solo

hello


so, then, i finally got around to watching this Solo film. or, if you will, Solo A Star Wars Story, look you see, for that appears to be its formal name. but, for the sake of typing it all, we shall simply call it Solo to be sure.

on the one side there seems to be little point in me rambling and making comments on a film that was release, what, 5 or 6 months ago. the other side, however, says that not quite so many saw it - Disney managed to pull off the presumed impossible with this and managed to make a Star Wars film that lost money, something not achieved with either the less widely loved "prequel" trilogy or, indeed, Ewoks Caravan Of Courage. maybe, then, there are a fair number who have not seen it but are for some curious reason wondering what it was like, or what my thoughts are.

to give a spoiler free (executive summary?), at a glance overview for those contemplating watching but wanting to know none of the "secrets", well, this is one boring film. had it been scripted and proposed as a movie without any Star Wars related character names, it would have been passed on. that's not the case with Rogue One, for example, which was a brilliant story and film in its own right that just happened to be set in that Star Wars universe. whereas their are some (brief) good to great moments in it, Solo is not a film you particularly need to watch in any great hurry, if at all.

right, you have had an overview. for the rest of this post there is no getting away from them - a really big, huge *** SPOILER WARNING *** is in place. seriously, read on not unless you have seen the film, have no intention of seeing it or could not care less if you knew the story and events backwards prior to seeing it.

so as we may start off on a positive note, a look at what this film gets right. and get right it does - perhaps for the first time since Disney took ownership of Star Wars, a "classic" character is presented exactly as they were and as they should be. take a bow all and sundry who ensured that Lando Calrissian was treated with the love, fondness and respect in Solo that precisely none of the other characters in the Disney era have been.

Lando - or if you will young Lando - looks, acts and behaves exactly as you would have imagined him to. every now and then someone does a list or article on actors what delivered really good performances in otherwise rubbish films. Donald Glover as Lando will forever be at the top of such a list. whereas his screentime is (infuriatingly) limited, it's easily the best parts. one really does wish they had just made a film called Lando, and had Han Solo as a bit part character in it. which gives you a clue, i suppose, as to how far wrong Solo really goes.

to this end, there is really one superb, great sequence in the film. well, sure, there are a number of ok moments, but by far the best is when Han, Chewbacca (Chewie, if you like) and Lando are pulling off a daring escape after a daring heist. never tell me the odds, etc.

really, this sequence should have been the premise for the film. the world simply did not need a Solo Origins story film. all and sundry of the target market are quite familiar with who the characters are; what we wanted was a two hour wise-cracking thrilling adventure of them in action. instead we just get a brief hint at how awesome such a film would have been.

yes, i am aware that i am treading quite dangerously close to the "fanboy" line here. hopefully i do not cross it, but let it be you, the reader, who judges and damns me if so.

what is sort of OK about the film? Alden Ehreneich (no idea how you pronounce, sorry) in the lead. but not necessarily for the reasons you might think. whichever actor took on this role was on something of a hiding to nothing, really. even aside from the fact that the part appears indelibly linked to Harrison Ford, what problem there is with the character is that everyone of my generation who loved Star Wars wanted to be Han. when, in the late 70s, it was break time in school and we were in the yard playing Star Wars, 100% of us wanted to be Han Solo, 0% wanted to be Luke or anyone else.

this Alden Ehreneich does a decent job of the lead role in the film, carrying as he does a pedestrian plot through a meandering script. alas, he does so without you (or maybe just me) ever really seeing or recognising him as Han Solo as such. he is not bad at all, he just seems to be playing some different character all together.

nothing unusual there, really, with the Disney approach to the source material. in The Force Awakens they successfully managed to make all of the "classic" characters be absolutely nothing like they were in the original films. for good measure, they then went ahead and changed them all about again in The Last Jedi, deftly undoing all of the (many) good parts of the first new sequel.

for the most part, they achieve this by simply refusing to let the characters be who they are. when all is said and done, when this new "sequel" trilogy of Star Wars Episodes 7, 8 and 9 are all done, one of the biggest retrospective complaints will come when fans at large realise they did not allow Han, Luke, Chewie, Leia and them robot things to have one last adventure together. with Solo, the major issue is that for some reason they didn't simply let Han be Han, having derring do scoundrel like adventures.

even when Disney relents and gives a bit of what i believe is commonly called "fan service", the results are somewhat mixed. one of the original films, i believe the first, makes reference to Han Solo doing something called the "Kessel Run" in a time or distance faster than anyone else, ever.

to be honest it's not really a part of Star Wars folklore, mythology or legend i have ever been all that interested in. so maybe i am not the best person to comment on it all. but, by the time it came into the film, i was rather thoroughly bored with it all, and nothing in the sequence was all that interesting or exciting. as point of fact, my abiding memories of the Kessel Run are or were that it was dark, murky and you had little or no idea what was going on, bar the much fabled Millennium Falcon sliding between two colliding planets or other such celestial bodies.

what of a big bad for the film? in this regard the makers were spoilt for choice, in truth. most would have reasonably expected Jabba The Hutt or a rival "space gangster" to be the villain of the piece, or failing that at the least some sort of encounter with Boba Fett or other such bounty hunter.

no, instead for the "big bad" they gave us a few seconds of a, surely in the eyes of many, bizarrely resurrected Darth Maul out of Star Wars Episode I The Phantom Menace.

oh yes, indeed. if one had watched all of the animated Star Wars The Clone Wars series, not to mention the equally animated Star Wars Rebels, one would have been aware that Darth Maul somehow survived being cut in half by Obi-Wan ("Ben") Kenobi. he got given some robot legs and then got told to just get on with it.

just exactly how many in the audience would have been aware of the above is debatable. not many, going on what i recall of reactions to it. in terms of giving "fan service", quite strange that they would cater to the few aware of the above, rather than the many by giving them a Jabba or a Boba, or any such "bad side" character what has a name that ends in the letter "a".

and even then, one wonders exactly how thrilled prequel / Maul / animated tv series fans will be with this. Darth Maul appears for a few seconds via one of them hologram thingies, and seems to be in it purely so that they can have a character ignite one of them light sabre things. even though he does nothing with it.

so, to go all over the place and make this non-linear, when Han met Chewie. strangely, this scene is one of the few highlights of the film mentioned, as it is a genuinely good set piece. unfortunately, however, it kind of undoes what a lot of my generation "knew". in the comics and books what came out after the Star Wars films in the 70s and 80s, it was made clear that Han Solo was a Tarzan like character, a human who grew up on the Wookie planet, and that was how he came to know the language and be friends with Chewie. yeah, that gets torn up and thrown out for something far more conventional in terms of American "buddy" movies.

they needlessly fiddle with other things, too. one of the most frustrating things about Solo is that one of the best moments in the film sits on disc two of the blu ray set, filed under "deleted scenes". those what grew up with it all knew that at one stage Solo was an Imperial pilot, and got kicked out or was a deserter. yes, they did indeed film all of this, in a really most excellent sequence, but didn't use it in the film, opting or electing instead to show him as a ground trooper. oh.

a "tell" for a Star Wars film is that it is supposed to be a fun (laser sword) swashbuckling adventure for the whole family, with the emphasis on giving the younger members of the family (kids) a sense of awe, wonder, and reason to dream. to this end, William got bored with it all and walked out of the room where we watched it just after an hour, James just sat and wondered why did they spend so much time and money making Solo the way they did, instead of an at least interesting thing.

the biggest gripe for the boys came in the form of the "big set piece", the "train heist". from what i recall much noise and fanfare was made about this sequence by the producers before it was released. essentially, as the boys observed, it strives to be a (quite poor) shot by shot rip off of a sequence that was great in Captain America The First Avenger.

other major issues with the film? well, i am going to leave Woody Harrelson out of it. in terms of Mr Dependable, yes indeed Woody Harrelson just turns up and stands around being Woody Harrelson. this works really, really well in something like Zombieland, where such a character makes sense, but not in Star Wars. this is with particular reference to his (or his characters) use of the word "hell". who knew that such a concept existed a long time ago in a galaxy far, far away?

who i will point out as being particularly bad, however, is Emilia Clarke. once again. yes, she is indeed a quite "popular" actress in that dragons thing, Game Of Thrones, but that seems to be in relation to the wardrobe decisions made for her character. here, much like in the awful Terminator Gensys, the "acting" we get is Ms Clarke having dark hair and standing around smiling a lot.

yes, that is her pictured with Paul Bettnay. he who was so good in that other Disney money machine, Avengers, and yet is suspiciously poor here in a role best described as "the big bad but not really the big bad as we are going to show you a few seconds of Darth Maul later". basically, he stands around a lot, has some weird lines on his face that glow when he gets angry, and takes the Al Pacino approach of either mumbling some words or getting quite shouty.

that Solo is a mess of a film and appears destined to not make any money for Disney probably puts paid to any idea of a Han Solo film that fans would actually want. all they had to do was have two hours of Han and Chewie running around, away from or for Jabba The Hutt and/or Boba Fett, with Lando hovering around to betray them but eventually redeem himself. instead, then, they went to an awful lot of effort to make something that seems bereft of any ideas or any sort of tangible point.

it will not happen, but perhaps Star Wars should simply be left well alone. any hope that the clumsy mess of The Last Jedi would not be allowed again fades away quite quickly into Solo. is it, i wonder, that Disney had not even ever seen a Star Wars before throwing many billions at it?

go, Disney, go and look at what made James Bond, the original Star Wars films (and the prequels) and even your own Avengers films such spectacular successes. what you will find is that all of them tell more or less identical stories again and again, just with slightly different spins and slightly different characters. and that, really, as an audience, is all we want. the safe, comfortable knowledge that we shall be entertained for a couple of hours by something which we are familiar, just with a bit of a different take on how it was presented this time.

and then you get something like where my brother reckoned Solo was excellent, and doesn't quite follow why i did not enjoy it. so there. perhaps of the small number who saw it many in fact really quite liked it, and i am in a sort of minority.

well, as ever, thanks for reading, and if this has been of use or interest to anyone anywhere, nice one!



live long and prosper!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!