OGWiseman Ruminates!
Solo, Rogue One, and Episode I: A New Hope - A very unusual Star Wars Trilogy!
I had planned to do another original story this week as a catch-up after my birthday weekend, but I’m working on a poem for the next story and those always take a long time. This one is no exception, so I’m going to take another week to finish and I’ll do two in a row later this year. But the poem is going to be great and I can’t wait to share it with you!
In the meantime: Continuing the project my wife and I started here—
— to rewatch the entire Star Wars canon in in-universe chronological order (as opposed to order of production), we’ve now watched the next three in the series: “Solo” and “Rogue One”, neither of which I’d seen, and then the OG “Star Wars Episode IV: A New Hope”, the 1977 classic that incepted the Star Wars universe and changed the cinema landscape forever.
After seeing “Rogue One” and loving it, I had planned to write just about that—doubly so because these three seemed like an odd trilogy for the subject of an essay, having been made by completely different creative teams in each case. After seeing all three, though, it occurred to me that “odd” is often a synonym for “interesting”, and that this particular triumvirate of films encapsulates perfectly the range of styles, tones, genres, and levels of quality that have populated this universe in the 45 (!) years of Star Wars (so far).
The basic premise for me is that these three films represent three radically different approaches to the Star Wars universe, two successful and one unsuccessful, but that in their totality they show the conceptual genius and unprecedented range of the Star Wars universe, which can thrive and endure even though in my view only two of the films in it (Empire Strikes Back and Rogue One) are actually great films.
(A sub-note on this: My memory of Return of the Jedi is that it’s got the greatest twist in film history but otherwise doesn’t have the panache and drive of “Empire”. I’m looking forward to revisiting it and will be revising that opinion. Stay tuned.)
But so: “Solo” has all the makings of a Star Wars classic. Two rising stars in iconic roles—Donald Glover as Young Lando and Alden Ehrenreich as Young Han. Lawrence Kasdan (who scripted “Empire” and “Return of the Jedi” and was *robbed* of an Oscar for “The Big Chill”) back to write it. And the hot young directors of “The Lego Movie” and the “Jump Street” franchise—Lord and Miller—at the helm.
Put another way, it had all the makings of an expensive disaster. The iconic Lando and Han roles are a problem because we already know those characters can’t die, so it’s hard to worry for them. The screenwriter was now in his late 60s, insisted his son be hired to co-write with him, and was trying to recapture the spirit of movies he had written forty years before in a completely different era in American culture. As for Lord and Miller? They’d most famously done broad comedy and a movie where the actors were made of pose-able plastic in a factory in Denmark.
Do note that movies are often like this! Hollywood does not make widgets! It’s alchemy, not manufacturing, and it’s a subtle art. There’s genuinely no reason this movie shouldn’t have been awesome—it just wasn’t.
For one thing, observant fans will have noted that the credited director on this film is not Messrs. Lord and Miller, but rather Ron Howard. The basic (rumored) reason for this is that Lord and Miller came in and wanted to shoot in an improvisational, loose style. This worked with Channing Tatum and Jonah Hill on Jump Street, so why not on Star Wars? Well, because it was costing a million bucks a day and the unproven actors they’d signed up probably got really intimidated by that, and the script they actually had was pretty thin and didn’t head-on deal with the problem of the characters’ well-known survival until the main trilogy of movies, and, and, and…
So the studio fired them and brought Ron Howard in to finish on schedule, and he did just that, and even though it was probably the right decision the movie is much the worse for the multiple directors and the confusion that inevitably resulted.
Planes never crash because of one thing. It’s a cascade at the wrong moment. It’s bad weather plus a bad part plus human error. Movies are the same—it’s always the cascade that tanks them. And luckily when it happens to film nobody dies, they just make sort of a turd and lose some money, which is basically what happened here.
Notice how none of this has been about the plot of “Solo” so far? Yeah, that’s because I watched it a week ago and I basically can’t remember any of it. Not a great sign. Without googling: There’s a heist. There’s this really valuable substance, sort of a Dune trope but not as good. Han has to get the Millennium Falcon from Lando. There’s a gangster of some kind who keeps trying to kill them. But mostly it’s winking and nodding at “The Kessel Run” (which Han does indeed make in 12 parsecs, prompting me to think: “This was much more fun when he was just bragging about it”) and a bunch of other Star Wars refs and so-called “fan service”, which is a term that sounds much more favorable and support-able than it ought to considering how much it sucks. The fans deserve to be serviced, but not like this!
And the bottom-line problem, the insurmountable issue that neither Lord and Miller nor Lawrence Kasdan nor Ron Howard nor Yoda himself could figure, was this: We knew what was going to happen, and that just makes it very hard to make a story dramatic.
Enter Rogue One.
Now if you have not seen Rogue One, and you like Star Wars or just good sci fi at all, and you have two hours, I highly suggest you go on Disney Plus and watch it immediately. It’s excellent. And what’s amazing about it is that it’s good in a very ordinary way—it’s not a massive conceptual leap like Star Wars is typically trying to do, it’s just a very well done movie—well-written, well-directed, self-aware.
In fact, it’s so well done it manages to surmount the *exact same problem* that Solo fetched up at the base of—the fact that we know what’s going to happen. Meaning: The movie is about (no spoiler, it’s in the first scene) the quest to steal the plans for the Death Star that the Empire is building, and *we know they succeed*. A huge thing in the original SW trilogy is that they have these plans, and they use them to blow up the Death Star. So we know the Rogue One heist succeeds!
Writer Tony Gilroy (another absolute heavyweight who wrote “Michael Clayton”, the most exciting movie ever made in which basically nothing happens) and Director Gareth Edwards (who made the criminally underseen “Monsters” on a shoestring budget) clearly had the meeting that Lord and Miller and Kasdan never had for Solo, where they (The Rogue One team) sat down and went: “Okay, so the audience is going to know our ending, so how can our entire movie be created to account for that fact?”
This is the whole key to writing good movies and telling good stories in general—achieving an understanding of what the movie *inevitably is* so that you can design the non-inevitable parts to complement the inevitable ones.
In Rogue One, they realized that the part of the movie that *was not* predictable was the characters, and so they just invested heavily in that. There are 5-6 richly developed human characters, with good and bad aspects and understandable, empathetic motivations. The entire movie is about Meaning and Sacrifice. Rather than “Will these characters succeed?” we are forced to ask “What will this victory cost these characters?” That gives the inevitability of the proceedings a tinge of dread, as these people we’ve come to love are led towards impossible, overwhelming danger from which we know they will not flee.
The Rogue One team was also disciplined enough to strip out all the winky references that Lord and Miller and Ron Howard seem to have agreed were awesome. Again, at the aforemontioned meeting, Tony Gilroy must have said: “We’re driving at this one huge thing we know is coming, and *everything* else has to be foreign and unknown for us to get away with it.” And then they had the fortitude to pass up easy jokes, use that screen time on character development, and never take us out of the reality they were trying to create.
From there, they just executed really well, especially in terms of tone. The movie is gorgeously designed and shot (Gareth Edwards has a distinctive visual style that is heavily influenced by Kurosawa and is on full display here, just as in “Monsters”, which you should also watch if you haven’t.) The music isn’t by John Williams but the guy they got to do it mimics John Williams’ style so perfectly that it might as well be him.
The little details of the direction are so perfect, too. The female lead is a very attractive woman, but after days without bathing she gets gross like everyone else! Her sexuality is not ignored, but it’s not played up—it’s a fact about her character but only one thing among many. The cast is believably and credibly diverse (Pedro Pascal’s accent is awesome) without ever having a preachy moment about it. There’s such an array of instances where they passed up “fan service” in favor of just making the movie work really well, and the commitment to that elevates the film.
They even resisted the temptation to do some kind of cutes5y, cop-out ending. There’s no fake “surprise” or twist reveal. They do in fact get the Death Star plans. There, I “spoiled” it. But knowing that much makes no difference. It’s really good!
There’s an idea in internet-philosophy circles called “The Slow Cancellation of the Future”, which has nothing to do with “wokeness” or “PC”. It’s not that cancellation. Rather it’s the idea that we are no longer engaging in grand, conceptual change of the kind that golden-age sci fi was made of.
Classic example: If you look at a movie made in 1965 vs. one made in 1985, the difference is obvious. A child could look at the two side by side and tell you which one was newer. Not just the technical aspects but the very essence—the content, tone, and pathos—were unmistakably different.
A film made in 1999 vs. one made in 2019, it’s not clear that’s the case. (e.g. “The Matrix” and “The Rise of Skywalker”, of which “The Matrix” probably looks more impressive despite the technologically earlier production date, to say nothing of it’s obvious conceptual and imaginative superiority.
Point being: There’s a meme in the zeitgeist that we’ve lost the ability to make large conceptual leaps. And it’s hard not to see a serious data point for that theory when moving from “Rogue One” to “Star Wars: A New Hope”.
In terms of execution—plotting, pacing, character development, and especially quality of the dialogue—Rogue One is the obviously superior film. In fact, frankly, “A New Hope” is pretty bad. It’s slow, and the dialogue has all the classic George Lucas-isms that poop all over the Prequels (Luke: “I’m Luke Skywalker, and I’m here to rescue you!” lol). Origin stories are always hard, and this movie falls prey to a lot of the classic origin-story mistakes that wrecked “X-Men: First Class” and more recently hamstrung “The Eternals”.
And yet. The startling conceptual genius of Star Wars atones for all those sins, and makes the film undeniable even now. The world this film creates is so incredible that it’s still speaking to audiences 45 years later in a half-dozen different genres and several mediums. In 1977 of course it was also a technical revolution, but even now, without that, the sheer size and audacity of the theatrical imagination fills the screen.
It’s a world so good that one small part of that world, one unanswered question about the plot logic of the original trilogy (“Why was there a design flaw in the Death Star in the first place?”), was enough to underpin an entire film and, with good execution, make Rogue One an instant classic.
It’s a world so good that even when they had to fire the director halfway through and bring in Opie to finish it, “Solo” is a totally watchable movie with some really fun parts and cool details to it.
It’s a world so good that three full movies of misfires and cinematic howlers (a.k.a. The Prequel Trilogy) not only didn’t destroy the franchise but have found enduring life in semi-ironic fan communities and delivered a whole new generation of Star Wars-lovers to the Church of Lucas.
It’s a sign of our decadence how amazing these “bad” movies are, and I for one am delighted to live in the era when our greatest monuments flicker at us in the dark. Star Wars mostly kind of sucks. Long Live Star Wars.
END
Thanks for reading. Hope you enjoyed, and I’ll be back next week with an original poem! Have a great one.