CW: contains spoilers for the films Solo: A Star Wars Story and Star Wars: Episode IV — A New Hope.
The odds were very much against Solo: A Star Wars Story (2018). It’s a Star Wars prequel film about the least interesting character from the Original Trilogy. It’s a film constrained by its own premise: how do you tell an interesting story about Han Solo, a character who has a perfectly self-contained arc not only within the original Star Wars trilogy but within the original Star Wars film? Solo: A Star Wars Story had a troubled production similar to Ant-Man (2015). Both are franchise films that started off with an interesting creative team with a unique style and a reputation built on comedy films who were fired for their creative differences with the monolithic studio system behind the project. With the odds stacked against it, it wasn’t unreasonable to expect Solo to be like Ant-Man: an uninteresting mess forgettable within the larger context of the overarching franchise.
It’s a pleasant surprise, then, that Solo works so well. It’s a fun, space-Western, heist movie and is unapologetically nostalgic for fans of Star Wars. But it also has surprising depth and enough subversion of Star Wars tropes to be interesting.
Whereas Star Wars: The Last Jedi (2017) expressed one of its themes — breaking away from the past — through a subtextual disdain for the damaging effects of nostalgia, Solo fully embraces its role as a nostalgic enterprise. Solo is, as its own soundtrack expresses, ‘Reminiscence Therapy’. This track from John Powell’s soundtrack is a medley of John Williams’ classic motifs from Star Wars (1977) and The Empire Strikes Back (1980) and, to some extent, it’s a synecdoche of the film. Again, we’re watching the Millennium Falcon outmaneuver TIE fighters; again, there’s comic relief droids and Lando (Donald Glover) being smooth. But the film is so charmingly open and honest about this nostalgia trip that it come across as energetic rather than pandering: I was grinning like a loon when the theme kicked in as Han and Chewie sat down together in the Falcon’s cockpit for the first time.
Within this larger nostalgia though, there’s small subversions. When Han (Alden Ehrenreich) is thrown into the pit with “the beast”, I fully expected the traditional Star Wars creature set-piece: a rehash of the rancor in Return of the Jedi (1983), the stadium fight with those three creatures in Star Wars: Episode II — Attack of the Clones (2002), and the rathtars in Star Wars: The Force Awakens (2015). Solo subverts this trope in an interesting and unexpected way. I also never expected to see Lovecraftian cosmic horrors, discussions about the rights of artificial lifeforms, and allusions to sexual relations between droids and humans in a Star Wars film.
Like Rogue One: A Star Wars Story (2016), Solo does a good job balancing the nostalgia against the subversion: the old against the new. It cements my interest in the ‘anthology’ films more so than the Sequel Trilogy films. Rogue One and Solo are both films that show how the spirit of rebellion manifests under the fascist regime of the Empire. They show how individuals react and rebel differently under the yoke of authoritarianism and against the crushing despondency of living in a state of war without end. Those are stories that I’m more interested in seeing than the Sequel Trilogy’s traditional good-vs-evil narrative. As interesting as The Last Jedi is and as much potential as it provides for the future of Star Wars, the Sequel Trilogy’s premise begins with a reset button and the presentation of a Nu-Empire and Nu-Rebel Alliance. They perpetuate an old narrative with new forms: they do interesting things within that narrative but ultimately we’ve seen the plucky rebels bringing down the authoritarian regime before in the Original Trilogy. The Star Wars universe is an expansive galaxy: Solo gestures towards other stories to be told in it.
The weakest points of Solo are, in fact, its efforts to point to existing films in the franchise. The cameo from Darth Maul, for example, offers no narrative resolution and has no payoff in this film or any promise of future payoff in the current slate of Star Wars films. For anyone who hasn’t followed Maul’s arc in the Star Wars animated series, it just raises unnecessary questions. It feels forced and feels like the Marvelification of the franchise with Maul as the Nick Fury of the Star Wars universe and with a wink at the audience that says “keep consuming Star Wars content”. You already have my money, Disney, you don’t have to try so hard.
The biggest challenge that Solo had to overcome was the narrative strictures placed on it by its premise: we’ve already seen Han Solo’s character arc. Han is the self-interested scoundrel who, by getting swept up in the adventure of Luke, Leia, Obi-Wan, and the rebellion against the Empire, discovers his humanity and his connection to wider political concerns. The premise of a Han Solo prequel film seems stymied by the fact that, by the end of the film, Han has to be the selfish criminal that we meet in the cantina in Episode IV.
Solo: A Star Wars Story succeeds by embracing this and focusing on the question of who Han is when we meet him in the cantina. What kind of person is Han when we first meet him? Qi’ra (Emilia Clarke) states it directly: Han has always been the good guy. Even when he’s posturing as the scoundrel, even when he’s stealing speeders on the streets of Corellia, even decades later when he leaves Leia and the Resistance to become a smuggler again, Han is only ever pretending to be a selfish scoundrel. Deep down, he’s a good person interested in helping other people and doing the right thing. The dodgy special effects of the 1997 Special Edition of Episode IV did not make me believe that Han didn’t shoot first. Solo made me believe that he wouldn’t shoot first.
