Solo

Disney’s ongoing effort to strip mine the original Star Wars films of every bit of mystery and novelty continues with Ron Howard’s Solo. In its casting and humor, it is superior to the grim Rogue One. In it’s overly intricate storyline and not-great moments of fan service, it’s more of the same.

Alden Ehrenreich fits the profile and is competent as a young Harrison Ford, whose Han Solo character would become the template for anti-hero heroes to come. Written by Lawrence and Jonathan Kasdan, Solo‘s sloppy first third establishes Han as a “scumrat,” a kind of second-class citizen and street hustler on the planet Corellia. The brash Han and his girlfriend, Qi’ra (Emilia Clarke), long to escape the scummy shipbuilding planet and live hustling ever after exploring the galaxy. The Empire is in charge, with storm troopers enforcing order everywhere. To escape a debt, Han and Qi’ra attempt to escape, but Qi’ra is apprehended. Han vows to return for her. During a silly Ellis Island moment that recalls a young Vito Corleone, Han gets his surname. It is another needless elaboration upon a character where none was necessary.

This is all dashed off in a perfunctory, let’s-get-to-the-next-page fashion. Howard’s cinematographer, Bradford Young, drapes early scenes in a too-dark mist that renders the creatures indecipherable. It’s only when Han becomes a soldier and meets a team of other scoundrels (Woody Harrelson, Thandie Newton, and John Favreau) who, after some coaxing, break Han and his new best pal Chewie (Joonas Suotamo) into their life of crime. Han longs to be a pilot and gets mocked.

The dangerous heists and shenanigans cause our heroes to run afoul of a crime organization called Crimson Dawn, the face of which is the evil Dreyden Vos (Paul Bettany). For a plot that has so many contrivances and backstabbings, the pace settles into a casual stroll that persists until the end of the two-hours-and-fifteen-minutes running time. Amazingly, these spinoffs are all spawned from the original Star Wars film, which does the opposite.

At some point soon, Star Wars movies will run out of callbacks. For now, though, we’re bombarded. This can sometimes be charming, as with Donald Glover’s Lando character mispronouncing “Han” as his forebear Billy Dee Williams once did. (Glover’s performance is a kind of delightful slam dunk of subtle charm as he flawlessly mimics Williams without overdoing it.) But mostly the endless in-jokes and continuity earmarks make the viewing experience cumbersome and obnoxious, filling in gaps the diehard fans really don’t want filled in.

Will the spinoff movies ever feel like anything more than Disney On Ice for Star Wars fans — your favorite characters back, albeit in watered-down form, prancing and preening before your eyes? Unlike Rogue One, which is still the only point of comparison, Solo is not without its charms. It has solid jokes, genuinely appealing performances, and actually does back-fill the narrative in half-interesting ways (e.g., the way Han and Chewbacca meet is adorable).

The train wreck that was the film’s production to my eyes seems to have been a non-issue where the final product is concerned. Many fine films had “troubled” productions. The problem with Solo may well be the same problem the fans have always had — thinking too hard, over-complicating the fun until fun is no longer fun. Movies are art. Disney treats these spinoffs like homework assignments.

Solo: A Star Wars Story — TWO STARS

Directed by Ron Howard

Rated PG-13

Disney

LucasFilm

135 min.

Star Wars: The Last Jedi

Crafted to stay one step ahead of the crazy fans while simultaneously supplying them black-tar one-hundred percent pure good stuff they crave, The Last Jedi (the eighth episode of the main series of Star Wars movies) is transfixing, beautiful, and wildly uneven in its consumption of time. The movie, directed by  Rian Johnson, is most eloquent when it is wordless. When people are talking, they’re talking fast, shooting information at you, information you don’t need to know to understand what’s happening — for example, at one point they’re trying to destroy a big cannon thing-y — but we get the details nonetheless because of the population of people, grown men most of them, who are going to roast Johnson for years to come if they’re not told precisely how those shield generators were disabled.

Therein lies the difficulty of making one of these movies: they’re not normal movies. As I wrote with respect to The Force Awakens, these directors are playing a perilous game of managing expectations and safeguarding what is to some a secular religion. Johnson, who also wrote the screenplay, spins the plates admirably, finding the visual poetry in images Abrams found merely cool.

Three main story threads are shuffled for most of the two-and-a-half hours of The Last Jedi, but they all revolve around the same dramatic situation: stopping the First Order, which is the latest iteration of The Empire. General Leia Organa (Carrie Fisher) leads the Resistance during an opening space battle scene in which the evil General Hux (Domhall Gleeson) is attempting to block an evacuation. The battle of TIE fighters, star destroyers, and bombers is meant to wow us, but Johnson uses them in service of personal character moments. Amid the explosions, we always get a close up of someone feeling feelings. A resistance bomber pilot’s self sacrifice, Kylo Ren’s (Adam Driver) moral choice to not kill a certain someone from his fighter — these are what Johnson builds the action toward. Johnson, whose prior films include Looper and Brick, is all about the emotional payoff. In genre films, characters act out their feelings rather than discuss them. In Johnson’s genre experiments, they do both.

Of course, you’re wondering what of Rey and Luke Skywalker? When last we left our heroes, Rey (Daisy Ridley) was presenting Master Skywalker (Mark Hamill) with his light saber. At every turn, Johnson sees it as his duty to outsmart the fans who are trying to outsmart his film. The moment of Luke’s reaction to Rey has been built up, the tone even having been established by the solemn ending of the prior movie. Johnson immediately undercuts it. (To his credit, the humor in the film, which is ample, doesn’t feel like a string of punch-up jokes but rather arise organically from the scenes.) The Empire Strikes Back storyline lives — as the good guys attempt to defeat the dark force in the galaxy, a powerful but untrained young Force user seeks the help of a legendary old Jedi. Johnson doesn’t make as much use of Rey and Luke’s time together on Ahch-To (that’s the island). If anything, their time together suggests she didn’t really need to seek out Luke as much as she thought.

What Johnson has wrought is a complicated movie cluttered with dangling threads and new bright-eyed characters. Things get a bit crowded in the middle of the picture, when Finn (John Boyega) and Rose (Kelly Marie Tran) report to a Las Vegas-type planet to find a code-breaker who can disable the First Order’s tracking systems. We cut back and forth from there to Poe (Oscar Isaac) attempting to wrest control of the Resistance strategy from Admiral Holdo (Laura Dern) to Rey and Luke’s bickering. This all happens while through a Force-powered Jedi mind meld, Rey and Kylo Ren are able to communicate telepathically. It’s a lot to take in. Johnson’s dialogue moves fast, contains lots of details, and knows you can’t keep up. You don’t need to. The nuts and bolts of what people are discussing is never as important as what people are doing (a stark contrast to George Lucas’ prequel trilogy).

The film is at its best when everyone shuts up and Johnson and cinematographer Steve Yedlin mine the territory of the Star Wars universe for beauty. Ships traveling at light speed is not just a gimmick here — it’s a single image that elicits oohs and aahs. Likewise, Supreme Leader Snoke’s (Andy Serkis) throne room is one of the most arresting feats of production design I’ve seen this year. The red guards, who in the original trilogy might as well have been mannequins, are now militarized and imposing; they seem to glare even as their faces are hidden. Johnson borrows from both Kurosawa and Irvin Kershner to create the effect. A final showdown between heroes lands as satisfying and surprising, with Johnson pulling out one more bit of plot trickery to fool the experts coming to the theater dressed as Sith Lords.

What will go under-discussed as The Last Jedi is digested by the masses is the extent to which Johnson has managed to coax intimate and relatively restrained performances from his leads. Daisy Ridley, who in the prior film must’ve felt the weight of the world on her shoulders, here seems more relaxed, poised. Adam Driver, an ungainly leading man if ever there was one, is likewise more comfortable — and more believable as a murderous villain who is conflicted about being conflicted. And as for Mark Hamill, Johnson gets the most out of the sixty-six year-old by using him sparingly, understanding that it’s Hamill’s mere presence in the film that has the desired effect, not what he does. (Hamill has always been a good sport; he is more charismatic when playing “Mark Hamill” than he ever was as an actor.) Carrie Fisher’s character, Leia, unconscious, flying through open space, will have a similar effect on audiences.

The jumble of delights and thrills that is The Last Jedi ends up being memorable in an almost predictable way — as in, here’s what happens when you let a young hotshot auteur have his way with a Disney film. And Johnson does have his way. There is a light saber battle in the film that is so handsome looking it transcends the genre of “light saber battle.” One wishes Johnson’s flair for the letting an arresting image speak for itself were conjoined with a skill for being less wordy in dialogue, but then again enjoying these films requires trade-offs, both on the part of the filmmaker and on the part of his audience. We trade a plot contrivance for a little dopamine jolt for nostalgia here, or a light saber fight there. And these films often, at this point, don’t have themes that aren’t already inherent in earlier films in the franchise, but we go along anyway. This one has a new theme that is essentially an invitation to the fans: loosen your grip on the past.

Star Wars: The Last Jedi — FOUR STARS

Directed by Rian Johnson

Rated PG-13

LucasFilm

Disney

152 min.

Rogue One

“Rogue One,” the new Star Wars picture, was billed as something a bit different. The first stand-alone film to exist outside the main narrative of Episodes 1-7, we were promised the story of a ragtag group of rebels who have little to do with out familiar heroes Luke Skywalker and Princess Leia. These are the scrappy little scamps who conspired to steal the Death Star plans, which serve as the MacGuffin for the original 1977 “Star Wars.”

Instead, what director Gareth Edwards and screenwriters Chris Weitz and Tony Gilroy  have wrought is a tedious, downbeat, relatively joyless procession through a needlessly convoluted plot, one populated by characters who aren’t characters so much as Hasbro action figurines with brief backstories printed on the back of the box. Like FN-2187, the film itself is of bifurcated allegiances. The filmmakers are torn between the (understandable given the way the incentives are aligned these days) impulse to provide full-service fan service and the desire to be the Star Wars film that is at full liberty to behave in new and interesting ways.

Edwards and company split the difference. J.J. Abrams did so also in last year’s “The Force Awakens,” a more successful end product. One could argue that that entire film is fan service, which is, I would argue, why it works. “Rogue One,” however, has the feeling of being driven around by someone who wants to show you a new neighborhood while at the same time chatting endlessly about the neighborhood you’ve just left.

The overlong first act introduces us to Jyn (Felicity Jones), the daughter of an engineer (Mads Mikkelsen) whom the Empire has conscripted into helping build a super weapon. After her dad is taken away by the Empire, Jyn has to fend for herself. We witness the traumatic moment that comes to define her life, but we’re left in the dark about how she’s lived beyond that, save for a line of as-you-know dialogue spoken by Forest Whitaker, whose brief and conspicuous presence recalls Max von Sydow in “The Force Awakens.”

Soon Jyn finds herself reluctantly in league with the Rebel Alliance, at once searching for her father and helping the resistance locate the coveted Death Star plans, which will enable the rebels to cripple the Empire by destroying their super weapon. Jyn is probably thinking and feeling things throughout this process, but the film doesn’t bother much with that. She’s alarmed when something alarming happens, weepy when something weep worthy happens. Bing, bang, boom. Her life may be complicated. She is not.

Along the way Jyn teams with a Rebel intelligence officer (Diego Luna), who might be a perfect romantic foil because he also has no personality, a couple of dreamy mystics who know how to kick ass (Donnie Yen and Jiang Wen), and a pilot defector from the Empire (Riz Ahmed). There are others, including a reprogrammed Empire robot now serving the Rebel cause (voiced by Alan Tudyk) when he’s not spitting out one-liners. For a film that takes its cues from the original “Star Wars,” which only had three or four main characters, “Rogue One” bombards us with people about whom we’re supposed to care. They all seem like robots, with the exception of the witty robot.

We’re meant, one supposes, to “know” them by giving them a good once over — the no-nonsense intelligence soldier, the mystical blind warrior, the battle-tested mercenary. What do they want out of this? Why are they down for this adventure? By the middle of “Star Wars” (1977) we know precisely why Han Solo has teamed with Luke and the wise old man, and we know what led Luke to leave Tatooine. In “Rogue One” such character motivations are vague if not absent.

Edwards, a capable director of action, brusquely escorts us through a narrative that slows to a crawl in the second act (the only crawl in the film, as it were). Watching “Rogue One,” I wondered what the experience was like for non-Star Wars fanatics, those rare audience members who, by virtue of having either real jobs or sound mental health, have not memorized every frame of the prior films. For me, the boredom was punctuated by a parade of Easter eggs, references to the Star Wars canon. But what about them?

Rather than fold these nods into the narrative thrust of a scene, as Abrams at least tried to do half the time, Edwards just tosses them all over the place for no reason as if he’s throwing rice at a geeky wedding. R2-D2 and C-3PO appear in “Rogue One” for no other reason than it enables fanatics to freak out over the fact that everyone’s favorite Laurel & Hardy droids are in the film. Hey there goes the guys who start trouble with Luke in the cantina scene! Hey that’s the same lookout tower shot from the original film! Oh shit that’s the same Empire admiral who gets Force choked in Episode 4! Until this franchise gets past this constant self-referential Tourette’s syndrome it will never do something truly fresh.

The final few minutes of the film are, in one sense, electric and fun. An unexpected appearance by an established character feels both tacked-on and just right — at least in the sense that it’s probably what the film should have been doing all along. The Force, light sabers, and familiar Star Wars showdown scenes are eschewed, until they’re not. Established characters are sidelined, until they’re not. (The use of CGI to recreate old characters who are dead or too old to play the role is at once ethically questionable and not as bad as some have alleged. I would bet most audience members won’t realize the human on screen isn’t a human.) Edwards, in the end, chose to have his blue milk and drink it too. The attempt to branch out and expand the Star Wars  universe is noble, I guess, but it cannot coexist with the selfsame Give ‘Em What They Came For impulse that has crippled, at this point, the majority of the films in this franchise.

“Rogue One: A Star Wars Story” — TWO STARS

Directed by Gareth Edwards. Rated PG-13. LucasFilm, Disney. 2h 15m.

Star Wars: The Force Awakens

“Star Wars: The Force Awakens” tracks so closely with the storyline of the original “Star Wars” movie that the two feel like long lost twins. Director J.J. Abrams wisely deputized Lawrence Kasdan, who worked on the scripts for “The Empire Strikes Back” and “Return of the Jedi,”and Michael Arndt as co-screenwriters. Thus “The Force Awakens” plays at once as a sweet memory a fresh discovery.

Of the many elements George Lucas’ ill-advised prequel trilogy botched, the basic story was paramount. Obsessed by the actually-kind-of-boring notion of “What if we saw Darth Vader as a child?” the prequels unfolded as a kind of elongated nightmare for fans. The films were rife with poor pacing, laughable dialogue, and maddening “retcons” (ask your local Star Wars fanatic for a brief treatise on midicholorians; it won’t be brief). The prequels didn’t feel like “Star Wars.”

And that’s where the franchise left it a decade ago with “Revenge of the Sith.” Anakin had become Darth Vader. The two trilogies formed a lop-sided novel. Imagine if Melville got drunk and wrote about Ahab’s childhood.

Eneter Abrams, a man for whom the “Star Wars” saga is, essentially, his “Moby-Dick.” Handed Episode VII, his mandate was simple: Don’t screw it up, brother. Abrams vowed to rely on practical effects, jettisoning the CGI artificiality of the prequels, and to bring back beloved characters. For the first time in a long time, the fans were optimistic.

Thus Abrams had a lot of boxes to check. Evoke the scope and tone of the “Star Wars” we love; revive old, beloved characters; continue the saga in a believable way; don’t screw up.

What Abrams has produced is a fascinating work of American cinema, both as a piece of pop culture myth-making and as a movie in its own right. Viewing “The Force Awakens,” one has the sense of a seasoned trial lawyer arguing his final summation before a skeptical jury — the attorney must navigate a minefield, with each utterance being a potentially fatal misstep, and, above all, he must make the jury buy what he’s selling.

How does a filmmaker give the public what it wants while giving the public something new, something it didn’t know it wanted? In many ways, this is the question at the heart of contemporary Hollywood filmmaking. There’s nothing wrong with nostalgia and so-called “fan service” so long as it’s done artfully (e.g., Ryan Coogler’s “Creed”).

Some years after the Rebel victory that destroyed the Empire and its Death Star (watch the original trilogy), the galaxy is once again in turmoil. A new threat known as The First Order has emerged, led by Vader fanboy Kylo Ren (the miscast but admirable Adam Driver). The familiar opening crawl tells us that Luke Skywalker (Mark Hamill) has disappeared (!), and Princess/General Leia (Carrie Fisher) is looking for him, just as she sought the help of Obi-Wan Kenobi in the original film. The taxation of trade routes to outlying star systems appears to be a settled issue.

There’s a difference between a story structure and a story formula. Abrams, with his confident non-anxiety of influence, is keenly aware of this difference. Abrams’ film is dominated by the plights of new heroes. The search for Luke and the quest to defeat The First Order is led by Rey (Daisy Ridley), a lowly scavenger on a desert planet who may well have an important lineage, and Finn (Jon Boyega), a young man who begins the film as a Storm Trooper seeking a kind of conscientious objector status. Early scenes evoke the majesty of adventures past while underscoring the fact that those adventures happened in the past. The film’s most beautiful shot is simply one of the Empire’s familiar star destroyers, now a pathetic wreckage lodged in sand, being picked apart for its scrap metal.

As actors, Ridley and Boyega are both as big as the environments they inhabit. With the exception of Driver (and Hayden Christiansen, for that matter), every actor appears to fit snug into what the film envisions for them. Fisher’s turn here is downright poetic in its restraint. In a movie such as this the characters of Star Wars past can be jazz musicians, relying, as the trite expression goes, on the notes they don’t play. And for the first time in years, Harrison Ford is well caffeinated and making an effort. The 73 year-old has always protested too much. He loves playing the now gray-haired Han Solo.

“The Force Awakens” is both a marvel and a masterpiece of sorts. Abarams evenly cooks together John Williams’ score, energetic performances, and tastefully integrated VFX into a space fantasy adventure that truly does feel like a continuation of the “Star Wars” saga.

There are missteps, of course. The second act is extremely poorly paced in the spots that should be the snappiest, and Han Solo’s catwalk confrontation with Kylo needed one more script pass. Likewise, the third act is too pat, almost half thought out. These snags invert the prequels’ pattern. Abrams got the big stuff right and a few little things wrong, not vice-versa.

Mr. Abrams has not re-invented the wheel. There is no cinematic innovation to be found in “The Force Awakens,” just as there’s no major innovations to be found in the Rogers-Astaire films. This kind of movie is a pre-fabricated product shaped by audience expectations. Is “Shall We Dance” all that different from “Top Hat”? Did it need to be? Or did we just want to see two perfectly matched performers dance through a thin plot? Does this stop “Swing Time” from being a truly great film?

Or put differently, if McDonald’s adds a new sandwich to its menu, we want it to taste a little different, but we also want it to taste like McDonald’s.

“Star Wars: The Force Awakens” — FOUR STARS

Directed by J.J. Abrams. Rated PG-13. Lucasfilm, Bad Robot Productions. 135 min.