Film Review: Solo: A Star Wars Story

Back in 1977, when Harrison Ford walked into everyone's life as the galaxy's most lovable and (anti-)heroic scoundrel, did anybody ever really jump up and demand "I want his backstory"?

Anyone? No? Well, I didn't ask for this either. But with the latest Disney/Lucasfilm pact, something like this was inevitable, because money. The beautiful thing about Han Solo is that his backstory is already sprinkled in throughout the series--writing a prequel just for him practically writes itself. And yet, that's the disconcerting problem--Han worked in the originals because he was a mysterious rogue with a shady past, with only shadows of it popping up as occasional story problems. I feared that revealing the source of his shadowy past would take away from the enigmatic depth, because less really is more in this case.

Thus, I walked into Solo: A Star Wars Story cynically, expecting a blue milk run through all the checkboxes that aligned with the original movies (the fact that Phil Lord and Christopher Miller were bumped off the director's chair in favor of Ron Howard did little to alleviate my concerns). Even though the film opens with a fast and furious speeder chase, I just leaned back and expected a dry, colorless, lifeless hack job to sink into my ears and eyes.

I walked out rather satisfied. What happened? Same things that makes any movie perfectly watchable--a magic combination of storytelling and cinematic experience. Howard managed to bring that certain something to the table that made Willow so charming back in the day--an adventurous spirit, wrapped around a romp of a plot with charming characters, cute comedy, eye-popping action, and marvelous special effects.

Sure, you do get to see certain checkboxes marked off, such as how Han met Chewbacca, hustles and bustles with Lando Calrissian, beauty shots of the Millennium Falcon (and its eventual degradation into a hunk of junk--man, that was fast), and the historic "Kessel Run" in a miraculous 12 Parsecs! Fortunately, these don't really lift away the air of mystery from Solo's character--if anything, they turn his moments in the originals into throwbacks. Prequels often run the risk of making universes smaller, but Solo manages to expand the Star Wars cinematic realms in exciting ways--this is a film that dives deeper into the seedy webs of crime syndicates, and promises that there's a lot more fertile ground to cover. This is easily the closest a film has come to becoming a Shadows of the Empire adaptation. The only bad thing Solo does as a prequel is that it brings back a Prequel Trilogy character just for the hell of it--even I'm pulling the last of my hair out wondering "how is this character still alive?!!"

The actual story behind Han Solo is a simple one: he was dude (Alden Ehrenreich) on Corellia who tried to worm his way out. When he failed to get his girlfriend (Emilia Clarke) off the planet, he joined the Empire. Then he got kicked out of the academy. He went to war anyway (I dunno, I wish there was a little more shown about these Imperial years), hooked up with some roughnecks (headed by Woody Harrelson, playing a character who feels lifted out of a Sergio Leone western), and took a job to rob a train (I'm sensing a pattern...). When that goes to hell, he has to take another job to make up for things and save his hide, which prompts the madcap chase to rip off the Kessel spice mines. The whole time, Solo plays the odds not only for his freedom, but for the girl he left behind.

There are predictable aspects to this plot (especially anything that was already revealed in the original movies). It's also hard to feel tension for these characters when you know the leads have to survive. What helps, however, is that the story is still firmly established on characterization that feels fresh. Alden Ehrenreich embodies Han Solo with surprising nuance--all the fun qualities Harrison Ford initially brought to the table carries over without feeling like a mere copycat. Other performances are quite solid, and they're all unified with a fairly decent script. I feel the opening act is the weakest, largely because so much of the character is "told" to us and not shown. After the big train heist scene, the film settles into a comfortable pace and pattern that's easily digestible.

Like the other modern Star Wars films, this looks really sharp and slick. Most of the film looks a little too dark for my liking, but the cinematography is still really nice most of the time. No expense spared on any of the sets, props, costumes, or special effects. Music is often quite pleasing and interesting. It all looks and sounds so money.

But that may be the film's downfall: money. Fans might not be fooled or enticed enough to see past the film's business prerogative. But what studio film isn't made to make money, especially with the Star Wars brand? Solo could have been much worse--I'm personally pleased that it managed to capture the right spirit, even if it took a little time to find it. Casual viewers might shrug it off--as a fan, I've got nothing but good feelings about this.

3.5/5

Book Review: At the Mountains of Madness (HP Lovecraft)

It takes a lot to scare me, especially in a novel. H.P. Lovecraft's shtick has always crept under my skin with theory alone, and there's myriads of other media that carries over the same tropes of cosmic horror with varying degrees of success. When it comes to the original (and all things original for that matter), there are things to admire, but it's just that--a thing to admire.

Writing itself was different in Lovecraft's day--much more tolerant of telling, not as much showing. With At the Mountains of Madness, the dude expends many many pages to describe this Antarctic expedition in a dry, scholarly voice. He stiffly describes the slow, gradual exploration of desolate ice fields, mountains, and finally an ancient city that shouldn't even exist in our reality. It's at its best when the macabre happens--dead bodies, mutilated animals, stolen and broken supplies, all with no apparent cause...now that's creepy. But the climax of the experience occurs when the characters behold one of these Elder Things and it just freaks them out of their minds.

When the macabre becomes apparent, the story does hold some level of dread, tension, and suspense. I pretty much kept reading because I knew this would pay off with some kind of crazy monster at the end. But to get there, you have to wade through a ton of dry prose that tells (not necessarily shows) the journey, the history of all the things (including the things that should not be), and so on. The only emotions that emerge out of the text is terror, at the end. Which might be the point I suppose--the characters are blank slates that let us experience their terror, but when you spend a hundred pages describing every shape, stone, street of an ancient city, it reads like a textbook. Don't even get me started on the hieroglyph reading, which leads to a massive infodump on the whole genealogy of the Elder Things and all the critters that bleed into other Lovecraft stories (to be fair, the shared-universe aspect of his work is a nice touch).

What attracts me to Lovecraft will always be his core themes: that some things are so far above-and-beyond humanity we can't even comprehend them. To try is to go mad. And those things will crush us, not because they're evil but because we're all just petty insects to them. The vastness of the cosmos and the greater creatures that could exist beyond Earth or the universe is what instills terror, either with a direct confrontation with an abominable Elder Thing, or with the implied effects of their existence (which is scattered with freaky details throughout the whole expedition). It's the themes that define just about every Lovecraft story I've read so far. I'd even go so far to say that most of his stories have the same pattern: characters experience something weird, it lures them into a creepy place, they see a monster, they come out of it mad. Same pattern in this book, just as it is with Call of Cthulhu or The Colour Out of Space and whatnot. Same-but-different.

This is one of those works where I wanted to like it more, but couldn't get past the long, wordy, super-dry prose. I can get behind the idea of it, because this brand of horror is something I admire and do find unsettling. The story is solid, but the execution fell flat for me personally. It's a thing to be admired--studied even. And I'm glad I read it (along with some of the other Lovecraft stories). But it's a vast universe of terror, and I believe Lovecraft's influence has birthed a cosmos of other, more unique, more enjoyable, and maybe even scarier stories.

3/5