What a shoddy Star Wars fan I am. The Solo movie has been in cinemas for five weeks and I've only seen it eight times*1. There are reasons behind this ranging from manic IRL scheduling through to my own enforced laziness (due in no small part to the manic IRL scheduling). But this weekend appears to hold the final screenings at my local (although Monday's new listings will tell), so barring me perhaps being able to catch the film on an as-yet-unplanned jaunt to the capital, this is probably the end of the line for me and the Corellian captain on the big screen*2…
One last pass to catch the things which make me smile. Like Qi'Ra's warning to Han at the spaceport that they could be "sold to Crimson Dawn or the Hutt cartel", the very same organisations which the pair of them go on to work for anyway.
One last pass to catch the things which make my jaw drop. Like cinematographer Bradford Young's 360° tracking shot of Han's stolen speeder during the Corellia docklands chase. Then later, the similar pan-around of the Millennium Falcon as it skids into a crash-landing on Savareen.
One last pass to catch the things I suddenly notice for the first time. Like what appears to be a droid/vehicle made from an AT-AT's leg/chassis framework, moving in the water on Corellia. And the stripped down landspeeder in the factory alley there. And the guy sitting at the card table in the game at the end, wearing a modified X-Wing pilot's helmet. And the dude standing behind Lando in the same game wearing a breastplate from repurposed Snowtrooper armour.
After careful consideration, I think I love every single frame of this film. No caveats, no exceptions. There are parts I'd like expanded, but that doesn't mean I don't love what's there. Bravo Lucasfilm, bravo.
In fact, I only have one question: where the hell is my Therm Scissorpunch 3¾" action figure, Hasbro..?
The Star Wars's.
Yes.
Yes, all.
For some, quite possibly.
No, but I'll insist that you tell me every single thought of yours about it, then I'll critique those as well.
There isn't.
I don't like it. I don't agree with it.
But I accept it..
Level 0: It is Star Wars.
…but if you wanted to go round the houses with it, Solo features Jon Favreau, who rolled up in Disney's John Carter along with Dominic West, who starred in 2010's Centurion along with Riz Ahmed, a player in Channel 4's zombie-drama Dead Set which also starred Andy Nyman, who was in 2007's Death At A Funeral with Alan Tudyk, who has lent his voice to various episodes of Robot Chicken with Seth Green, who appeared in 1995's Notes From The Underground alongside... Jon Favreau
*1 Yeah, I know it seems excessive to normal people, but I caught The Force Awakens eleven times in its initial run, Rogue One for nine screenings and The Last Jedi on ten separate occasions. What was notable watching Solo this time is that my screen held 18 viewers as the BBFC card came up. Which is more than attended the 3D midnight screening on day 0, but there you go… [ BACK ]
*2 Although the blu-ray is pre-ordered, obviously. [ BACK ]
DISCLAIMERS:
• ^^^ That's dry, British humour, and most likely sarcasm or facetiousness.
• Yen's blog contains harsh language and even harsher notions of propriety. Reader discretion is advised.
• This is a personal blog. The views and opinions expressed here represent my own thoughts (at the time of writing) and not those of the people, institutions or organisations that I may or may not be related with unless stated explicitly.
One of the (many) joys of a new Star Wars movie is the soundtrack, and Solo is no exception. For the most part, Mr. John Powell is on scoring-duties this time around, the anthology movies falling outside of John Williams' remit as composer for the saga-episodes. And as Michael Giacchino demonstrated on the Rogue One soundtrack, this gives the standalone films a sense of their own identity at a fundamental level.
So this score is probably the one I've warmed to soonest in the modern, Disney-era of the franchise, and that includes Williams' own work for The Force Awakens and The Last Jedi. With the numbered episodes, there's the mix of familiar themes and new pieces, which I found particularly jarring with TFA. TLJ fares a little better as a secondary level of callback then comes into play covering Episode VII, and the amount of new material subsides. But I also struggled with Giacchino's Rogue One for a while, as it was stylistically different from what had come before in the GFFA (as was the film). I'd had Rogue One down as a great film score in itself, just not Star Wars. Of course given time, replays both in- and outside of the movie, and the arrival of TLJ, it bedded itself in.
But on to Solo. John Williams does return briefly to the fold for track 1 here, The Adventures Of Han Solo, setting the main musical motif for the feature and finally giving Han Solo his own theme after all these years*1. And ironically enough, Powell's arrangement and usage of Han's theme arguably makes for a more Williams-esque soundtrack than the composer's own previous two stints. There's often a sweeping, almost operatic quality than John Snr doesn't seems to want to fully return to just yet.
Powell's use of percussion drives the whole thing forward, not just embellishing the more militaristic cues but adding style (and different styles) to the set-pieces. Elsewhere, Solo reminds me of Hans Zimmer's work on the Pirates of the Caribbean movies, dynamic and almost tribal in its execution. Zimmer is also evoked in the second half of track 5, Flying With Chewie (the bit where Han and the air-drying wookiee are talking on the gantry of the Imperial lander as it flies over the surface of the snowy planet Vandor). It's a refreshing change for Star Wars to be this 'casual', and I wish the score came back to it later (maybe next time). And I could be mistaken, but I'm sure I'm getting beats from Kevin Kiner's Clone Wars soundtrack in here, too. In addition to the percussion, Powell's choral cues fit in with Solo's visual aesthetic of the old-time Western.
A few 'legacy' themes from the original trilogy are referenced in the score of course, but when they appear they're relatively fleeting and entirely fitting*2. That said, grumbles have been heard at Blackout Towers about the Imperial recruitment holovid which plays in the spaceport on Corellia, using a modified version of the famous Imperial March in its soundtrack. This effectively makes some of the Star Wars music canon within the Star Wars galaxy, which feels a bit odd. Then again, bear in mind that the same thing occurred in Star Wars: Rebels, so this isn't a first*3.
The only thing that's missing, from my point of view, is the synth- and guitar-based tracks which were used in the initial trailers. They hinted that the film could possibly sound very different from what had come before, but in the end these were for promotional use only. A damn shame.
So the short version is (in case you hadn't guessed), Solo has a great soundtrack. One of the smaller points I love is that after the new theme which makes up track 1, it plays out more-or-less in order of the film's story (which happens far less than you'd expect with this sort of thing). That's another little aid to letting a new score bed in, as your memory of the movie can flow in linear order as you work your way through the CD*4.
Much like the movie itself, John Powell's score for Solo becomes inherently Star Wars™ because it's not trying too hard to be Star Wars™, and is arguably better than it has any right to be. But the end result is what everyone was hoping for anyway, so it's all good.
Welcome to the family, Mr Powell…
The Star Wars's.
Yes.
Yes, all.
In some cases, it's entirely possible.
No, but it's a film ripe for discussion.
Apparently not.
Level 0: It is Star Wars.
…but if you wanted to go round the houses with it, Solo stars Paul Bettany, who was in 2005's Firewall with Harrison Ford from the movie Six Days Seven Nights that also featured Temuera Morrison, a major player in 1994's Once Were Warriors, as was Rena Owen who went on to star in Absolute Killers along with Ed Asner, who performed voice-work in the animated Our Friend Martin, as did Samuel L. Jackson, who starred in Avengers: Age Of Ultron with... Paul Bettany.
*1 And while that's a lovely sentiment, we can't escape the fact that Han's new theme isn't in the four movies where the character has previously appeared. Williams hasn't reverse-engineered a previously innocuous but recurring signature for this (largely because there's no such thing in the world of Star Wars soundtracks), so his work on Solo would go some way to suggesting a musical foundation for further outings with Alden Ehrenreich's Han, even if it's appearances in other movies in the GFFA around that time, rather than outright sequels to Solo. [ BACK ]
*2 Contrast this with John Williams opening The Last Jedi by ending the main theme with a slide into the 'Tatooine' flourish from A New Hope's beginning, for approximately no logical reason. The first that that's happened in eight films and no, I'm not going to let that one go. [ BACK ]
*3 Normally I'd add the caveat that the Rebels TV show garnered a substantially smaller audience exposure than one of the Star Wars cinematic movies of course, but given Solo's troublesome box office performance, I think it's best if I don't alert you to that comparison at all. Oh, hang on... [ BACK ]
DISCLAIMERS:
• ^^^ That's dry, British humour, and most likely sarcasm or facetiousness.
• Yen's blog contains harsh language and even harsher notions of propriety. Reader discretion is advised.
• This is a personal blog. The views and opinions expressed here represent my own thoughts (at the time of writing) and not those of the people, institutions or organisations that I may or may not be related with unless stated explicitly.
This is your spoiler-break. It's the chunk of text which acts as a buffer so that accidental-clicks or preview-feeders etc don't give away that REDACTED is in this film. Although by the time this review finally goes live (mad few weeks IRL, folks), it'll hardly be a secret, but still. The principle is there.
So in this bit I'll just say that the IMAX screen in which I saw Solo for the fourth time was sorely in want of bums-on-seats, although again, this should come as no surprise to anyone at this point. That was disconcerting enough, but the actual projection itself wasn't top-notch either, which in my admittedly limited experience is unheard of with IMAX. Severe ghosting with the 'green' lens (or digital equivalent) on the right-hand side of the screen. I'm used to shoddy projection with RealD screenings, but this ain't on. Obviously I had a word afterwards, but depending on which level of staff you catch in the foyer, you're never quite sure how much further your observation will travel.
Anyhow, neither of these things ended up spoiling what, for me, is a thoroughly solid entry in the Star Wars canon. Read on to find out why...
Despite having a largely optimistic lead character for most of its run-time, Solo is a movie of foreshadowing.
Some of this is blatant. Tobias Beckett's quiet advice to Han, "...assume everyone will betray you, and you'll never be disappointed", should ring in everyone's ears the next time they watch The Force Awakens, as the Corellian stands on the gantry in Starkiller Base looking at his son for the last time.
Other lines are more broad. The opening caption-card, 'It is a lawless time' is an indicator right off the bat that since the Empire are the ones supposedly running the galaxy now, they're still not going to appear in this film too often. And other than the spaceport scene on Corellia (where the troopers are told to back off by Moloch, anyway) and the furry Rangetroopers guarding the Conveyex train on Vandor, the film stays true to that promise.
Then, thre's a layer of in-movie, retroactive foreshadowing. When we first re-join Qi'Ra onboard Dryden Vos' pleasure yacht, she's wearing a semi-circular amulet as part of her dress, resembling the bottom half of the Crimson Dawn tattoo adorning her wrist. And when we finally meet the head of that organisation in the movie's final minutes, we see he's wearing one too (although Qi'Ra has removed hers by that point). It's a visual link which only really becomes apparent when the film is watched for a second time.
Oh yeah, and Maul. He's back.
Who saw that one coming?
Hmm? You didn't? Well, the clues were there...
+ + +
So I didn't understand, when I read the 2014 comic-series Son Of Dathomir, why the powers-that-be had left the ex-Sith Lord and all-round troublemaker, Maul, surviving. 'Again'.
The Zabrak's exit in The Phantom Menace had been fairly definitive ('divisive', even), and while his Season Four return in the Clone Wars series had been oddly compelling, the thought remained that you wouldn't bring a character back from the void like that without planning a really great send-off. And the build-up of the Shadow Collective episodes in Season Five seemed to be heading for just that conclusion. Having Maul building a criminal empire with his brother/apprentice, utilising the Mandalorian Death Watch, the Hutt families, the Pyke Syndicate and Black Sun pulled together a lot of threads, and when Darth Sidious finally snapped and went to sort business out himself, that promised the ultimate smackdown. But Maul wasn't destroyed by Sidious, only captured, and with the line "Do not worry, I'm not going to kill you. I have other uses for you…"
But in 2014 The Clone Wars was cancelled, and the ambiguous thread on which Maul's fate had been left dangling seemed even more ominous. Maybe we'd find out what happened to him, maybe not. Not every question in Star Wars needs to be answered, although most eventually are. But in the Lucasfilm/Disney re-jig - and keeping in mind that The Clone Wars series was to be considered canon in the body of work moving forward, a four-issue comic series, 'Son of Dathomir', was commissioned. It told the story originally intended for the sixth season of the show. In it, Maul is taken to Palpatine's secure prison on Stygeon Prime, where he is used as bait to lure out the Dathomir witch, Mother Talzin, so that Sidious can finally dispose of this matriarchal thorn in his side. But, long-story-short, Maul escapes at the end. 'Again'.
So a few years down the line in Star Wars Rebels, we eventually learned the obvious reason why: to be a part of future Star Wars stories of course. But all good (or badass) things must come to an end, and everyone's favourite horny assassin finally met his match with his long-time nemesis, Ben Kenobi (hey, I told you up the top there'd be spoilers. They're just spoilers for 'all' of Star Wars, that's all) on Tatooine. So that was that. Arc closed, circle complete, there goes Maul. Bye mate.
But of course, Solo takes place (for its largest segment), around ten years before that final duel. Maul's still around, still pissed off, it's an expensive place and he's got to get his disposable income from somewhere. And hey, what better job in a lawless galaxy than to be a crime-boss, right? Which brings us directly (again) to our first tip-off…
1) One of the first things we see, after the familiar 'A long time ago, in a galaxy far, far away…' card, the next words to appear on-screen are "It is a lawless time". Season 5, Episode 16 of The Clone Wars sees Maul consolidating his criminal power and eventually facing off against the livid Darth Sidious. This episode is titled 'The Lawless'. Given these words at the beginning of Solo and Maul's appearance at the end, his crime syndicate now including (or being spearheaded by) Crimson Dawn, my brain can't think of this as co-incidence.
2) Another linguistic nod comes later in the movie on Kessel. Qi'Ra refers to her (ostensibly fictional) boss as "his eminence". Not a particularly obscure term, but a very specific one nonetheless. Eminence isn't a word which occurs often through Star Wars scripting. But 'Eminence' was the title of Season 5, Episode 14 of The Clone Wars. This is the one where Maul assembles his allied criminal factions into The Shadow Collective, including the Pyke Syndicate. Showing one of the Pykes at the same time as this line is uttered is (in my fan-boy mind) a deliberate clue on the trail to Maul's eventual reveal.
3) Yeah, I wish I could find a direct reference to episode 15 of that season, 'Shades of Reason', the other one covering Maul's rise as a master criminal. But hey - we can't have everything, right?
It's entirely possible (probable, even) that these lines would have appeared whoever was going to be in the hologram which Qi'Ra fired up (this was only finalised late in the game). But the fact that they did anyway creates a link. Perhaps a retroactive one, but a link all the same. And that's not to say I second-guessed Maul's appearance. I absolutely didn't. But the words 'Lawless' and 'Eminence' rang bells from my second-pass onwards.
On the surface, Solo is a throwaway, star-hopping adventure. Just underneath that, it's a web that links the prequel, original and sequel trilogies, as well as Rogue One, The Clone Wars and Rebels.
This is about as Star Wars as they come…
The Star Wars's.
Yes.
Yes, all.
Time will tell.
Well I'd have said no, but I've also read 'mixed reactions' by now so who knows?
…I thought I heard a cut-off one during the exterior ground-battle on Kessel.
But no, of course I can't be sure.
I mean, I've only seen the film four times.
Level 0: It is Star Wars.
…but if you wanted to go round the houses with it, Solo stars Donald Glover, who voiced Miles Morales in episodes of Ultimate Spider-Man, which also featured Tom Kenny who performed in 2015's animated Back To The Jurassic, as did Grey DeLisle, who lent her voice to Transformers: Revenge Of The Fallen, a movie featuring the warblings of one Michael York, who went on to narrate the 2014 Sleeping Beauty which starred Olivia D'Abo, who was in 1994's Clean Slate along with James Earl Jones, who reprises his Mufasa role in the upcoming live-action version of The Lion King, which also features the tones of... Donald Glover.
DISCLAIMERS:
• ^^^ That's dry, British humour, and most likely sarcasm or facetiousness.
• Yen's blog contains harsh language and even harsher notions of propriety. Reader discretion is advised.
• This is a personal blog. The views and opinions expressed here represent my own thoughts (at the time of writing) and not those of the people, institutions or organisations that I may or may not be related with unless stated explicitly.
As is so often the case, a second-pass of a new Star Wars film is what's needed to lend a little more clarity to the proceedings, especially when the pacing is as frenetic as Ron Howard's Solo. And once the story's larger events are comfortably filed away, the web of sub-plots can be more properly digested. And while I'll go into this further with my next review, Solois a movie of sub-plots. Not so much one big idea, but lots of smaller ones. It's the cinematic equivalent of one of the Star Wars novels, full of supplementary information, yet still teasing that there's more to be uncovered.
And this itself is a task which could take quite some time, on a visual level at least. Solo is dense with 'stuff', from background characters to props and scenery. Nothing is there by accident, and much of it means more than just its superficial presence. But Arrival cinematographer Bradford Young has thrown an extra challenge into the mix, with many of the locales being absolutely thick with grime or dust, and anything other than the pleasure yacht and the film's final planet being presented in low-lighting conditions. Having first seen Solo in 3D, notorious for its light-loss, it was surprising to note that there's not actually too much difference once the glasses are off (although it is still clearer).
But what's more interesting is watching Howard's focus shifting gears from scene to scene. While it's not yet known how much of the final film was shot under the auspices of Lord and Miller, word on the street indicates that Ron's reshoots were 'extensive'. And yet, there's still a marked unevenness in tone throughout film, as Howard clearly has more enthusiasm for the film's action setpieces over the dialogue-driven scenes. But speaking of 'driven', it's the race-and-chase sequences where the director of F1 biopic Rush and 1977's Grand Theft Auto really shines. Flaring afterburners stand in for squealing tyres, and you can feel Howard's yearning for speed as a variety of vehicles show what they've got when a decent pilot is at the controls.
The majority of moviegoers would probably tell you they never want to see another cinematic pod-race as long as they live. I'm wondering why the hell we didn't get one in here.
But despite my tonal grumblings here, Solo is still an incredibly solid Star Wars film, and continues to intrigue and excite. But this will be the last time I can write about it without wading into spoiler-territory…
The Star Wars's.
Yes.
Yes, all.
Time, and future Star Wars projects, will tell.
Unlikely.
Y'know what, I'm starting to think there's not and that Matthew Wood's only gone and bloody done it..
Level 0: It is Star Wars.
…but if you wanted to go round the houses with it, Solo stars Alden Ehrenreich, who was in 2016's Hail, Caesar! along with Clancy Brown, who has provided various bits of voicework on Phineas and Ferb, alongside one of the show's lead performers, Thomas Brodie-Sangster, who appeared in 2011's Death of a Superhero with Andy Serkis, who starred in Sex & Drugs & Rock & Roll, which also featured Ralph Ineson, who was in 2012's Great Expectations alongside Sally Hawkins, who rocked up in Blue Jasmine with... Alden Ehrenreich.
DISCLAIMERS:
• ^^^ That's dry, British humour, and most likely sarcasm or facetiousness.
• Yen's blog contains harsh language and even harsher notions of propriety. Reader discretion is advised.
• This is a personal blog. The views and opinions expressed here represent my own thoughts (at the time of writing) and not those of the people, institutions or organisations that I may or may not be related with unless stated explicitly.
