Star Wars goes ‘Solo’

Whereas Harrison Ford had a roguish smile, in ‘Solo,’ Alden Ehrenreich flashes a gummy grin.

Somewhere during the Ron Howard-directed Solo: A Star Wars Story, the prospect of Alden Ehrenreich as an earlier version of the iconic Harrison Ford character finally makes sense. You guessed it: it’s when he’s sitting behind the wheel of the Millennium Falcon for the first time, surrounded by a Wookiee, a young Lando Calrissian, and a pretty, petite female making wisecracks. It feels an awful lot like old times.

Space cowboy: Emilia Clarke, Woody Harrelson, Ehrenreich and Chewbacca take over the Millennium Falcon in Solo: A Star Wars Story.

And that’s the good feeling that eventually emanates from Solo: a connection with the characters and references we know so well from Star Wars: Episodes IV-VIII.
Since we are going backwards, there is a lot of reverse engineering to this prequel. We are being told Han Solo’s origin story, after all, so much parsing of George Lucas’s original Star Wars script and screenwriter Lawrence Kasdan’s later witticisms (here extended by both father and son Jonathan) is necessary.

Yet it’s a bumpy ride, at least at first. Ehrenreich, who’s displayed some of the “aw, shucks” likability of Ford in movies like the Coen brothers’ Hail, Caesar!, at times seems lost in the role — an iconic one he seems both unable to mimic faithfully and unwilling to make his own. Whereas Harrison Ford offered a roguish smile, Ehrenreich flashes a gummy grin.

But this is the problem for Star Wars, going forward: they will have to relinquish hold of older fans’ memories and expectations, and build new alliances with young, less-reverent audiences. Young actors like Daisy Ridley and Adam Driver proved it can be done in their Star Wars chapters. Solo, which shouldn’t have required so much ardent salesmanship, has been marked by second guessing: original directors Chris Miller and Phil Lord were replaced by Ron Howard, who reshot 80 percent of the action. (The concern among Star Wars royalty was that their improvisational approach didn’t strike the right tone for the series.) The script by the Kasdan tandem punches many comic notes, but basically centers around two heist jobs.

There are compensating pleasures: Emilia Clarke, fresh from Game of Thrones, makes for a sleek and centered Qi’ra, the glamorous gal that Solo left behind on Corellia, a planet nobody wants to be left on, or return to. So naturally Solo, a Baby Driver-type wheelman for a heist gang, declares that he will return to Corellia and rescue her. He falls in with crime mentor Tobias Beckett (Woody Harrelson), his wife Val (Thandie Newton, fresh from Westworld, not so fresh here) and a Wookiee named Chewbacca.

Donald Glover plays a younger Lando Calrissian.

The early action scenes are strangely disengaging and distancing, and this veteran fan knows why: we are simply filling time until we are tied back into classic Star Wars lore. There’s that pair of metal dice that show up here and in most earlier episodes, passed on from Qi’ra to Han; there’s the arrival of Lando (Donald Glover), charming and cheating his way through a game of cards; there’s a pretty good meet-cute between Chewie and Han.

But after a while, it becomes a fan’s game of connect-the-dots: by reverse-engineering Star Wars lore — informing us, for instance, how Han Solo got his name — it feels like the filmmakers are merely ticking off boxes, making sure fans get their “fix” of cherished information. The movie doesn’t trust itself enough to really take off on its own.

Part of the difficulty is Ehrenreich, sporting a perm ’do that can correctly be called “very ‘70s.” He may eventually grow and relax into this role (assuming there are sequels); Clarke, on the other hand, is a breath of fresh air, regal yet charming; and Glover does a solid job of resurrecting Billy Dee Williams, capes and all.

We are left, though, with a back story that doesn’t actually fill in how Han Solo became Han Solo. We know precious little about his parents (fathers are notoriously absent or shady figures in Star Wars mythology); and we know that here, he seems nothing like the cynical, post-Watergate character that Harrison Ford effortlessly portrayed in 1977. We are instead told that he’s “a good guy.” Perhaps too good for his own good. A little less good, and a little more digging, might have resulted in more gold onscreen.

Yuko Takeuchi sniffs out a fresh case in HBO Asia’s Miss Sherlock.

The world, strangely, never seems to tire of Sherlock Holmes. After Guy Ritchie’s screen versions, the Benedict Cumberbatch Sherlock, and TV’s Elementary pairing a male Holmes and female Watson comes Miss Sherlock, a Japanese series created by Hulu and shown locally through HBO Asia (Fridays, 9 a.m.). With a sharply dressed Yuko Takeuchi as the curiously nicknamed Japanese detective “Sherlock,” and an unlikely partner Wato (or Wato-san, which is amusingly close to “Watson”) played by Shihori Kanjiya, there are enough local touches to make you crave not only Japanese food, but a good mystery. And a small but dedicated fan base is building: the eight-part first season goes beyond the obvious gender switch to offer us characters and an arc that, once again, proves how resilient Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s creation is.

Sporting Hermès jackets and practicing Bach cello suites instead of scraping violin solos, Sherlock seems to specialize in chemical analysis to clear her cases; Watson, a dowdier dresser, is an army surgeon suffering from PTSD after her stint in Syria.

The chemistry stuff and female surgeon angle are interesting, because we get to see females as scientists and doctors, which can only be inspiring to young girls, whether simply fans or prospective future scientists (such as our daughter).

The fun starts in Episode 1 when Wato’s apartment mysteriously burns down (shades of Edward Norton’s character in Fight Club), forcing her to bunk with Sherlock. “We are not friends,” comes Sherlock’s constant deadpan disclaimer as she rudely shoves Wato aside. “I’m sorry,” simpers Wato to every client and suspect they meet on their cases, apologizing for Sherlock’s very un-Japanese rude behavior.

The fun continues in watching Takeuchi take sheer pleasure in solving cases; it overrules her sense of decorum, which is consistent with how we’ve always viewed Doyle’s creation: a character so consumed with “eliminating the impossible” that she can’t be bothered to be polite. Along with the Japanese themes (folklore-ish devil bats and cucumber toners and food, food, food) there are shades of a story arc here, which, despite its familiar parameters — Mycroft, Moriarty — we’re already willing to follow. After all, the BBC’s Sherlock seems to be on permanent hiatus, or else creatively exhausted, so it’s not a bad time to resurrect this crew of characters in yet another guise.