Solo: A Mostly Harmless Story

Title: Solo: A Star Wars Story

Directed by: Ron Howard
Written by: Lawrence Kasdan and Johnathan Kasdan

I was cautiously optimistic going into this movie, and still found it a touch underwhelming.

It was harmless.

Well. Mostly harmless.

THE SHITSHOW THAT WAS PROMISED

Perhaps that counts as something of a minor triumph for the makers of “Solo: A Star Wars Story”, given how relentlessly negative most of the pre- and even post-release narrative has been.

Pre-release, the original directors Phil Lord and Christopher Miller were famously fired halfway through the production and the stalwart, staid Ron Howard brought in to reportedly reshoot 70% of the movie. Han Solo actor Alden Ehrenreich was apparently so unimpressive that a coach was hired to put some smug in his smuggler. 

I’ve only just seen this because it was only released here June 29. Frankly, Japan’s decision to delay the release of the movie a full month after the rest of the civilized world (previous Disney movies have come out within a week of the US premier) should have been seen for what it was: a massive vote of no-confidence in the success of this movie. That lack of confidence seems to have been well-founded.

Post-release, the box office results have been less than stellar, as the franchise has been brought firmly down to earth. As I write this, boxofficemojo.com reports that worldwide, the movie has made just shy of $370m, which doesn’t sound bad until you realize it’s about one-third what the next lowest-grossing of the Disney movies, Rogue One, made during its run. Reshoots are reckoned to have blasted the movie’s production budget up to $250m, so when you add in marketing and subtract the theater chains’ take, means the movie will likely lose money on its theatrical run. 

Pundits (well, okay, Internet idiots like me, really) have been quick to suggest reasons for the lack of interest—its release came too hard on the heels of Avengers: Infinity War and Deadpool 2, it came too soon after The Last Jedi (TLJ), it didn’t feel ‘necessary’, audiences are rebelling against the controversy of TLJ and boycotting the movie.

Let me offer another possible reason: It isn’t that good.

It isn’t that bad either, but the best I can offer is that it isn’t the utter shitshow that was promised.

OH, STUFF THE LORE

We open on Corellia, a world of Victorian steel mills and Dickensian child labor, where a young Han (Ehrenreich) dreams of escape with his squeeze, Qi’ra (Emilia Clarke of Game of Thrones fame). The two make a break in a spectacularly dull car chase, and reach the spaceport where they find every memorable moment from the previous Star Wars movies, cut up, stuck in a blender and regurgitated onto the script page at every possible opportunity: Stormtroopers tell people to “Move along,” a recruiting video plays the Imperial March theme, and so on.

Indeed, this movie half feels like an answer to all the obsessives who cried about TLJ’s being unfaithful to the ‘lore’ of Star Wars, designed to stimulate that pathetic need to feel you’re the smartest person in the movie theater. So, so many eye-rolling shout-outs: Tracking devices on the Falcon, the holo-chess table, Teras Kasi from a two decades-old Playstation game, a suit of Mandalorian armor in the background in one scene. Because for too many out there, this seems to now be a substitute for things like engaging characters or an interesting plot.

Ah yes, the plot. Right.

Han escapes Corellia although Qi’ra doesn’t. Han joins the Imperial army, then deserts, joins up with a smuggler and con-man named Tobias Beckett (Woody Harrelson) in a series of escalating heists designed to buy off Crimson Dawn crime syndicate boss Dryden Vos (Paul Bettany). Here, he is reunited with Qi’ra, who has become either Vos’s sex-slave (Vos is creepily and physically controlling of her, and her face falls as soon as he enters the room) and/or lieutenant (she’s a deadly martial artist and Vos sends her with Han to ensure he honors his end of the deal), I’m not really clear which—and I suspect the movie isn’t either. It all culminates in the Kessel Run, made famous in the original Star Wars thanks to an offhand remark Harrison Ford’s Han Solo makes to Luke and Obi-wan.

I was struck how this feels like a movie in search of a purpose or goal, kind of flitting from one scene to the next, dutifully ticking off boxes on the back story that we already know about Han Solo—gets a nickname, tick, meets Chewbacca, tick, gets his blaster, tick, does the Kessel Run, tick, wins the Millennium Falcon in a card game, tick. Shoots first, tick.

Any time the movie appears in danger of going in a new or interesting direction and showing you something you’ve never seen in a Star Wars movie before, it’s immediately reigned in and we skip ahead to the next scene. There is a very, very brief sequence, for example, where Han is thrust in the middle of a sort of World War I-style battle, filled with terrifyingly confusing explosions and smoke, and you think, ah now we’ll see how he grows to hate the Empire through this senseless war.

But nope. Next scene he’s plotting mutiny and escaping with Chewie. I think it was always going to be hard to make an interesting Han Solo prequel (or the Boba Fett and Obi-wan prequels which may or may not be in planning), but seeing the Empire from the inside might have been an interesting twist, focusing less on what we already know about Han and more on what we don’t know, or more on the mechanism of evil, and how the free soul rebels against tyranny. 

Sorry fellas. This movie has boxes to tick.

As a result, each scene and plot point feels thin and stretched out, like an idea spread over too much running time:

“We must escape,” says Han. A minute later, they do.

“I should join the Imperial army,” thinks Han. A minute and a brain-hurtlingly stupid nickname later, he does.

I think it’s symptomatic of this kind of approach of stitching plot points mechanically together that two scenes end with characters walking off in some random direction, despite being in the middle of icy/sandy wastes. It’s very meta, as if the characters just decided to literally walk across the pages of the script to the next scene. You ain’t got no spaceship buddy, where the hell you think you’re walking to?

A SMALL MOVIE

The locations, both interior and ex, feel oddly cramped and soundstage-y. The spice mines of Kessel, for example, look like they could comfortably fit into a suburban back yard. The cinematography is very dimly-lit for about the first third, punctuated by Pokemon-seizure inducing blast of brilliant light. There’s little of the visual flair that made TLJ enjoyable despite its potty plotting, save for perhaps the aforementioned battle scene and one more where we follow Han up the ramp and into the Falcon in the middle of a firefight. Should-be-crowd-pleasing sequences like the initial car chase or the flight through the Kessel Run are instead just kind of leaden and lifeless. The music keeps swelling and telling me something dramatic is going on, but I’m not buying it: Chewbacca sitting in the Falcon’s co-pilot seat, for example, is not in and of itself dramatic. It’s a totally unearned moment, that acquires significance only with knowledge of the Star Wars series. Otherwise, it’s just this big furry ape sitting in a chair.

As Han, Ehrenreich is fine, I guess, aside from one scene where he takes the Falcon’s controls and does the I’m-obviously-not-driving-this waggling the steering wheel from side to side bit. There’s one or two scenes where he shows the thin veneer of bravado over someone unsure of themselves, but there’s too little of this. I don’t especially buy him as the future Han Solo we met in the original trilogy, since he seems to lack any hint of selfishness or cynicism.

Clarke similarly lacks the hint of depth and menace her role seems to call for, as someone who has had to be ruthless in order to survive inside a criminal organization run by an unstable, paranoid narcissist. Indeed, the movie seems uninterested in Qi’ra as anything other than a motivator for Han, which makes her climactic betrayal at the end of the movie far less impactful that it might have been otherwise—despite the fact that her arc seems much more interesting than Han’s.

Phoebe Waller-Bridge has one enjoyable scene as L3, a navigation droid infatuated with Han’s frenemy Lando (Donald Glover), but her ‘droids’ rights’ shtick humor falls flat, coming off as ill-timed mockery of equal rights movements. Even the stunt casting of Donald Glover as Lando didn’t do much for me—though I know other reviewers loved him—I can’t help but suspect his accolades have more to do with the goodwill he’s already garnered from his music and previous acting than with his performance here.

DIRECTIONLESS

I think the common thread between the sketchy plot and sketchy characters is the lack of a clear goal or direction for the characters.

You could do a movie about plot, but here there are three or four, raised and discarded in quick succession. In the good Star Wars movies, the heroes had something they want to accomplish, a goal, an objective. Steal the plans and blow up the Death Star. Become a Jedi knight. There’s none of that here. Han wants to earn enough money to buy his own ship and return to rescue Qi’ra from Cor—oh no wait, there she is. He wants to do a heist to pay off a gang lord—ah, no, he’s decided not to. There’s nothing left to connect you to the main character, a vague sense he wants a ship and independence, but there’s nothing really established onscreen in the movie.

Alternatively, you could do a movie about character, but the titular loner ends the movie much the same as he began it, and we grow no closer to understanding what makes him tick. He says he’s a selfish guy, others say he’s basically good, but there’s no evidence either way. Han is just kind of blown by the plot, exercising little agency at any stage of the story. His friendship with Chewie is paint-by-numbers and established in a single scene, in keeping with this movie’s impatience to cover all the required ground. Qi’ra is another potentially interesting character, but relegated to the background—this movie could have taken a lesson from Mad Max: Fury Road and realized the viewpoint character doesn’t always have to be the center of the action.

So instead we’re left with a kind of rote retelling of what we already know about Han Solo, with no alarms and no surprises, while the hero himself becomes a kind of muddled blur, his only motivation being to hit the required plot points and move the story forward. If the plot points themselves were more fun, we might not notice the boring characters and haphazard execution. It’s not actively, malevolently bad, it’s just a bit dull, lifeless and predictable, content with doing what is safe and expected rather than challenging the imagination of the audience in any way.