lad who knocks about the universe
getting in and out of scrapes is the same person as veteran smuggler
who Luke bumps into in the second act of A New Hope. But he was an
enraging enough hero for this kind of space opera. There is no doubt
that much of Han Solo's charm came from Harrison Ford, not from the
script. ("You can type this shit, George...") Perry King
speaks many of the same lines in the Radio adaptation, and he comes
across as a rather more mono-dimensional unsympathetic mercenary. But
Han Solo isn't reducible to Ford. For every minute of screen time,
there are ummpety-ump pages of printed text and umpety-ump comic book
panels, all telling the Further Adventures of a figure who is
identifiably Han Solo, none of which have any input from Harrison
Ford.
It is Leia who called Han a mercenary and she wasn't being quite
fair. Han wanted the reward money to pay off Jabba the Hutt, because
if he doesn't, Jabba the Hutt will murder him. We never see any sign
of him enjoying the trappings of wealth or wanting an indulgent
life-style. That's followed through mostly in Solo. Han keeps having
to do heists because he owes money to various galactic undesirables,
but this isn't quite the life he would have chosen.
The "how Han first met Chewie" seen is funny, clever and
retrospectively a bit obvious.
The Han Solo who we meet on Tatooine is older than Luke, a
veteran, maybe 35 to Luke's 19 if we go by actor's ages. He obviously
has a history, and the kinds of stuff he does in Solo is definitely
the kind of stuff we would have imagined him doing. He gets involved
in impossible heists, strikes arrogant poses in seedy space bars,
falls out with nasty gangsters, is betrayed and counter-betrayed
multiple times but usually turns out to have been one step ahead of
them. I didn't believe in the Prequels because I didn't believe that
the kind of adventures Ewan McGregor was having were the kinds of
adventures that Alec Guinness would have had when he was young. Alden
Ehrenreich has exactly the kinds of adventures that a young Harrison
Ford ought to have had.
One of the cool things about a charming, veteran space pirate is
that there is a history and a back story which he knows and you
don't; and one of the specifically cool things about Han is that he
keeps giving us tantalizing glimpses of his past. Arguably, we don't
want to see Han playing cards with Lando, any more than we want to
see Ben Kenobi and Luke's Mysterious Father fighting in the Clone
Wars. But that is an argument against prequels in general, not a
criticism of this film in particular.
It is interesting, is it not, how things that we all assumed were
canon but have never actually been mentioned before slide into these
movies and no-one bats an eyelid. I absolutely knew that the game on
which Lando wagered the Millennium Falcon was called "sabac"
but I am pretty sure I learned that from the RPG, not any movie.
Star Wars is a collision between three things. Star Wars is
actually a collision between a lot more than three things, but three
will do. It's first and foremost great big clashes of dreadnoughts
and doughty little dog-fighters; a space ships and aliens space opera
yarn. Star, in a very real sense, wars. But in the middle of the big
star war there's a King Arthur fairy tale about the last quest of a
magic Knight with a glowy sword. And somehow about two thirds of it
takes place in a world of frontier towns, cactuses, and dodgy bars;
space pirates and space gangsters. Space opera plus space fantasy
plus space cowboys.
The main movies have increasingly focussed on the Jedi Knights to
the exclusion of everything else; Rogue One was basically the Space
Wars bit with everything else taken out. Solo is a space cowboy story
with no Jedi at all. (Spoiler alert: Well, hardly any.) And what it
proves is that the cowboys in space element was always what Star Wars
was mostly about: if you had to define the saga in two words, "Space
Western" does the job much better than "Science Fantasy."
There are no casinos, coffee lounges, libraries, or idyllic romantic
interludes in Solo: no moment at which I thought "I am sorry,
but this is just not Star Wars."
But neither is there anything surprising or imaginative in the
movie. There are good plot twists, but they are the kinds of good
plot twists that you would expect in a movie of this kind; the kind
of plot twists that anyone who had seen Empire Strikes Back would see
coming at a distance of less than twelve parsecs. This is the kind of
Han Solo movie you would have made if you had been asked to make a
Han Solo movie. This is the kind of Star Wars adventure you would
have made up when you were running the Star Wars RPG, and indeed did.
Two thirds of the movie consists of a motley crew of mismatched
individuals who get on okay, but quarrel a bit, in a spaceship that
they kind of call home; which makes it feel not entirely unlike an
episode of Star Wars: Rebels. Indeed, the ending, not quite a cliff
hanger but with distinct loose ends left untied, felt very like the
end of a TV pilot episode. I suppose that since everyone decided in
advance that the film was not a success, we won't now get to see the
follow up.
To an extent, any Star Wars film maker is damned if he does and
damned if he doesn't. Do something experimental and different, use a
Star Wars episode to say something about the Star Wars mythos, give
us surprising takes on much-loved characters and fans (not all fans)
will accuse you of violating the Sacred Saga. Fly close to the genre;
do the kinds of things we expected and hoped you would do; show us
the stuff we always wanted to see and fans (not all fans) will accuse
you of making a redundant film that no-one asked for.
There is a very minor sub-plot about a robot. Some people have
seen ten Star Wars movies and two TV shows but are still surprised
that Star Wars movies often involve cute comic relief. The robot
thinks of itself as female, and is very cross that robots are being
used as slave labour on that planet that C3PO is concerned about
being sent to the spice mines of. (Chewbacca is not wild about what
they are doing to the wookies there, either.)
Some people think that this is an unwarranted intrusion of
politics into what is basically just a series of adventure movies
about plucky revolutionaries overthrowing a fascist regime. If you
are one of these people, you need to seek professional help
immediately.
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