SOLO: A STAR WARS STORY (2018)

6/4/18 - Solo: A Star Wars Story (2018) - 5/10

Passably solid and entertaining, but less engaging or thrilling than it should be. Spectacle action pieces, but the “jazz” is a little less than was necessary to pop and the lack of charisma within the titular role (as written and as played) just made this film sag. Everything around Solo is more interesting than what we actually get, which is the last thing you want from a film called Solo.

Solo is somewhat fun, but it lacked any real hook or magic. Much of the elements felt stock, superfluous, or just rather unnecessary. The things that I liked most from this film orbit its molten core but are interchangeable to the nature of this film. I wish I could have seen more of Clarke’s Qi’ra character or the interplay of Harrelson’s Beckett and his crew, because both of them were more interesting than the main character and his lackluster ride.

It was also weirdly action intensive and war centered. I understood their purpose, placing the Star Wars in a trench filled WWI atmosphere, with its dark overtones, but it was used for quips against its heavy backdrop rather than true emotional weight. Similarly, like Rogue One and Last Jedi before it, Solo also throws in other elements that feel tacked on (in this case, the anti-slavery sub-story that felt flat and unfulfilled in any way). I was reminded more of the Society for the Promotion of Elfish Welfare within the Harry Potter books, but given the slightest lip service in the films, all to barely be dealt with in any satisfying or significant way. Slavery is something Star Wars can’t help but keep coming back to but manages to screw up in every iteration.

A major problem within the feature was the lighting and cinematography overall. For this film, it was completely off and unintelligible, which was unacceptable. It has come to light, that the opaqueness experienced by some audience is due to theater projector problems and inabilities. That may be so, but the pervasiveness of the problem and the scale of this particular popcorn entertainment makes me question the choices of the filmmakers. It was shocking they allowed much of their audience to see such poorly lit and barely captured scenes that weren’t isolated but a prolific element of the films aesthetic. I empathize with an artists intention and the importance its integrity, but there are reasons that studios and groups make films. For me, these “dark” scenes were not just distracting but blatantly bad and colored a portion of my experience.

Perhaps Solo’s biggest blunder was its necessity to stick to some kind of cannon and almost exclusively show us what was not necessary. They had free reign to expand on Han Solo’s life journey and experiences, but they kept showing us the few things we knew about him already but did not need expanding. I did not need to see him “make the Kessel run” or win the Millennium Falcon from Lando or set up jobs with Jabba the Hutt or encounter the Rebellion, but of course, they could not resist ripping these tertiary character bits from our imagination and plaster them on the celluloid. These moments were easy and cheap and none of them worked as well as the wholly new elements (like Qi’ra or Beckt’s crew) that the movie makers breathed life into. Quibbles, yes, but intrinsically problematic too.

This has been quite a bit of seeming disdain, but the film isn’t bad. The CGI, the action set-pieces, the surrounding characters and its non-reliance on standard SW material (No Skywalkers, No Jedi, Little Empire or Rebellion) let this film breath and click at times. It still lacked in many key elements to be as great as it hoped of being, but it balanced out its grown worthy awfulness with slick sci-fi fun. A less-than-stellar effort, but not all together hateable.