“Disobedience is the true foundation of liberty. The obedient must be slaves.”
― Henry David Thoreau
Star Wars — since the very beginning — has been completely intertwined with the concept of rebellion. George Lucas, himself rebel-minded when it came to the existing shackles of the day in the Hollywood system, set out to not only tell HIS story in HIS way with the original “Star Wars” in 1977, he also burned the candle at both ends to ensure he would be able to continue to do so into the future. He then laid all of those threads of rebellion into his “space fantasy” film in as overt a fashion as possible.*
* Notably, his previous film, “American Graffiti” was overtly rebellious as well.
Indeed, strip out the magnificent world building and brilliant riffs on epic storytelling done in Star Wars, and what are you left with? What is the point?
Well, in a global sense, the conflict is the point, and said conflict arises from the yin and yang of oppression and rebellion.
As I’m fond of saying, it’s called Star WARS for a reason.
However, looking beyond the black and white conflict of the Rebellion and the Empire, you’ll still see this theme at play within the character of Han Solo, the handsome roguish smuggler who plays by his own rules and doesn’t adhere to societal conventions. Moreover, he actively seeks to avoid being trapped into situations that threaten his “freedom,” and in the process, he becomes one of the most iconic characters in modern film history.
If you decide, as a company, that THIS character’s back story is worthy of its own feature film (as Disney did), you also decide that themes of freedom, subjugation, slavery, conflict and rebellion are going to be a major part of said film.
I won’t overly critique that decision (the decision to make a Han Solo movie), mostly because I enjoy “Solo” a great deal and find that it works in what it sets out to achieve. Yeah, it’s a little try-hard at times, and yeah, these actors don’t embody these roles in quite the same way as the original actors did. I wrote when it came out about its misguided marketing/release efforts, which I believe could have been handled much, much better.* To be sure, the filmmakers had a tall task in front of them (not least of all because of the decision to switch directors mid-stream), and in the bottom line (money), they failed. Solo only grossed $392 million worldwide while critics savaged the movie for being unnecessary.
* I read recently that Solo was originally intended to be released in the wake of “The Force Awakens,” which would have made much more sense. As a bookend to Solo’s death in that film you’d have this more uplifting caper story from his youth as a kind of catharsis. But regardless, releasing this movie a mere five months after the polarizing “The Last Jedi” couldn’t have helped in any case.
What the “No one asked for a Han Solo movie” crowd are missing is the worth of the film they were given. I find that worth to be three-fold:
- It’s a fun heist movie set in friggin’ outer space.
- We get an expansion of the Star Wars universe and better understanding of some of our favorite characters.
- We get rebellion — the point of all of this — out the ass.
That first one is fairly self-explanatory, but I don’t want to gloss over it either. “Guardians of the Galaxy” took the mantel from a movie like “The Fifth Element” in following in the footsteps of the fun space adventure that we first got to experience in “A New Hope,” and it was bloody great, one of my favorite movies of all time.
However.
That I can name basically two movies that fell into this category over the course of three-plus decades (and neither of them are Star Wars sequels) illuminates a depressing lack of this kind of hopeful, cheerful, awe-inspiring film-making that hooked me on the sub-genre in the first place.* Clearly, there was space (pun intended) for more of this.
* There are others, but not many. “Serenity” has some of that vibe, for example, though it’s much darker in general. (I bring this up mostly because I want to name-check a great movie like “Serenity.”)
The heist elements are somewhat unique for a movie like this. The aforementioned “Guardians of the Galaxy” goes down that road with the characters playing reverse hot potato with the power stone, but if it’s been done before basically once, well, I don’t mind coming back to it. Why? Well, heist movies can be enormously fun. Think of the enjoyment derived from something like the “Ocean’s” series and the storytelling possibilities of setting that in space are just immense.
If you put these toys in your sandbox — space adventure and heist movie — you can be enormously creative and delight audiences.
“Solo” mostly achieves those things, and added bonus, it does it while giving us more insight into beloved characters like Han Solo, Chewbacca, and Lando Calrissian.
To wit:
Han meeting Chewie is hilarious and delightful (and in my estimation, perfect — Han’s level of respect for Chewie’s basic dignity in stark contrast to the prejudice shown by others is wonderful).
The train heist cements their relationship, sets up our antagonist(s), and is an incredible action set piece that calls to mind Star Wars’ western roots.
Lando and Han’s antagonistic relationship works well from the outset and is tremendously amusing (and Han instantly becoming smitten with the Millennium Falcon rings true as well).
The Kessel Run, while breaking expectations in a number of ways, lives up to the hype and ultimately is as thrilling a sequence as the asteroid field scene in “The Empire Strikes Back.”
The prequel references — from a certain major “The Phantom Menace” cameo to the various background Easter egg deep cuts from “Attack of the Clones” and “Revenge of the Sith” — are fun, appropriate, and welcome.
Maybe Han winning the Falcon from Lando was a touch predictable, but it made for a satisfying conclusion nevertheless.
Taken together, all of these elements make for an enjoyable film for both Star Wars enthusiasts and general audiences alike … regardless of whether anyone “needed” it or not.
But it’s that gigantic conflict between oppression and rebellion that truly drives the film and leaves the viewer reflecting afterward.
Again, this stuff isn’t new for Star Wars. The original trilogy was all over it, while “Rogue One” examined war from the perspective of sacrifice and how we can draw inspiration from that sacrifice. “The Last Jedi” took a closer look at austerity and its role in the war machine, and even the prequels provided us slavery as a concept and its ultimate consequences for the galaxy through the pain endured by Anakin Skywalker (Spoiler: those consequences weren’t good.).
Still, we haven’t before had a Star Wars movie attack the concept from every angle quite like this.
Right off the bat, we see Han and love interest Qi’ra oppressed by basically three entities. Vile underworld boss Lady Proxima — an obvious callback to Jabba the Hut in “Return of the Jedi” — is the most immediately pressing threat, but the real effects of the Empire occupation is no doubt problematic for the citizens of Corellia as well. As is the specter of criminal organizations like Crimson Dawn. For Han and Qi’ra, dreams of leaving the planet exist, because living on the planet means living in subjugation.
Gangster Dryden Vos puts it best:
“I admire anyone who can crawl their way out of the sewer. Especially, a sewer as putrid as Corellia.”
Han’s path off the planet is under rule of the Imperial army, where he ends up in the muck and mire as a ground trooper on Mimban — as similar a predicament to slavery as one might find. Interestingly, Han blames his inability to follow orders for his continued subjugation and “grounding,” but it was in fact his quick eagerness to surrender his freedom and enlist in the first place that led him here.
He volunteered for this.
Was there another choice? He certainly didn’t try to find it in that moment. Han wants to be free (he speaks of this often), but he doesn’t have the first clue how to achieve it.
Freedom eludes him for much of the movie. From here, nearly every character he encounters is imprisoned or subjugated in some way. The other Imperial troops are locked in a conflict on a planet they don’t want to be on. Chewbacca is literally imprisoned in a cell, wrapped in chains, forever prejudiced against and enslaved as a “lesser” member of the galaxy due to his species. Beckett and his team of mercenaries are under the “employ” of an unsavory criminal organization that doesn’t tolerate failure. Qi’ra, it turns out, “escaped” from Corellia by pledging herself to that criminal organization, Crimson Dawn, locking her into a lifetime of servitude. The same applies to the more menacing gangster Dryden Vos — he is ultimately a slave to his master. When we meet Lando, his ship is locked up, keeping him from being able to make a living for himself, but even upon retrieving his ship, he is a slave to the pursuit of wealth. Even the droid, L3-37, is aware of her status as second-class citizen in the pecking order of society and wants to change that.
This is incredibly brought to the forefront on the spice mines of Kessel, where L3 is charged with creating a distraction and does so by freeing her brethren, sparking an uprising of both droids … and slaves. This is played for some laughs at first, but what looks to be a throwaway gag on the surface quickly turns into something else entirely. Several Wookiees are enslaved on this planet and freed in L3’s revolution, a particularly emotional sequence of events for Chewie. Han continues to show his friend respect and support as a true ally, and he earns a lifelong friend in the process. Chewbacca’s devotion to Han is sewn into the narrative here, and it’s genuinely affecting. As is Chewie’s catharsis in freeing his fellow Wookiees.
Where Han finds his own path to freedom is in the last place he’d expect to look.
The character of Enfys Nest first appears onscreen during the train heist, presented as a terrifying — yet one-note — marauding villain, seemingly only here to make a mess of things for our heroes. Yet, if we think about it, before any revelations about that character and her motivations occur, is there any hint of slavery at play here?
No, and when we come to find out her back story, that she comes from an enslaved people, and that her actions are in rebellion against oppressors bent on taking liberty from others, it ends up making perfect sense narratively.
The only person who is truly free is the one who is fighting the system of oppression. Of course she will end up being the one to show Han his path.
I enjoy tremendously how this is portrayed within the scope of the film, from how it is shot to what the score of the movie does to mislead us throughout the course of the run time until our ultimate reveal at the end (here’s a great analysis of the “Solo” score for those interested).
Ultimately, Han helps Enfys Nest and the seeds of her rebellion and is freed from his own bonds, but he doesn’t join their fight. He has to find his own path, his own way of making his way through the galaxy, to truly become self-actualized as a person and find his true freedom.
He has to make his own choices and disobey those around him — to become the outlaw Han Solo we all know and love — to find his liberty.
I guess you could say, in the end, Han must shoot first.
He does. Thankfully, he does.
Eat your heart out, Henry David Thoreau.
Liked this post? Check out:
My retrospective on “The Last Jedi”
My retrospective on “Rogue One”
My retrospective on “The Force Awakens”
My retrospective on “Revenge of the Sith”
My retrospective on “Attack of the Clones”
My retrospective on “The Phantom Menace”
My retrospective on “Return of the Jedi”
My retrospective on “The Empire Strikes Back”
My retrospective on “Star Wars: A New Hope”