Solo: A Star Wars Story, Best Case Scenario

Han Solo was not really always my favorite “Star Wars” character. When I was first falling in love with George Lucas’s space opera, Luke Skywalker was my favorite character. It was easier as a precocious adolescent to identify with a kid who hadn’t been further than Anchorhead than a grouchmaster gruff who had seen it all. Over time, however, Han Solo’s charms worked on me, which is to say that Harrison Ford’s I-Wish-I-Was-A-Carpenter anti-charm worked on me. If as a little kid I understood on some non-cognitive level that there was something innately cool about the spice smuggler propping his feet up on the table shooting Greedo first, it didn’t really begin to hit home until reality begin intruding as I tried, desperately, to come of age, striking MTV-influenced disaffected poses while on vacation with my parents to make it seem like I wasn’t with my parents. I was trying to leave Luke Skywalker behind, in other words, to become Han Solo, which is impossible but the compulsory De-Leon-ish teenage quest nonetheless. All that is to say, if you had told me in the early 90s that there was going to be a Han Solo standalone movie, oh my God, I would have flipped my lid. Back then we only had three “Star Wars” movies, after all, and at that time maybe Harrison Ford still would have been spinoff Solo, even if he would have sabotaged all his lines like the “Blade Runner” voiceover, which would have been just right. A Han Solo spinoff anchored by a disinterested Ford would have been the tops.

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Once upon a time a Steven Seagal thriller was as commonplace during the movie season as a superhero movie is in the present. Seagal’s movies were interchangeable entertainment, reflected not merely in their gunplay and kung-fu but in titles like “Out for Justice” and “Marked for Death” that seemed to come straight from some Hollywood brainstorming session overseen by risk management experts who prefer Bud Light at the bar and their fish served very plain. The quasi-snappy three words, in fact, are a hallmark of Seagal movie titles, where even the ones that are not three words sound like they are, whether it’s “Under Siege” blowing two words out to three syllables or “Fire Down Below” sounding less like four syllables than roughly 3.5. The essential sameness of these names correlates directly to their analogous adventures. I have seen some of these movies, but I could not necessarily tell you which ones I have seen and which ones I have not. I have seen “Hard to Kill”, I think, and not “Above the Law”, but it could be, I suspect, that I have seen “Above the Law” and not “Hard to Kill.” This is entirely appropriate. Steven Seagal Three Word Title Movies are not intended for rumination, which is why I always found it funny that he tried to jam environmental issues into “On Deadly Ground” (which I have seen…maybe). This blog supports protecting the environment, sure, but A Steven Seagal Three Word Title Movie is designed to go in one ear and out the other and left with your empty Junior Mints box on the theater floor, experienced in the moment, enjoyed in a mindless sort of way, and never thought of again.

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“Solo: A Star Wars Story” doesn’t sound like a Steven Seagal Three Word Movie Title. It sounds more like “The Path Beyond Thought”, a documentary about Steven Seagal’s time as a sensei in Japan, which I have not seen and which might be really, really good, but is nevertheless a title a few leagues apart from, say, the expository glory of “Half Past Dead.” “The Hutt Gambit”, which was the second book in a series concering Han Solo written by A.C. Crisp, is more indicative of the eponymous ring I wish Ron Howard’s movie was going for, less a Memorial Day weekend event than a late April or late September release. “Solo: A Star Wars Story” makes it sound determined to fit squarely into the franchise, meaning it will become fodder for endless conversations about its place in the canon. And whereas long ago, in a lifetime far, far away, I would have been ripe for those conversations, these days I find myself exhausted with them, a little burned out on this franchise that once meant so much to me. I have, I realize, become, finally, all these years later, in a way, Han Solo, just as I always dreamed, meeting his own movie on his level, less excited than indifferent, wishing that “Solo: A Star Wars Story” was nothing more than a Steven Seagal Three Word Movie, watched and forgotten, destined to be followed a little while later by an eminently forgettable movie too.

Six Degrees of Solo: (Properly) Casting the New Han Solo Movie

The shortlist of actors to portray young Han Solo in the famous “Star Wars” smuggler’s 2018 origin story just dropped and, boy oh boy, is that list a letdown, straight milquetoast. The simple solution, of course, is not to make this movie, but this is Hollywood and Hollywood does stupid things, and Hollywood will continue doing stupid things until the earth crashes into the sun, and so the Han Solo origin story is coming whether we like it or not. So let’s buck up, readers, and deal with this new Han Solo casting head on.

How do you cast Han Solo? Harrison Ford is Han Solo and Han Solo is Harrison Ford. Trying to cast Han Solo is like…like…like…trying to cast Bob Dylan. I mean, how is it possible to cast Bob Dylan. Bob Dylan is Bob Dylan and Bob Dylan is Bob Dylan. But wait! Remember when Todd Haynes brought Bob Dylan to the big screen in 2007 and cleverly found a way around the unplayability of his principal subject? Knowing that no one could be Bob Dylan, he essentially crafted a film around the legend’s essence, offering people who were not like Bob Dylan in any way to embody the bard’s various characteristics. Granted, Han Solo isn’t really the shape-shifter that Dylan was/is; Han Solo is who he is. Nevertheless, Solo had distinctive traits, and to spotlight those traits and truly cut to the heart of Han, a character so ingrained as a certain actor in the public’s psyche, the only way to work around it is by summoning a few people to united and go generally against type for Cinema Romantico’s Han Solo origin story...“He’s Not Here.”

The Six Degrees of Solo

Loner 

Neko Case. The genre-defying singer/songwriter is not an actor and that makes her perfect. Though Ford had acted when he assumed the Solo role, he wasn’t employed as an actor at the time, and that indifference afforded such a relaxation in his performance that he was practically floating. And Neko Case’s indifference and irreverence, a “What The Fuck Am I Doing Here Exactly?” aura would feed directly into that unforgettable Solo-y nonchalance.

Scoundrel 

Edward Norton. The finicky, if uber-skilled, Method actor turns his part into performance art, trying to find his way into Solo’s particular brand of roguishness with scenes of Norton work shopping Han-ish attitudes and mannerisms opposite Vera Farmiga, Anna Friel and Naomi Watts.

Smart Aleck

James Ransone. Han Solo has primarily been PC-consumption, but for “He’s Not Here”, he’s gonna stop being faux-polite and start getting real.

Cynic

Brad Pitt in “The Counselor.” And I mean that literally; to embody the cynical essence of Han Solo I want Brad Pitt to simply reprise his role in “The Counselor” and make pithy asides while wearing a Stetson and slurping beer.

Pilot

Val Kilmer. I can only imagine the Han Solo origin story will recount just how he made the notorious Kessel Run in less than 12 parsecs (and I can only imagine Cinema Romantico’s nemesis Neil deGrasse Tyson will take snot-nosed umbrage), but I have no idea how you render such a formidably mythic event on the actual screen. That’s like trying to bring the “Citizen Kane” girl with the white dress and the white parasol to the screen. Please! So instead we’ll sit Val Kilmer in a room of his choosing at his New Mexico ranch with a script in his hand and have him read aloud a monologue in character of how he, Han Solo, achieved the Kessel Run in less than 12 parsecs.

Corellian

Marisa Tomei. In order to completely understand Han Solo, we have to understand where Han Solo came from, which was Corellia, which is a fictional planet that mostly just exists to give Han Solo somewhere to be from. And if anyone was capable of implicitly embodying the ethos of an entire make-believe planet, it’s Marisa Tomei.

Han Shot

In “Veronica Decides To Die” Paulo Coelho wrote that “there is always a gap between intention and action.” If, however, anyone were capable of taking, say, a Navicomputer keyboard and wedging it between the intention and the action, thereby rendering that gap obsolete, it would definitely be the irascible spice smuggler Han Solo, which was what popped into my head when I read about Harrison Ford’s recent Reddit Q&A. He was inevitably asked for his thoughts on whether or not Han shot at Greedo first in “Star Wars: Episode IV.” Ever curmudgeonly, Ford replied (and you could hear the growl from Corellia), “I don’t know and I don’t care.”

To a certain breed of cinema devotees, the story is not merely familiar but probably played out – still, some may need context, and so we will provide it. In the original “Star Wars” of 1977, before “A New Hope” was woefully tacked on, we were essentially introduced to Ford’s Han Solo at the cantina in Mos Eisley where a bounty hunter named Greedo, his laser blaster drawn, sits down across from Solo to collect the mark on his head. Solo, coolly, draws his own laser blaster out of sight beneath the table and blasts Greedo down. Han not only shoots first, he’s the only one who shoots, most likely – as scholars note in their scholarly language – because he’s, like, a total badass, man. Unfortunately, upon the “Special Edition” release of 1997, Grand Chancellor George Lucas chose to make a notable change – that is, Greedo shoots first, somehow splaying his laser blast badly to the side of Han’s head and clearing the way for Han to get off his own shot. Or, to say it another way, Han Shot Second.

Aside from Lucas, grievous Lucas apologists and Skywalker Ranch Yes Men, no one cared for this revision, though some expressed their dislike for it more extravagantly than others. The creators of a website, for instance, with the expository name of HanShootsFirst.org went so far as to enact a petition officially calling for Greedo’s first shot to be revoked. The revision has been referenced with extreme distaste in Kevin Smith films and on the just shuttered “How I Met Your Mother.” Timothy Olyphant as Deputy Marshal Raylan Givens (a man who knows a thing or two about drawing first) knew that Han shot first. Go to a comic con, bellow through a megaphone that Greedo shot first, sit back, and watch the righteous spittle fly. And hey, I’ve long been pro-Han Shot First, thinking that it crucially underscored his character’s laconic cool. Except that hearing the man who brought Han to life growl that not only didn’t he know who shot first but that he didn’t care who shot first, I realized that I too didn’t care who shot first.

Lucas has gone on record in the years since with some sort of marble-mouthed blarney about how even in 1977 he intended for Greedo to shoot first, but no one’s buying it and it doesn’t matter anyway. In spite of the laser blast addendum, what Lucas could not change in his “Special Edition” was Ford’s demeanor. That was baked in and it was everything, because ultimately what this scene comes down to is not its mechanics but its philosophical underpinnings. The only way in which Lucas could have altered the philosophy of this moment would have been to somehow CGI it so that Han kept his blaster holstered and Greedo’s laser magically ricocheted off the wall and hit himself in the face. (I fear I may have just given Lucas an idea for the “Star Wars Maxima Cum Laude Edition”.)

In other words, the point isn’t that Han shot first. Han’s intention and subsequent action, minus the gap that he brazenly rejects, was to shoot, and he would tell you in no uncertain terms that in the same situation he shoot again. Or as the green dude from Dagobah might have put it: shoot or shoot not, there is no shoot first.