We saw Solo: A Star Wars Story over the weekend. Everybody liked it okay. I don’t think it was anyone’s idea of a great movie, and even my kids saw some of those closing double-crosses coming, but it was still entertaining, and that’s fine.
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| Solo: A Star Wars Story |
Solo’s biggest problem is that it wasn’t necessary. We didn’t need it. In fact, this is the problem with much of the Star Wars cinematic universe in general. These guys keep going back to the same well. Even with The Last Jedi, which at least bent a few of the old topes in new and unexpected directions, they’re still laser-focused on reliving the Original Trilogy (OT). It’s a great giant universe of possibility, but for whatever reason, the Disney version of Lucasfilm keeps strip-mining these same sections of story over and over again. And because they keep refighting the same battles, they’re making the victories of the past less meaningful. Now they supposedly want to make a Boba Fett movie, and spoiler alert: that one’s going to struggle, too.
This is not the way. Say what you will about George Lucas, but he at least kept trying to take the story in different directions. The prequels are not much like the OT, and Star Wars: The Clone Wars goes much, much further afield. That was its genius. It kept expanding the universe by pushing the boundaries. For all that I really liked The Force Awakens, it’s a movie that’s mostly coloring inside the established lines, refighting the old battles. Last Jedi does this, too, though it seemed too determined to astonish by half.
Really, the only thing that’s been even a little different in any of this more recent Star Wars stuff has been Rogue One, and even then… I mean, we all knew what was going to happen at the end of the movie. Yeah, it was great to see a different set of takes on the internal politics of the Rebellion and the Empire, and the fact that they made it a war movie out of Star Wars was itself smart execution of a concept.
But still. Rebellion versus Empire. This was the story.
It’s like that’s the only story.
I’ve been thinking lately about why the Marvel Cinematic Universe is working while Star Wars seems to have so spectacularly lost its way. I see it like this: the MCU is moving forward. They’re making very different movies and using different genre tropes, granted within the overall framework of their unique superhero trappings. Which is to say that Captain America: The First Avenger is not at all the same kind of movie as Captain America: The Winter Soldier, and neither has much is common with Guardians of the Galaxy. That’s a good thing. This was also why Rogue One worked.
At the same time, the Marvel movies have all proceeded with a unified vision of the future. They’re all going somewhere, if not necessarily by the same paths. But as viewers, we got the sense that all of that story meant something. Which is why people loved Avengers: Infinity War even though it was by no means the best movie that Marvel has put together. It worked because of the way they’d stacked all those story blocks on top of one another and then knocked them down. Even then, each individual block retained its relevance. We still needed each one as a part of the whole.
Star Wars is meandering by comparison. J.J. Abrams laid out a path that invalidated a lot of the OT’s storytelling through its refusal to explain how we got from the triumph of Jedi to the rise of the First Order. But he also threw down a trail of breadcrumbs for the future, too. Unfortunately, The Last Jedi made use of almost none of those breadcrumbs, invalidating many of Abrams’s choices in much the same way that Abrams had so casually done away with the victories of the OT. By the end of The Last Jedi, I found myself wondering if any of this had any meaning at all. Even if you liked The Last Jedi, and I did like it, it was still hard not to walk away wondering what the point had been. The film was almost nihilistic in its derision for what had come before. It played with the old toys, but it broke them. On purpose. Then the studio comes back with Solo, and it feels like an attempt to put these very same toys reverently back on the shelf, and they’re surprised that no one’s buying it?
Still I’m wondering: what’s the point?
Honestly, I’m losing interest in Star Wars, and I love Star Wars. But I don’t see where they go from here, nor do I trust that whatever comes next will actually matter. It seems to me nothing matters. At the end of the day, they’re just gonna blow it all up and reboot it regardless.
You can tell how badly off-course they are by the fact that they decided to include Darth Maul at the end of Solo. What possible purpose could that serve? We saw Maul die at the end of The Phantom Menace, and that was enough for most folks, but if it wasn’t, he was back for multiple seasons of The Clone Wars. Hell, we even saw him die at the hands of Obi Wan Kenobi—again—on Tatooine in one of the later-season episodes of Star Wars: Rebels.
What on Earth are they possibly going to do with him now?
Dude is dead. His arc is over.
But that doesn’t matter. All that matters is recycling the old ideas. It’s an endless cycle. Obi Wan defeats Darth Maul? So what? We’ll just reboot him and start again. Nothing matters, so why not?
I think maybe Disney’s original idea was to have Solo lead into an Obi Wan Kenobi movie, using Emilia Clarke’s character as the through-line via her relationship to Maul. Again, we already saw this play itself out on Rebels, so I can’t fathom what its purpose would be, but I also can’t think of another plausible explanation. Granted, Solo is looking to actually lose about $50M all in, so whatever they’d planned next is sure now headed straight for the incinerator. But they must have intended something. I mean, they must’ve, right?
Abrams has to somehow pick up all of these pieces with Episode IX, and if the intent is tie all three of the Skywalker trilogies together, frankly I don’t see how he pulls that off. Not from where we are right now. We had a trilogy about Anakin Skywalker’s rise and fall, and another—the OT—about his reign of terror and eventual redemption. This third trilogy should therefore be about his legacy, and maybe we could have gotten there with what we saw in The Force Awakens. After The Last Jedi, though, I just don’t see it. And even if I did, I wouldn’t trust that it would matter in the end.
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