#will it appeal to a large chunk of your core audience who are nerds

[yusuke-of-valla]

I have so many great video game ideas that are relatively low budget @ anybody hire me to be in charge of this shit I'm a genius

[theladyfromplanetx]

Dear Lawrence Kasdan So, You Say You Love Han Solo

Dear Lawrence,

I hear there’s a bit of a kerfuffle going on about the Han Solo movie you’re EPing and have co-written with your son. I wish I could tell you I was sorry to hear that, but in all honesty I’ve been hoping for the last few years that someone would kill this project with fire and then nuke it from space for good measure. Sure, most of the reason that large chunks of the nerd world have responded to the very idea of this film is that a lots of people, including me, think it’s a fool’s errand for any actor other than Harrison Ford to strap on Han Solo’s DL-44 blaster. But ever since the release of The Force Awakens, I’ve had a second reason for saying:

to this venture.

I kind of hate to say it, Lawrence, but it’s not me: It’s you.

You see, the The Force Awakens did something to me that even The Star Wars Holiday Special, painfully delivered prequel lines about sand, and the very existence of Jar Jar Binks couldn’t do: The Force Awakens made me regret that Star Wars is still a thing.

It made me regret that children were being introduced to something that used to be innocent and good-hearted by a film that shows that the end game of youthful heroism is failure and running away (and that Han should have stuck to his initial demand of $10,000 all in advance in A New Hope).

It made me angry that nobody among the-powers-that-be looked at it, took a deep breath and said “wait a minute. In shadow-rebooting A New Hope, do we really need to make two of the biggest characters in film history pathetic runaway losers and the other a heartless automaton who would kill her son on (not a)Death Star unless hapless sucker Han showed up to do her bidding and die trying to bring him home…even though that request made not a lick of sense given that the Force-sensitive parent who could actually have had an influence was the bidding mother would have just blown Kylo clear out of the sky had Han not shown up to (1) solve her problem by getting yet another (not a)Death Star shield down and (2) die?“

It made me rue how far we’ve fallen as a critical thinkers when we can be hoodwinked so easily that we spend a couple of billion at the movie theatre on a film that’s dressed up to look and feel like Star Wars, but is utterly life- and hope-denying at its core and presents a kind of nihilism that we’d probably reject as an audience if the words STAR WARS weren’t plastered on it.

Oh, also, the story doesn’t really make any sense.

As you can see, eighteen months later, I can still get a bit aggrieved by all this. However, to quote one of the most egregiously jaw-dropping placeholder lines in The Force Awakens, that is “a story for another day.” (Sorry, Lawrence and JJ, but in a past life, which I call the late 1990s, I went to film school and put in my time in the screenwriting trenches as well. You know and I know that line right there would have gotten you laughed out of an on-line screenwriting class at an unaccredited diploma mill.)

The story for today is that I’m not really keen on the idea of you touching the character of Han Solo again, both because of TFA and because of whatever happened to upend the Solo standalone’s directors. The weight of the evidence coming from the usual suspects (aka unnamed sources) is that the disagreements over the tone of the film and the character of Solo became so vast that somebody had to go. Lord/Miller, as I’ve read in the millions of lines of digital type about this and to which I’m now adding, saw the film and the character as funny, while you insisted that Solo was not funny, but was selfish and sarcastic. Other descriptors of Solo that have been thrown around and attributed to you re: Solo are “narcissistic,” “uncaring,” “out for himself,” and “mean.”

Oh, and you’ve also been quoted as saying you “love Han Solo.”

And therein lies the problem.

Now no one wants a Han Solo movie…hm. I could just stop there for a lot of the fandom, but I’ll proceed.

No one wants a Han Solo movie in which Solo keeps trying to get Chewie to pull his finger, but I’d like to propose, Larry, that perhaps Lord/Miller weren’t the only problem here, because it seems that you actually don’t love the same character that the audience loved in the Original Trilogy. You love the darker version of the character that was tossed around in story conferences and in early drafts and you love the darker story that Lucas toyed with, but decided against using (thank the Makers) in Return of the Jedi. You love the Han Solo that Lucas and Leigh Brackett introduced as the “before” Han at the beginning of A New Hope, but not the “after” he became by the end of that film and the “after-after” he became by the end of ROTJ. Now that Lucas and his lighter view of the Star Wars universe are no longer on the scene, it feels like you’re trying to retcon Han Solo to win a battle you fought and lost long ago and in the process create a smuggler whose heart isn’t actually made of gold anymore.

I know that’s not a very nice thing for me to say, but I can’t help but say it, given how you and JJ had your way with the character in TFA, because he certainly wasn’t the character we left at the end of ROTJ. Nor, I should note, is he the character that we met in Bloodline, the Disney/Lucasfilm novel released after TFA and set five years before it, in which Han and Leia are still happily married and Han is pretty much an identifiable older version of ROTJ Han. TFA Han was an awkward mash-up of a script portraying an aged version of the character we met at the beginning of A New Hope and an actor playing hard against the script to show us a broken man wandering the galaxy and trying to make it work.

That impetus — to remake a beloved hero in a less heroic image — is kind of ugly in any context, despite all the folks who will insist “BUT IT’S REAL” as if real had anything to do with a franchise that for forty years has appealed to the little, innocent part of us that still wants to believe in Santa. It’s particularly a problem when applied to the character of Solo and the role that character plays for Star Wars.

Solo’s not the kid who, twenty minutes into the Original Trilogy, decides he wants to be a Jedi and spends the next five hours and forty minutes of film becoming just that. He’s not the character with royal roots who has been fighting for the good guys since before the first film started and continues to do so until the trilogies end.

He’s the character who has to find his better angels, who has to change in order to become the hero/man/boyfriend/partner/friend he decides he wants to be. He’s a guy who has to overcome his natural instincts for self-preservation. He needs to learn to say “I’m sorry.” He’s snarky, FUNNY, and sometimes grudgingly follows the conscience he’d rather not have in order to do the right thing. He’s not always really convinced about the whole “religion” thing, he’s had some rough times, he’s done some rotten things, and he likes money.

It’s no big mystery why Solo is a fan favorite. It’s Harrison Ford, yes, but its also because Solo is as much like all of us as someone can be in a universe with hyperdrives, lightsabers, and Wookiees. He gives the Star Wars universe some identifiable grounding — and HUMOR. (If you don’t believe me, see: prequels.)

And by the end of Return of the Jedi, Solo became the person we’d all like to believe we are or can be— the one whose better angels have won out and given him a real shot at a happily ever after.

Oh, right, that didn’t happen. Well, it did for 30 plus years, and then it didn’t. Thanks, Larry. Always good to remind myself of Han Solo’s utterly pointless death scene in TFA, a death that many of us steeled ourselves against because we were pretty sure it was coming. It was gutting, though, not because it happened, but because it came at the top of act three of a film that had already stripped the character of his OT arc and also because the death was utterly devoid of heroic meaning or salvific result, given that all it did in the context of the film was turn Darth Emo into Darth Lyle Menendez and make Leia sit down and look somewhat upset.

But it can’t just be a pointlessly sad death of a character who, for all the talking up JJ did about cool rogue Han Solo, wasn’t played that way and didn’t come off that way, right? We all know that when you take down an iconic character like that, you do it with the endgame all planned out. You know exactly how that death — of a parent who rouses himself from his brokenness and ennui to risk his life for son he believes is likely already beyond his reach because the woman he loves has asked him to — will reverberate across the sequel trilogy and, ultimately, we’ll see that Solo’s final act WAS heroic. In fact, it was Kenobi-like. Aslan-like. Christ-like. You gave Solo the ultimate 180-degree arc, didn’t you? He died to save his kid, he died so everybody else could live, and you know it, right, Larry? You’ve got this whole thing mapped out, right, bud? I mean, c’mon, you love Han Solo, so you wouldn’t strip the character of his growth, throw him down an endless shaft (holy cow, dude, you literally shafted him!), and walk away to write another movie about him NOT being a hero, would you?

Oh.

Maybe you did.

So…you’re telling me that it’s possible Han’s final act was utterly futile, solely a device to tell us Darth Emo is really, really evil ? I think we already knew that, given the platypus mask, Vader lust, and the blowing up of a solar system. But, hey, thanks for getting people in our already messed-up world to argue that patricide can be justified; what’s been missing from our pop culture crap stew for the last decade is Star Wars fans arguing that the vastly immoral may be moral because they identify with the patricidal emo character whom they want to end up with the Mary Sue whose mind he attacked in the TFA version of a rape scene. I’ll never know how you avoided feminist outrage there, but count your lucky stars that feminists were so happy to have a female (not)Luke Skywalker in Star Wars that they overlooked that.

So now you move onto the Han Solo film, wherein, after meeting loser, regressed, lost, runaway and dead Han in TFA, we’re going to meet selfish, sarcastic, mean, narcissistic, and out for himself but not funny Han.

Can’t wait. By which I mean I could have happily waited forever, because I wasn’t waiting. I WASN’T WAITING, LARRY.

I get it, though. I’ve seen most of your work. You’re a serious filmmaker — you went from Larry to Lawrence. The Big Chill, Grand Canyon, Accidental Tourist, Mumford. I’ve seen ’em all. God help me, I even saw Dreamcatcher…but that’s a story for another day. What I know from those films is that when you’re calling the shots, nothing is black and white. Everything is a shade of gray.

What I also know is that those films are not made for the part of us that still wants to believe in Santa and that gray is not a good color for Star Wars. Star Wars became the cultural touchstone it is precisely because it jumped into a very gray period in our history, with gas lines and Soviets and malaise, with a black-and-white, good versus evil morality that made everyone just a little bit happier when they left the theatre. You didn’t question if the heroes were heroes or the villains were villains. In its own goofball way, Star Wars — with its complete faith in the power of hope — was countercultural.

Now? The new Star Wars took one look around at our current culture and instead of being countercultural, happily jumped right into the morass and is swimming around in the sludge of relativism. Heroes become failures and run away. Evil characters are given some sort of justification for being evil. Rebels fighting against the Empire are portrayed as assassins instead of people fighting a monstrous evil. The Resistance is some kind of non-governmental paramilitary group. Luke Skywalker thinks the Jedi must end. Oh, and the last two films you’ve written focus on a less noble version of the character you claim to love.

Star Wars is starting to look like a reflection of the worst of us as adults and as a society, instead of a goofy, lovable, out-of-this-galaxy inspiration to kids (and the kid in everyone) to be the best version of themselves.

Hey, I’m sure everyone at Lucasfilm is just fine with this, because these films, despite their shaky worldview, are also printing money, but, Larry, consider that maybe Wonder Woman has proven that there’s still a huge audience for naivete, goodness, and hope. Since you now have Ron Howard, who’s specialized in empathetic leads even in complex films over the years, can you maybe jettison the gray and try to create just one more time not the Han Solo that you love, but the Han Solo that is a combination of you, George Lucas, Irvin Kershner, Harrison Ford, and Leigh Brackett?

That’s the Han — the funny, snarky, constantly-irked one who talked a good game about being out for himself but somehow never was when the chips were down — that the audience has loved for forty years, because, in the end, CS Lewis was as right about this as he was about most things:

Oh, and if you could de-age Harrison Ford so he could play the role, that’d be great too…kthxbai.

Best,

Annie

Written in 2017 by Anne Michaela.