By Kerey McKenna.
Okay, right off the bat I’m going to say, despite some initial ambivalence to the project, I liked Solo: A Star Wars Story. I want to thank Steve Higgins of the Outer Limits Comic Shop (Waltham MA) for getting me some early preview tickets so I could see it before reviews are posted, and thereby not be biased by their hype—negative or positive.
Solo is a fast-paced action romp that’s well-executed—although that’s not as impressive as it sounds because it’s not particularly ambitious. The filmmakers didn’t take any risks that could backfire spectacularly—like George Lucas did when he cast Jake Lloyd in Phantom Menace to make a point that the most evil cyborg in the galaxy started out as an adorable moppet. Solo threads the needle of new actors taking on the role of iconic characters in a way that feels authentic without slipping into parody and caricature. Befitting a character that’s all about speed and making it to his next payday, the movie pace is frenetic compared to other entries in the saga. Right from the start, Han is an artful dodger raised in the slums of an Imperial industrial world. He literally races from scheme to scheme (and set piece to set piece) trying to find some measure of independence. Han bursts onto the screen already a roguish flyboy trying to bluff his way out of anything he can’t run from. Along the way he acquires the style (surname, clothes, broom handle pistol, and Millennium Falcon) and associates (Chewbacca and Lando Calrissian) that make him the Han Solo who will eventually pluck Luke and Kenobi off Tatooine in A New Hope. It is basically the feature-length version of the prologue of another Harrison Ford character in another LucasFilm adventure, Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade, in which we see a teen Boy Scout Jones go on a chase that foreshadows his adventures and affectations as the adult Indiana Jones we know from the rest of the series.
Upon reflection, I think some of my weariness in anticipating the film, and why I had to psych myself up for it with reviews of three separate Marvel Comics Star Wars series (Darth Vader, Lando, and Han Solo) was my weariness of the prospect that under Disney’s leadership we are due a new Star Wars movie every year as long as the merchandise sells and the movies don’t bomb at the box office. The accompanying prospect of annual debates over whether the latest Star Wars project is too derivative or too divergent from what came before tends to induce, well, weariness.
One such debate we’re sure to encounter concerns a big “twist” towards the end of Solo, that a) doesn’t contribute much to the story and b) will come completely out of left field if you haven’t been watching the animated Star Wars: Rebels TV series. I’m not going to reveal what it is here but when it happens, you’ll know it. Expect it to come up a lot in dissections of the film as soon as the “No Spoilers” grace period runs out
Speaking of dissecting the film, I won’t be doing that here. With all the hype around the movie, there are plenty of rundowns of who the new actors playing old characters are, who the new actors playing new characters are, and how well it all was executed. Instead, I’d like to trace how a revenue stream of licensed Star Wars prose and comic book fiction from the 80’s and 90’s became Rogue One and Solo. It’s not exactly Joseph Campbell's Hero Cycle, but the cycle from movies, to books, and then back to movies is quite the tale in its own right, which I’ll tell in Part 2 of this article.
Kerey McKenna is a contributing reviewer to Nerds who Read and SMOF for the annual Watch City Steampunk Festival. Check it out at www.watchcityfestival.com.
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