SOLO: A STAR WARS STORY (2018)

 

PHENOMENALITY: *marvelous*
MYTHICITY: *poor*
FRYEAN MYTHOS: *adventure*
CAMPBELLIAN FUNCTION: *cosmological, sociological*

Just as the stand-alone movie ROGUE ONE came out between Parts 1 and 2 of the Sequel Trilogy, the second and last standalone appeared between Parts 2 and 3. But unlike ROGUE, SOLO flopped, becoming notorious as the first STAR WARS film to lose money.

I'd very much like to believe the prevalent fan-theory that Rian Johnson's equally bad LAST JEDI damaged the SW brand so badly that audiences turned away from SOLO. But that notion wouldn't accord with the fact that RISE OF SKYWALKER, just a year later, made almost three times its budget-- though that was an underperformance compared to JEDI, which made four times its budget before negative reaction set in. 

I'm sure the Kathleen Kennedy regime did nothing to improve Han Solo's status by killing off the character in FORCE AWAKENS. The bean-counters were perhaps impatient to eject a character who could only be played by the high-ticket Harrison Ford, but it's certainly possible that doing so diminished the heroic dimensions of said character. That said, SOLO also had other problems.

The original script was commissioned, like the script for ROGUE ONE, by George Lucas before he sold the franchise to Disney-- though there wasn't a lot of time between the SOLO commission and the franchise-sale. Lawrence Kashdan, celebrated for his earlier contributions to the SW saga, started the script but then turned it over to his son John-- though I surmise that the basic ideas were all assembled by the time of the torch-passing.

The real fault of SOLO-- and I felt this in my theatrical viewing as well as my recent re-watch-- is that it gave audiences a "space western" with too little emphasis on the "space" part. Possibly the Kashdans thought that, because Han Solo was supposed to be a charming rogue, they ought to follow the example of the "spaghetti westerns" from the sixties and seventies. The heroes of those European oaters were almost entirely mercenary, doing good only incidentally if at all. 

Of course, Han Solo wasn't meant to be quite that dark. All the minutiae about his earlier career gleaned from the original trilogy-- his meetings with Chewbacca and Lando, his acquisition of the Millennium Falcon, and even the Kessel Run-- are on display here, and all the details are meant to prefigure Han's later conversion to the forces of altruism. But though the script constructs a lot of action set-pieces, they prove even more hollow than those of LAST JEDI.

As played by Alden Ehrenreich, Han is a rogue without demonstrable charm. On his homeworld he and girlfriend Qi'ra (Emilia Clarke) break away from a gang, but only Han escapes Correlia while Qi'ra is captured by the occupying Stormtroopers. In quick order, Han joins the military, leaves the military, joins a criminal gang, fails to steal a supply of valuable coaxium, and finally undertakes a larger heist to compensate gang-leader Dryden Vos (Paul Bettany). Oh, and Dryden's lieutenant is none other than the long missing Qi'ra, so now there's suspense about whether she'll remain loyal to Vos or switch back to her former boyfriend.

I imagine that viewers in the right mood may have been okay with all these pedestrian twists and turns. But I also think it likely that the movie was so ordinary that it never generated any good word-of-mouth. More oddly, SOLO is the least colorful STAR WARS film. Somehow, director Ron Howard and his team managed to make SOLO look much like Zach Snyder's MAN OF STEEL. It's not that bright colors don't exist, but that they're all muted by lots of black and brown hues. And with the exception of Woody Harrelson as Han's sort-of mentor, none of the performers manage to put across anything but very basic acting. The best thing about SOLO is that its failure may have spared audiences more botched "solo" efforts from the regime of Kathleen Kennedy.