Solo
Star Wars is such an integral part of my development that it’s hard to imagine the sort of person I would be without it.
I was awkward as a pre-teen, burdened with an overactive imagination and prone to long periods of solitude; sitting by myself on the playground playing make-believe with myself. My friendship group was solid, but they possessed more typical tropes of adolescent boys than I, collecting football stickers, joining football clubs, watching football. With the lack of any such defining hobby, I flapped loose for a while, unsure of who I was.
Then I saw Star Wars. Return of the Jedi, to be precise, a copy recorded off the tele one Christmas complete with interstitial bits from the announcer (an onscreen presence as was the tradition of the time) announcing which programmes were coming up after. It was grainy, disjointed and, if memory serves, not entirely complete, but it changed my life. This was something similar to the stories I’d been concocting in my head, only on a far vaster scale. This was something I could immediately connect with, the definiteness of its black and white morality,the purity of its heroes vs the evil of its villains. It was simple but oh so complex at the same time.
I became obsessed.
Soon I was collecting Star Wars stickers, finding friends I could talk to about Star Wars, watching everything Star Wars related I could find. I began reading the Extended Universe novels which opened up my love of genre literature, and watching more sci-fi films. I found a place in the world, one which still bore under-dog traits, but if I remained a part of the Out group it was an out group with membership requirements.
Later of course I watched the prequels and the veneer didn’t so much tarnish and dissolve completely. Star Wars became just another franchise amongst the Star Treks and the Babylon 5s and the Sliders. Then the sequels shifted its standing again. The Force Awakens and especially The Last Jedi reminded me of that feeling of discovery when I first saw an X-wing lock s-foils in attack position, or the excitement of the Millennium Falcon screaming away from a living wall of flame. The producers knew this was it for the franchise, a live or die chance to create a behemoth on par with the Marvel Cinematic Universe and, for better or worse, this monetary motivation produced a set of films that restored Star Wars to the top of the sci-fi heap.
And so we come to Solo, the second of the Star Wars Stories spin off films. I went into Rogue One, the first, with a need to be convinced. I felt, and feel, that although the main series revival had been a triumph, the spin offs were destined to become cynical cash grabs capitalising on a collective reflective nostalgia. But Rogue One knocked my socks off. It was a fantastic experience, with possibly the greatest third act to any Star Wars film, spin-off or not. I was, for the time, sold.
Although not as disastrous as the prequels, Solo is a step backwards.
The setup is fairly simple: a young Han must perform a series of heists to return to the woman he loves. Along the way he teams up with a rag-tag group of ne’erdowells as they attempt the impossible: a 12 parsec Kessel Run. Unfortunately, the film itself is just as simple, and shallow, as this kernel and fails entirely to entertain, delight or move.
This is a film which counts number of references as important as relatable characters. Where Rogue One was able to blaze its own trail whilst linking itself intrinsically to A New Hope, Solo has no such identity and instead forces references to the older films at every turn. Han’s surname? Concocted by an Imperial Officer because he’s on his lonesome. C3P0’s throwaway reference to the Falcon’s odd dialect (one of my favourite flavour snippets because it went unexplained)? The genesis for an entire subplot involving a rebellious droid. The fact that Lando’s costume in TESB included a cape? The guy is now obsessed with capes.
When it’s not Flanderising characters or desperately searching for relevance the plot ticks along fairly nicely. The action sequences are competently, if plainly, directed and the design of the film is stellar from beginning to end. Where it really falls flat, and the reason I came away convinced once more of the cash-grab nature of these spin-offs, was the characters.
In short, there is precisely one character in Solo: A Star Wars Story. And it’s not Han. It’s L3, the rebellious droid whose only plot relevance is, yes, a throwback to a previous film. Still, she’s funny, she’s motivated, she has an arc of sorts. She fulfils the minimum requirements of a decent cinematic character. The rest…don’t. Lando is a caricature of the suave hustler, a Huggy Bear type smarming his way through the film without managing to do anything of consequence. Beckett, Han’s wayward mentor, is a stereotype wrapped in a cliche; the freerolling criminal looking for his next score. Han himself is an empty space, a glass for us to pour our previous interpretation of the character into. The worst by far however is Emilia Clarke’s Qi’ra.
The creation of a love interest for young Han Solo was always going to be tricky. This was a character who would have to invoke Leia whilst not being Leia, to demonstrate traits in common with the erstwhile Princess whilst not being a copy or clone. The filmmakers apparently wanted a femme fatale type, no doubt inspired by Eva Green’s turn as Bond girl/foil Vesper Lynd.
What we have here is instead four or five completely different women, all played by Emilia Clarke. Qi’ra is such a mess of a construct that there is no way to see the character as anything other than five first drafts injected into scenes at random. I don’t think I’ve ever seen an attempt at drawing guile go so completely wrong.
Perhaps a better actor could have imbued her with some nuance. I could see a Johansson or, yes, a Green bringing the required mysteriousness. But Clarke simply doesn’t have the range for this sort of work. Her transformation from street-rat to mob-boss is not drawn out narratively but through costuming; she has a nice dress now. In one negotiation scene between gang-lord Vos and Han’s team, where the threat of death is very real if a compromise is not reached, Qi’ra actually argues against Han. Her motivations are never realised onscreen and indeed are never even hinted at.
There are several more examples of this character being a slave to the narrative, of changing personality entirely as the script demands, but all reside in heavy spoiler territory. Needless to say, she is the perfect encompassing of the film itself: a sloppy and cynical creation made to capitalise on nostalgia and little else.
One of my favourite pieces of Star Wars content was a book, the first in the Jedi Apprentice saga. It follows Han and Chewie as they revisit Kessel on some mission of mercy and end up thrown into a huge maelstrom full of decades old secrets and mysterious characters. It expanded the character of Solo in interesting and meaningful ways, evoking his deeply held insecurities and vulnerabilities decades before The Force Awakens. It was everything I wanted in a Han Solo story. It is also referenced heavily in Solo: A Star Wars Story. The Maw, the Kessel Spice Mines, the whole second act…everything’s there.
Everything, that is, except Han Solo.
This is the eleventh entry in my ongoing series of freewritten doodlings. The rational behind this is here: https://goo.gl/hi9Ub7
