A fond farewell then – or perhaps, more appropriately, a “see ya around, kid”, to Alden Ehrenreich’s take on Han Solo. According to reports, the damning box office haul made by Solo: A Star Wars Story means we will now not be seeing the further adventures of the scruffy young smuggler and his hulking wookie companion, Chewbacca. At least, not on the big screen.
It is hard to avoid feeling a little sorry for Ehrenreich, in many ways a perfectly serviceable Han whose greatest crime seems to have been not being Harrison Ford, the grizzled yet still enduringly-manly Hollywood vet who played the role one last time in 2015’s The Force Awakens - and probably just about saved that mixed bag of a reboot with his seemingly bottomless supply of authentic cosmic curmudgeon.
Ehrenreich played Han as a wide-eyed optimist, though no Luke-like young fool, who is only slowly becoming aware of the harsh nature of a galaxy ruled by the evil Empire and its assorted proxies and minions. In Solo, his spirit is trampled, though never crushed, by horrifying infantry battles and betrayal by the only woman he has ever loved. Yet he emerges remarkably cheerful and ready, by the time the credits roll, for his next adventure. The trade-off just about works: who would mind having their heart smashed to smithereens if you’d just won the Millennium Falcon in a game of chance and obtained the lifelong loyalty of a dog-faced alien with the strength of 10 grizzlies?
In truth, the idea of giving us a more callow version of Solo was probably rather flawed, akin to the dubious joy of watching James Bond in his teenage years, with all the boozing, womanising and spying still ahead of him. Unlike Ehrenreich, Ford was already pretty lived-in when George Lucas asked him to stand in as Han for line readings. With a wife and two young sons to support, Ford had been moonlighting as a carpenter for Hollywood luminaries such as Francis Ford Coppola since the early 1970s, having almost given up on ever making any real money as an actor. One suspects that having his dreams destroyed by real life turned out to be the perfect preparation for playing the cynical Corellian space scoundrel.
Lucas, for all his faults, knew that the fully-formed, ultra-crabby Han Solo of 1977’s Star Wars was the only one fans wanted to see. He briefly considered introducing a 10-year-old Han – complete with Chewbacca father figure – in 2005’s Revenge of the Sith, but ultimately spared us such horrors.
Perhaps we should have been spared twentysomething Han, too. And yet there are now myriad dangling story threads that will never be satisfactorily tied up, unless it is via the cheaper medium of spin-off novels and comics. We will never get to see Solo’s first meeting with Jabba the Hutt on Tatooine, and the betrayal that led to their falling out in the original trilogy. The “resurrected” Darth Maul’s ties to Crimson Tide, and continuing existence (despite Anakin Skywalker having already become the Emperor’s new apprentice Darth Vader at this point in the timeline) may now never be adequately explained - except on the small screen.
The endless success of the Marvel Cinematic Universe once seemed to have ushered in an era in which filmgoers could finally be sure that the hours invested in these movies was time well spent, the equivalent of reading the next Harry Potter novel safe in the knowledge that JK Rowling and her publishers would never allow the series to remain incomplete. These days, with the more mixed travails of the DC Extended Universe and now Star Wars, heading into the amphitheatre to catch one of these films has once again become a risky business, not unlike the experience of reading the first five novels in George RR Martin’s A Song of Ice and Fire saga - all the time with the uneasy sense that the esteemed American fantasy writer might not get round to finishing the final two.
The advent of the cinematic universe was meant to give filmgoers confidence that the story would keep unfolding, with each episode deepening and widening our experience of the infinitely-complex whole. But it now turns out that this new form of big budget film-making is, just like the old one, utterly hostage to the realities of Hollywood financing. Marvel’s success increasing looks like a one-off.
The biggest problem here is that movies like Solo can never really work as standalone entries when they have been configured so unmistakably as preludes to future episodes. Fans watching this movie in a decade’s time will not be left marvelling at its saving graces – the fabulous special effects of Linda Hunt’s snakelike Lady Proxima or the strong supporting cast. Instead they will be burdened with a sad reminder of what might have been, and in particular that climactic Maul cameo, with Ray Park’s sometime Sith Lord languishing as a strangely red and black striped, part-robot Star Wars white elephant.
