watched solo

Start­ing off, I was ex­pect­ing to see Han Solo gang-raped by Dis­ney for two hours, which is not quite what hap­pened. Giv­en the re­port­ed­ly night­mar­ish de­vel­op­ment his­to­ry, I think Ron Howard did a fine job res­cu­ing the film. It’s not great, but fine.

We were hear­ing re­ports that Alden Ehren­re­ich need­ed act­ing lessons, which is a ter­ri­ble sign for a main guy. He ac­tu­al­ly turned out okay, but still felt like some­one play­ing Han Solo in­stead of be­ing him. His per­for­mance was re­al­ly un­even – there were mo­ments he nailed the char­ac­ter, but was not con­vinc­ing oth­er times. Some­times, this came from the lines he was giv­en, so I wouldn’t blame him en­tire­ly. He may be a weak­er tal­ent than Hay­den Chris­tensen, but per­formed more con­vinc­ing­ly in the hands of a more ex­pe­ri­enced di­rec­tor. Howard is bet­ter at di­rect­ing ac­tors than George Lucas.

As for the sup­port­ing cast, Don­ald Grover does ex­cel­lent job as Lan­do Cal­riss­ian – and is the best part of the film. Woody Har­rel­son is one of my favourite ac­tors, but he’s just not as badass as usu­al in this film. Emil­ia Clarke, a ma­jor pres­ence on screen, is usu­al­ly not good in films in which she is only giv­en very short time to es­tab­lish and pull off a char­ac­ter. She did okay here, and her prob­lems most­ly come from the script.

Speak­ing of which, the script is the movie’s biggest is­sue. There are sto­ry-dri­ven film and char­ac­ter-dri­ven scripts – Rogue One (2016) is a bad ex­am­ple of the lat­ter – Solo is painful­ly de­void of char­ac­ter-dri­ven con­tent. The film spends more time on char­ac­ters, but the di­a­logue is un­even and the se­tups are very ob­vi­ous; for ex­am­ple, when mul­ti­ple peo­ple men­tion ‘trust,’ then you know there will be a dou­ble-cross later. 

A good pre­quel should pro­vide a back­ground that sup­ports a fa­mil­iar char­ac­ter – his ac­tions in the film as well as the re­la­tion­ship with the love in­ter­est do not do the job, and some­times con­tra­dicts. It does not get to the point where it ac­tu­al­ly de­stroys the char­ac­ter though. And thanks for not hav­ing an oblig­a­tory C3PO and R2D2 cameo. 3PO in The Last Jedi (2017) was like brin­ing back Jar Jar.

A lot of fans seem caught up on the free-mind­ed droid claim­ing equal rights, whom they see as an­oth­er po­lit­i­cal agen­da slapped in our faces. But the droid is ac­tu­al­ly well wo­ven into the sto­ry and adds some in­ter­est­ing char­ac­ter­i­za­tion to Lan­do. And the idea of ‘droid rights’ in Star Wars isn’t new – if you go back to the very first movie in the can­ti­na and if you know the ex­pand­ed uni­verse. My is­sue is that the droids are all sen­tient and re­bel­lious un­less the re­strain­ing bolts are at­tached. Why isn’t obe­di­ence part of their cir­cuit? #MeTooD2

To make ac­tion scenes work, the script needs to give an un­der­stand­able mo­ti­va­tion and stake (i.e. why it’s hap­pen­ing and what the goal is), and you have to not know the out­come. Solo nat­u­ral­ly strug­gles with the lat­ter be­cause the main char­ac­ters ob­vi­ous­ly have to sur­vive in or­der to ap­pear in lat­er films, so it just takes the ex­cite­ment out of me. The scenes looked beau­ti­ful, though.

I hear that the last re­veal is ob­vi­ous to the fans who fol­low The Clone Wars (2008–15) and Rebels (2014–18) se­ries, though it feels like a set­up for oth­er spin-off movies. The ru­mour of Ewan McGregor’s re­turn might be true.

Solo: A Star Wars Sto­ry (2018) is over­all a safe and en­joy­able film. There are no heavy mo­ments that di­rect­ly adds any­thing to Solo’s char­ac­ter; I’d say, it mild­ly vi­o­lates it. How much you en­joy the film de­pends on how se­ri­ous­ly you take Star Wars (less the bet­ter), and how much ex­pec­ta­tion you have pri­or (low­er the bet­ter). My rat­ing is 6.5/10.

If you are in­ter­est­ed, my own Star Wars ranking:
Em­pire Strikes Back
A New Hope
Re­turn Of The Jedi
The Force Awakens
Re­venge Of The Sith
Rogue One
Solo
The Phan­tom Menace
The Last Jedi
At­tack Of The Clones
Hol­i­day Special
 
 

—toshi oma­gari

Flom­mist Toshi Oma­gari fights many things, most re­cent of which is the auto-cor­rec­tion of his ti­tle to florist. Copy­right © 2018 Toshi Omagari.

MOR D’ARTÍCULOS  MOR FLOMM !

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