BEFORE: I took five days off there, which was both a good thing and a bad thing. Good because I can link to "Solo" after seeing it on OPENING DAY (a tradition for me with "Star Wars" films going back to at least "Return of the Jedi") and because in those five days, I was able to get some stuff done, like I made a list. Not that I DID many things on the list, I'm celebrating the fact that I was able to make the list of things that I need to get done. I did make an appointment with a real eye doctor, not the hack that I've been seeing at the (name of eyewear chain withheld) location near my office. When your doctors start to look like kids to you, you know you're getting old. But I also caught up on organizing and reading some comic books, and watching a LOT of television. I got current on "The Amazing Race", "The Detour", "Survivor", "Marvel's Agents of SHIELD" and nearly current on "Legion" and "Gotham". Next up: "Westworld" season 2 and "Genius" season 2, then maybe I can finally finish "Stranger Things" season 2.
But it's bad for me because while I wasn't taking films OFF the list, more films kept coming ON the list, and the main list increased from 150 to 155, in just 5 days. Now I've got to start whittling it down again, by adding only 1 for every 2 that I watch.
But another good thing I was able to do was to come up with a plan for what to watch after July 4, as my current linking chain comes to an end there. I'll reveal more about my new plan in my next post.
Meanwhile, a new "Star Wars" film is always a reason to celebrate. If anything, we've been given an embarrassment of riches in the last three and a half years, with FOUR new films - and in the old days, we only got one every three years, and that's if we were lucky. You kids today are spoiled rotten.
This marks three films in a row for Paul Bettany, who carries over from "Wimbledon", and Jon Favreau carries over also. (Both actors were also supposed to carry over from "Avengers: Infinity War" but I guess Favreau got cut from that film...)
FOLLOW-UP TO: "Rogue One: A Star Wars Story" (Movie #2,491)
THE PLOT: During an adventure into the criminal underworld, Han Solo meets his future co-pilot Chewbacca and encounters Lando Calrissian, years before joining the Rebellion.
AFTER: As an O.G. (original geek) "Star Wars" fan (some would say "superfan"), I can remember what it was like back in the day, skipping out of school early on May 25 in order to get my best friend's mother to drive me to the movie theater, where I could buy 5 or 6 tickets for me and my friends, acting as the point man for the kids who had to stay until the closing bell. (I wasn't a recurring truant, in fact I was an excellent student, and that made it easier to leave early, the principal and the whole school staff trusted me, heh heh. I probably only missed a couple study halls.). Then when the prequels came out I fulfilled the same role, taking the day off to buy 8 or 10 tickets and hold a place in line for my bosses and co-workers, and everybody benefitted.
Now, of course, tickets are sold on-line and seats are all reserved, so there's no reason to camp out for a week or wait in line for any length of time. Sure, it's easier, but aren't we missing out on a shared experience this way? Oh, well, my friend Adam bought two tickets weeks ago, so my place was secured and my streak remains unbroken. Both of my bosses, meanwhile, saw this film TWO DAYS ago at an Academy screening. I could have weaseled my way in there, but it didn't seem sporting - plus, as a superfan I knew I could hold out until Opening Day, and my ticket was already bought.
This was going to be the first "Star Wars" film where I could say that I knew the directors, because one of the creators of "The Lego Movie", Chris Miller, who was tapped to direct this Solo film, along with his directing partner, Phil Lord. Chris was an intern at one of the animation studios I work at, this was back in 2003 or so, and his friend Phil was often hanging around. I hadn't seen Chris in years, but re-connected with him at San Diego Comic-Con in 2015, and afterwards, I wondered why I hadn't thrown myself at his feet and asked him for a job on a "Star Wars" movie. When those directors got removed and replaced by Ron Howard, suddenly I stopped second-guessing myself and thought maybe I made the right move by remaining silent.
But my "Star Wars" geekdom runs very deep, from my 110-item autograph collection to my shelf full of every tie-in novel (canonical or not) and every "Star Wars" comic. Plus I have my enormous memory full of "Star Wars" trivia, my photos taken with both Carrie Fisher AND Natalie Portman, and of course my very true story about how I was invited to visit Skywalker Ranch, but made the unfortunate unavoidable error of trying to arrange a tour in the same week that George Lucas announced his retirement, so the whole place was on lockdown and I was out of luck. Hey, sometimes you have good luck and sometimes you have bad luck, the franchise gives and the franchise also takes away (especially all the money I spend on collecting autographs).
Fortunately, the new "Solo" movie has a lot to give, and it gives generously. Without giving away any spoilers, this is a back-to-basics approach that brings the franchise back to where it began, which is essentially as a Western set in space. (OK, I know the film draws from Kurosawa & other Japanese films, too, but work with me here). Besides being a hot-shot pilot, Han Solo is great with a blaster - we know this because he got the drop on Greedo in the first film BY SHOOTING FIRST, UNDER THE TABLE and no other scenario is allowable when discussing this plot point. There are shots in "Solo" that are framed EXACTLY like a duel in a Western town, or when Solo walks into a saloon/cantina to join a high-stakes poker game.
Of course, some of the best Westerns are also "heist" movies, and "Solo" is that too. When the team's mission is to uncouple a few cars from a mag-lev train, I thought that this whole sequence could easily have come straight from a Western film, a genre where people are always robbing moving trains, and those sequences have become more elaborate in recent Westerns, as movie special effects have advanced. However, if you prefer to draw comparisons to other heist films, like "Ocean's 11" and its sequels, that's fine, too. This is "Solo's 6", or perhaps "Beckett's 6" once the characters come together and work out all the details.
It's too bad that Han's time on Corellia, his home planet, is so short in this film. We spend barely any time there, since he's so eager to get OFF of Corellia - we barely understand why he and Qi'ra want to leave so bad, except that the opening titles told us that the galaxy is basically "lawless" and therefore life everywhere sucks. So, umm, why do they think their life is going to be any better somewhere else? I guess once they get a ship of their own, they can at least get from planet to planet and see how badly each one sucks?
But Solo's plan to leave Corellia doesn't exactly go smoothly - does anything? He vows to return and make things right, but the fastest way out is to join the Empire by enrolling in the Naval Academy as a pilot. (You'd think spaceships would be more of an Air Force thing, but somehow they count as Imperial Navy, which honestly sounds like it should be made of boats, right?). But then even THAT doesn't go his way, and he ends up in the infantry instead. It's a damn shame, because I think I would have preferred to see Han in flight school. He had to pick up those flying skills somewhere, right?
If I think about it, nothing really goes Han's way at all until he meets Chewbacca. Who couldn't use an 8-foot 200-year-old loyal-as-hell Wookiee on their side? So at least we get to see how the best bromance in sci-fi started. (not to mention how Solo got his traditional blaster, what exactly the Kessel Run is, and how he ended up owning the Millennium Falcon - geez, the movie explains everything except where he bought his first black vest...)
And this is only really a problem for superfans like myself - because between the novels and the comic books I've already SEEN the story of "When Hanny Met Chewie" at least a dozen times. And we've all heard the story about how he won the Falcon in a game of Sabacc (which I now know is pronounced "suh-BACC", and not "SAB-buc", the way I've heard it in my head. Oh yeah, and this movie confirms that it's always been "HAHN Solo", as if it almost rhymes with "LAWN" or "GONE" not "HAN" like it rhymes with "STAN". Except Lando can't seem to get it right, but that totally tracks with the way Billy Dee Williams said it in "Empire".).
Some of the earliest "Star Wars" novel tie-ins were the first Han Solo books, starting with "Han Solo at Stars End" in 1979. But they were set some time after Han met Chewie and won the Falcon. In 1983 three books were released featuring Lando Calrissian and his adventures flying the same ship, these were clearly set earlier, and ended with Lando expressing a desire to retire (so maybe he wanted to lose the ship?). But then in 1997 came a new Han Solo trilogy, starting with "The Paradise Snare", and it tells a similar story to the "Solo" film - how Han got off Corellia, and into the Imperial Academy. Only ALL of the details are different - this book is one of many that has now been retconned out of the timeline, now that Disney bought Lucasfilm and decided to explore the same territory with a movie. And the second book in that trilogy, "The Hutt Gambit", detailed how Han met Chewbacca and Lando, and began his career as a smuggler. (And I believe the third book in the series, "Rebel Dawn", was the first book to explain the Kessel Run, in a manner similar to this film.).
Anyway, I don't want to get bogged down in all these details, differences between the pre-existing novels and the movie, because even though I spent a lot of time and money on those books, they might as well not exist any more - yeah, I'm still kind of upset about that. But we have to focus on the movies, they have the power to make things more real than the books. And this movie is a lot of fun, and it goes very far in explaining who Han Solo is as a character, how he got the way he is - and still managed to leave room for a sequel, by suggesting there's a big score waiting on Tatooine, where we all know Han's going to end up working a job for Jabba the Hutt that will go spectacularly wrong, and he'll end up owing Jabba so much money that he'll spend years trying to climb out of that hole. So look for "Solo II: Another Star Wars Story" if this one really catches on.
But as a fan, I sort of face the same conundrum I did with "Rogue One". I wonder if this story needed to be told - because not only has it been told before in different forms, every "Star Wars" fan has a version of this story in their heads, and some of those might even be better. (OK, probably not.). But can you fill a tie-in film like this with a bunch of visual references, call-backs and shout-outs to other parts of the original trilogy, and is that enough in the end? I'm going to tentatively say "yes", but I'm also going to see how I feel about "Solo" after several more viewings, to see if it holds up against the main numbered films.
NITPICK POINT: We've been hearing about the "spice mines of Kessel" since the very first "Star Wars" film in 1977, and we finally get to see them here! Only Han & company go to Kessel for a very different reason, to get another thing. Does this make sense? Why wouldn't they go to Kessel to get spice, since we fans all know that's what gets mined there? I guess a planet can have more than one resource or thing that it makes, but it does seem just a little off-brand.
Also starring Alden Ehrenreich (last seen in "Rules Don't Apply"), Emilia Clarke (last seen in "Terminator Genisys"), Donald Glover (last seen in "Spider-Man: Homecoming"), Woody Harrelson (last seen in "Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri"), Thandie Newton (last seen in "The Pursuit of Happiness"), Joonas Suotamo (last seen in "Star Wars: The Last Jedi"), Warwick Davis (ditto), Anthony Daniels (ditto), Erin Kellyman, Clint Howard (last seen in "EdTV"), Ian Kenny (last seen in "Sing Street"), Kiran Shah, Ray Park and the voices of Phoebe Waller-Bridge (last seen in "Albert Nobbs"), Linda Hunt (last seen in "The Year of Living Dangerously") and Sam Witwer.
RATING: 8 out of 10 liberated droids
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