Solo: A Star Wars Story

As an aside, before I even begin: Does "A Star Wars Story" work for you? I feel like it sounds awkward. Something about the indefinite article and the utterly generic "story." It's like whenever you have a biopic that's "Otherwise Interesting Title: The Famous Person Story" always makes it sound like it's some really crappy made-for-TV-movie-back-when-such-things-were-often-terrible.

Anyway.

I'm still often surprised to see people who react so negatively to the Last Jedi. As a lifelong (if starting at age 9 counts) Star Wars fan, the Last Jedi was the exact sort of decon/recon I wanted to see of the new movies. The Force Awakens, while its characters redeemed it, rehashed a lot from the original movies, and the Last Jedi delved into the philosophy and mysticism in ways that I found fascinating. I felt it challenged the audience in a way that the Force Awakens had been too gunshy to do - examining just what would happen to someone who was simultaneously a human being but also a godlike figure of legend.

Solo doesn't do that. In many ways, it is the quintessential fan service film. It ticks a hell of a lot of boxes, explaining things like why Han described the Kessel Run in units of distance rather than time (which has been a subject of nerdy debates for like forty years - I'd always just assumed it was a research error) or why his last name was Solo (turns out the heavy-handed character labeling is in-universe.)

True to Star Wars tradition, Solo is a mixture of genres. It's part Western, part Noir, part Heist movie. I don't want to do a full plot recap, but basically the film starts with Han and his girlfriend Qi'ra (I had just assumed she was Keira until I saw the IMDB page) trapped living in some rat hole on Corellia run by a local crime boss. Han gets his hands on some valuable fuel and attempts to use it to escape the planet with Qi'ra, but just as they are about to get out, Qi'ra is seized by the mob lackeys and they're separated.

Hoping to be a pilot, Han joins the Imperial Academy, but we rush through those three years to find that he washed out and wound up in the infantry, fighting in some WWI-style trench warfare on some planet that is probably totally innocent and just being put under the Imperial boot heel.

But the movie isn't about the Empire or the not-quite-there-yet Rebellion. We actually don't see a lot in the way of Stormtroopers or the Empire in general. Indeed, as the brief blue-texted captions at the start (echoing the initial "A long time ago in a galaxy far far away...") describe, it's a time of lawlessness. The Empire, like so many autocratic regimes that claim to be there to restore law and order, are actually not in the least interested in doing so.

As befits a Han-centric story, we're dealing with criminals and outlaws, and only in the sense that the more powerful mobsters have friends or minions within the Imperial hierarchy does the government really come into play.

So what we have is a plot in which Han screws up a job, only to realize that this puts him in debt with a very powerful person you wouldn't want as an enemy, and so he and his team have to pull a more dangerous job, all while dealing with double-crosses and unclear loyalties.

Of the three genres that the movie apes, the least effective is the heist movie - there's very little of the fun, Ocean's Eleven-style planning, complications, and reveals. Instead we see criminals doing what I might term "opportunistic heroism," as they stage a slave revolt within the spice mines of Kessel so they can sneak their loot out in the chaos.

In terms of Noir, Han's relationship with Qi'ra is pulled pretty directly out of that genre - the lost love who resurfaces with a potentially darker past than the hero's and whose loyalties thus cannot be trusted. Unfortunately, the only real payoff for this is what seems like a sequel hook for a movie that's already an interquel spin-off featuring a character long thought dead unless you've been watching the animated TV shows or, like me, reading AV Club reviews when they catch your attention. It's really not clear to me that such a sequel will happen unless by shear force of Disney filmmaking will. Unfortunately, this forces Emilia Clarke to play the whole movie as an enigma we might never be able to explore and unravel.

One of the oddities of the movie is that Alden Eirenreich is not all that much younger than Harrison Ford was when he first played Han. Now, I wouldn't want to see Han as a little kid (just as, in retrospect, it wasn't a great idea to introduce Anakin in the prequels before he was, like, twenty - among other issues.) But it does sort of shrink the time scale here. Lando is supposed to be one of Han's best friends by the time of Empire, and so having him just meet him here suggests the bond is a somewhat weaker one than we might have assumed (one could have imagined them being childhood friends from the way they act in Empire.)

Now, for the record, I did think it was a pretty fun movie. It just didn't blow me away with anything. It was pretty much the movie I expected it to be. And some people might really like that - especially after the risks that Last Jedi took. If you're looking for space adventures with Han and Chewbacca, this is definitely that. And if you want to explore the underbelly of the Star Wars universe in a way that Rogue One didn't even really do, this gets at that as well. Star Wars popularized the "used future" aesthetic, and this really gets that look - we even see that Lando's ship - you might have heard of it - the Millennium Falcon, was once a pretty snazzy vessel before Han got it all jacked up.

I would say that all eight existing main Star Wars films are essential in their own way - the prequels for showing how ambition without restraint can create cinematic abominations, and the sequels for handing off a film franchise to a generation of filmmakers who grew up on it and seeing their own takes on the world and its mythos (I don't really need to explain why for the originals, right?) Rogue One was a bold and bleak leap out of the series comfort zone, which made up for its flaws with "holy shit did they really do that?" chutzpah.

Solo... is inoffensive. I'm a sap so I'll always be curious about the fate of long-lost love interests, but in ways that Rogue One avoided by centering entirely on new characters, Solo suffers a bit of the inherent problem with prequels, which is the foregone conclusion. We know that he won't get back with Qi'ra because he has to get with Leia. And we know that Lando, Chewbacca, and Han are all going to be fine, which then makes the deaths of other characters less shocking.

If there's one thematically interesting thing the movie reinforces, though doesn't really introduce, it's the idea that Han gets betrayed. The depths of that betrayal do have a range - Lando at one point abandons him in the middle of a standoff, but one does not get the impression that either of them considers it personal. But given what we know of how Han ends up in the end of The Force Awakens (does that still need a spoiler tag? Would you be reading a review of a Star Wars movie if you hadn't seen it?) the fact that Han's life is filled with betrayals makes his death at the hands of his own son really freaking tragic.

Still, this isn't a movie to make you think too hard about the consequences of Han's lifestyle choices. It's fun. Don't expect epic and you'll have a good time.