I hated the idea that this movie was going to exist. “Who even wants a Han Solo movie, I asked?” and my friends seemed to echo the sentiment. Part of Han’s appeal was his mystery, his shady past. Besides, we still haven’t gotten that Ewen McGregor Obi Wan film, nor the Ahsoka film, nor any really interesting look at the more bizarre parts of the galaxy far, far away. Star Wars is a big universe, and I was tired of the movies’ narrow focus. Then I saw the trailer, and I knew this film would be awful. “I’m not going to pay to go to this. I’m not giving Disney more money for making lazy films,” I told my roommates. Months passed. Directors changed. The movie came out. “Listen to the soundtrack,” my friend Clark said. So I did. And it was magnificent. John Powell knew what he was doing with Star Wars, and he didn’t take that mantle lightly. The score dips from soaring brass sequences of tense eighth notes to quiet piano moments with remarkable grace. By the time I reached the screaming vocal theme from “Mauraders Arrive” representing Enfys Nest and her crew, I was totally sold. Even John Williams’s one contribution to the score, “The Adventures of Han,” a three-minute, breakneck flurry of brass and madness, knocks all of his work on the disappointing Last Jedi score out of the park. This is how you make a killer score. So I went to see the movie because of the music. Dead serious. I had heard the movie bombed at the box office, that the ticket sales numbers were bad, and I was actually relieved to hear it. After the mediocre Rogue One managed to do so well, I was hoping Disney would finally take a hit for making just okay movies that wrecked the box office simply because the name Star Wars was stapled to it. So because of the music, and because I didn’t feel bad contributing my money to a movie that had already failed in my eyes, I went to see Solo. I went with my friend Matt, and we kept looking at each other throughout the movie, confused. We were waiting for the movie to get bad. But it never did. In fact, it went from good to great to okay to excellent, and then it ended. I left the theater feeling elated and a little disappointed in my own cynicism and a lot disappointed in the critical and commercial failure of the film. “This is a good movie,” I said to Matt as we drove away from the theater. “Like, really good.” He agreed. I couldn’t believe what had happened.

 

Solo is a bleak and beautiful film. It is an American Western in the truest sense, tapping into a subgenre of the Star Wars series I’d always wanted the movies to tap into. This movie has it all: a train heist; gun-slinging; a quiet, tense shootout in an abandoned ghost town; characters with mysterious pasts who repeatedly double-cross each other. But this movie is also every bit as much the science fantasy space opera you’ve come to expect from Star Wars. There is romance, there are tense space travel scenes involving tentacled beasts living in wormholes or something, and the guns are still blasters, every shot punctuated by the oddly satisfying pew! we all know and love. But this movie is also absurd, and it revels in its own absurdity. In a moment of pure cinematic bliss, we watch as Donald Glover’s Lando cradles the severed head of his dead robot lover amidst a shootout between slavers and a massive droid rebellion. There is something outlandishly ridiculous about the scene that reminds me of the prequels at their best. In fact, I can’t help but compare this movie to other Star Wars films at every turn, and I’m consistently surprised to see it coming out on top. For all of The Last Jedi’s subversions of expectations, few of them actually made sense. But the finale of Solo involves at least four instances of double-crossing, and they all make sense. Rogue One throws a bunch of characters at the audience in a row and tries desperately to make us care about them before they all die, and it doesn’t quite work. Solo manages to give a four-armed monkey alien who works for an evil crime syndicate ten minutes of screen-time that make me care more about him than I ever will about Jyn Erso. This movie has plenty of humor, but it rarely feels forced. Why? Because the script is just so good. I’ve had countless arguments with friends about the quality of The Last Jedi, and where our differences really start to come out is in regard to the writing. A long-held opinion of mine is that the majority of film reviewers do not care enough about screenplay. They do not care about writing anywhere near as much as they should, and writing is very possibly the most important part of a film. I know I am incredibly biased. I don’t make films in any capacity. I’m an English and creative writing major. And of course, the notion of referring to reviewers as that nebulous “they” is inherently problematic. It is difficult not to generalize. But regardless of the difficulty in making an argument about film criticism as a whole, I would like to take a moment to stress the importance of a good screenplay. The importance of a good story. And it turns out Lawrence Kasdan consistently turns out a good story. The man has written precisely eighteen movies, and among them are arguably the best of the Star Wars bunch: Empire Strikes Back, Return of the Jedi, and The Force Awakens, and his one contribution to Indiana Jones was Raiders of the Lost Ark. Along with his son, Jon Kasdan, he once again wrote the kind of story that makes those movies work. It is fun, adventurous, daring, funny—but it doesn’t force anything. It isn’t trying too hard to surprise you. Kasdan’s scripts have a certain quiet confidence to them, as if to say: I’m telling a story. It doesn’t need to be revolutionary in structure. It doesn’t need to subvert expectations at every turn. It needs just one thing—to be good. This is not to discount the work of Ron Howard however, in making this movie work. If you look at the way the screenplay was utilized in the trailer for Lord and Miller’s version of the film, you see the same dialogue, but twisted. Lines that ended up being serious played for laughs, lines that would eventually become wrought with irony played straight. Lord and Miller knocked it out of the park with The Lego Movie, but Solo shouldn’t have been that kind of film, and thanks to Ron Howard, it didn’t try to be.

 

But what about the acting? The characters? The acting is solid across the board. Alden Ehrenreich nails the part as Solo, and I’m convinced those who disliked his take on the character are perhaps overly hung up on the simple fact that he is not Harrison Ford. There is a quiet sadness to Ehrenreich’s take on the character, punctuated by a hopeful optimism that slowly fades. We watch Han come to terms with the Empire’s nasty colonialism as he fights in a war he was forced into. We watch as life pulls him along and he tries his best to be nonchalant, to roll with it. We watch as he makes the decision to be “the good guy” even though he thinks he doesn’t want to. And finally, we watch him become just cynical enough to be the kind of guy who shoots first. Emilia Clarke as Qi’ra is understated, unclear in motivation, mysterious in background. She may be slightly underdeveloped, but Clark does a great job with what she has. Woody Harrelson plays a caricature, but he does it remarkably well, bringing surprising nuance to the part. Donald Glover is perfect as Lando, precisely the right mixture of natural coolness and forced suavity, the Lando you love but don’t quite trust. Paul Bettany as the villainous Dryden Vos feels generic. It works, but he’s not exactly anything new. He doesn’t bring the same terrifying energy as Vader, doesn’t have the startling design of Maul or the raw authority of Dooku or even the mesmerizing robotic insanity of Grievious, but he works. Joonas Suotamo’s Chewbacca is one of the film’s strongest characters, though I have no idea how much of that is thanks to him and how much is thanks to special effects, CGI, etc. Whatever the magical combination of parts that make up Chewie is, it works. Waller-Bridge’s droid, L3, is where things get a bit more complicated. She does a great job bringing the character to life, but the character herself is a bit of a mixed bag. L3 represents many things, and some of these things seem to be at odds with one another. She fulfills the role of the sassy droid popularized by R2-D2 and perfected with Alan Tudyk’s K2-SO in Rogue One. But the story also sometimes wants us to take her more seriously; her plotline, relegated to a small piece of the movie, could fill an entire movie of its own, and is handled somewhat sloppily. L3 is the living embodiment of cyborg feminism, that curious intersection of third wave feminism and robo-ethics that has permeated much of modern sci-fi’s greatest works. Mixing this with the comedy of the sassy robo sidekick feels like a mistake. Additionally, the movie doesn’t dedicate enough time, energy, or intelligence to that complex theme to make it work. The result is a fun, but flawed portrayal, a droid whose plight the movie both wants to take seriously and simultaneously laugh at. When Lando gets up from his chair in the ship and asks L3 if she wants anything and she says, “Equal rights,” it is unclear whether we ought to laugh with her or at her, or even if we should laugh at all. The way droids are treated in Star Wars, given their intelligence in many cases, makes for a potent feminist and slavery metaphor the movie seems to call attention to but never address. Solo rarely feels unsure of itself, and L3 is perhaps its biggest misstep in that regard. L3’s character is wrapped up in only two things: her desire to liberate droid-kind, and her half-romance with Lando. She is sometimes likable, sometimes frustrating, and the movie seems ambivalent about her. While I wish her arc had been handled better and that she had been more fleshed out as a character, the droid rebellion she leads is a remarkably good scene. When her body is eventually melded into the ship itself as a navigation system, (part of the ship, part of the crew), I couldn’t help but wonder about the metaphor of a female slave body becoming a part of an object. Is it intentional? Is it problematic? Am I thinking about this too hard? As long as the narrative treats her as merely a disgruntled droid, she doesn’t quite work. Almost, but not quite.

 

But when Solo works, it works. When the famous Imperial March theme becomes diagetic in military propaganda commercial, when Han struggles through mini AT-AT-infested trench warfare, when the liberated droid army takes down Kessel, when Han wins the Falcon from Lando, when Han first meets Chewie, when the train heist goes awry, when Enfys Nest reveals her true goals—the movie feels like everything it should be.

Solo is a remarkable film. Several of my film critic friends disagree, and I respect that, but I’ve noticed a curious thing: English majors seem to agree with me. I know this is all anecdotal and perhaps it would be a mistake to write that “English majors love Solo,” but I’m doing it anyway. Because this is a movie in which excellent writing, compelling characters, well-executed Western pastiche, and one of the best scores of the year come together into a magnificent conglomerate of a film, and I believe that deserves to be recognized.

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