Solo Makes Star Wars Unimportant - And Fun

I was not excited for Solo: A Star Wars Story. The Last Jedi exhausted me to a degree I never thought possible with this franchise. I wasn't mad. I was tired of it all. The Prequels ignited a burning inferno of passionate rage in me that lasted over a decade. The Last Jedi quieted those embers to dust and smoke. The problem is very simple: Star Wars is stuck up its own ass! The franchise has become this recursive loop of redefining its legacy over and over. So now it seems to have no legacy. When a work of art stops talking about anything other than itself, it becomes boring. We've spent so much time arguing about why Star Wars is so important that we missed the easy truth: Star Wars isn't important. It never was.

The last thing I want to write is another post about "what even is Star Wars, man?". I've written that same shit like ten times now, and I'm bored. The obsession around keeping the movies true to their heritage has poisoned this Disney reboot. Disney has been painfully insecure with these new movies and it makes everything awkward. I even liked what The Last Jedi had to say about the fandom and (again) the legacy of this series. But I don't see Star Wars for a cultural essay. The new Star Wars movies have put so much energy into proving that they are Star Wars that they didn't have time to actually be Star Wars! So how come Solo makes it all look so easy?

Solo is not a movie that needed to be made. Nobody needs to know how Han Solo met Chewbacca or won the Millenium Falcon or even what the Kessel Run really was. It's a fan service prequel in the most blatant and pandering way. Maybe for that reason Solo is the most relaxed and lightest Star Wars movie in a long time. It knows what it is, and it isn't high art. It's a SciFi heist flick with a touch of old Westerns and a singing space fish. That isn't a cultural touchstone that will define a generation, and it shouldn't be. Because the only thing Star Wars needs to be is fun. Not important. Fun.

Solo is easily the best Star Wars made in my lifetime, which is damning with faint praise, I know. (Assume that I was born sometime between 1983 and 1999.) Solo is also a movie so good that it makes a few movies I liked retroactively bad. I realize after this that I was kinda fooling myself with The Force Awakens. I like Rey and I like Oscar Isaac and I like what they're doing with Kylo Ren, but that movie is trying too hard. It's plastic in the wrong ways, like a party where the host is begging you to have fun. Solo is plastic in the right ways. It is a pointless good time.

One thing I love about Solo is that this movie allows itself to be weird. I remember when Star Wars was weird, that was before it became the Cornerstone of Western Nerd Culture, and we all took it too damned seriously. You know Jabba the Hutt is a weird goddamned thing, he's a fat sandworm warlord, and we never blink at that anymore. Solo features a major robot character, L3, whose motivation is socialist droid revolution. Lando also might be fucking L3, by the way. Han starts out as the ward to a small-time gangster on Corellia. Of course the gangster is a giant pond snake, because why not? The main bad guy has scars that glow red when he gets mad. Why? Who cares! It's fun. I'm sure there's a Wookiepedia article you can read that will explain it all. And once you know his backstory all the fun will be gone.

It's surprising too how easily Solo seems to adapt the Han Solo character. Alden Ehrenreich does not look like Harrison Ford and doesn't sound like him either. But at no point during this movie did I feel the need to check my notes to see if this matched "Han Solo purity". Ehrenreich makes the role his own, while keeping the cocky swagger that made Han Solo such a legend. Honestly, as much I love Donald Glover's Lando, he's too close to the original. Donald Glover does such a good Billy Dee Williams voice that it is downright scary. But that leads to an Uncanny Valley effect where the performance isn't as good as it could have been if Glover had just used his own natural voice.

That Uncanny Valley of "just close enough while not imitating" may be the secret to what makes Solo good. It is clearly Star Wars in terms of imagery and dialogue. There's the Millennium Falcon, get serviced, fans. But much like Rogue One, this is not shot like a traditional Lucas Star Wars. There's no side wipes, the colors are oddly dark for a movie so upbeat. (Compare to the Disco-colored Guardians of the Galaxy movies.) Solo is so dirty and gritty that one sequence takes place in Space World War I, yet the characters are all charming rogues or Wookies. It's a cool contrast of color tone and mood tone. Solo also is doing really creative stuff with the music. The Enfys Nest theme uses haunting choral chanting in a mystery ethnic language* that sounds nothing like the universe we grew up with on VHS. Yet I love it.

Solo also brings up the ugly implication that perhaps R2-D2 is raping the Millenium Falcon.

Then the score directly cribs from John Williams and suddenly you realize how derivative this can get. Your exciting chase scene through a nebula with a space Cthulhu is actually a mix of the TIE Fighter chase from A New Hope with the asteroid field from Empire Strikes Back. See, now we're too close to the original and it isn't as much fun. Meanwhile there's a train robbery sequence that's much more exciting because this is new ground for the series. It isn't new ground artistically. The sequence is just like any other Old Western train robbery only with Probe Droids and the Indians now have Speederbikes. Another action scene is a riff on American Graffiti street races. A dash of Star Wars paint over old ideas is all Solo needs to be fun.

Solo is at its worst when it gets too caught up in the continuity or call-backs. Han threatens a character with a fake thermal detonator at one point, which only makes sense if every character in the room has seen Return of the Jedi. I also don't know why the screenwriter felt the need to explain where Han Solo got his last name. Of course they play with the "Han shot first" meme - albeit in a surprisingly dramatic way. There's also a cameo at the end of this movie that is so jarring that I had to take off my glasses, rub my eyes, and shake my head in bitter shame. (Then I laughed about it for an hour afterwards.) I hope you like your sequel bait thrown right in the middle of the climax, ruining the tension.

But then Solo is at its best when the rest of Star Wars lore disappears. This movie has nothing to do with the Force or Skywalkers. It very nearly manages to not have a single lightsaber. These are just a bunch of crooks, frauds, and frauds pretending to be crooks out to steal some space nonsense for Space Paul Bettany. And that's more exciting and intense than the intergalactic stakes that Rogue One felt it needed. Solo ends up very small. The most heroic action saves about twenty people, top. But small is fine when the characters work, the humor lands, and the movie stays fun.

Like the rest of the film critic wanna-bes on Twitter, I was ready to stab Kathleen Kennedy through the heart for firing Chris Lord and Phil Miller from Solo. It was a blatant grab of studio power in a franchise that has already had a very troubled history of executive meddling. But you can complain all you want that Solo is the corporatization of Star Wars. Here's the truth: Star Wars was always a corporate product. These movies are cheap capitalism from the 70s inspired by the cheaper serial story capitalism of the 1940s. Individual artistic vision was never the point. Weird singing space fish were.

I don't think Solo "saves" Star Wars. Actually looking at the box office returns, there's a good chance that Solo might have killed it. But "saving Star Wars" is exactly the kind of narrative I don't care about anymore. These movies don't need to carry anything more than the weight of their own isolated dramaturgy. If people don't want simple fun Space Operas anymore, that's too bad. Cause that's all Solo is, and that's all Star Wars needs to be.

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* I'd compare it to Panzer Dragoon music but nobody played Panzer Dragoon.