DON'T BE ALARMED
I know it's not quite Sunday yet, but I finished a very extensive examination of Solo: A Star Wars Story today after going to opening night last night, and this Sunday's 29th regular issue is simply too packed to fit any mention of it, so I thought I'd whip up a quick email for ya.
I ended up just under 5000 words - which is a lot - because Solo contained so much bizarrely malevolent treatment of very sensitive subjects like slavery, women's rights, and general liberation. For those who don't particularly care about which of the Star Wars films may or may not be teaching your children pre-segregation shit, I've included a paragraph below on what the film tells us about Han Solo, himself.
Remember: you can always send your feedback by simply replying to these emails!
Till Sunday morning,
David Blue
Editor-in-Chief
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In the past, when film enthusiasts and fans have described Han Solo as “the best character in Star Wars,” they’ve actually been praising his potential as a character, not his material itself, and Solo’s most effective function as a franchise film was to shut that praise down. Han was not at all denied his movie — this is his movie — and it provided him the screentime to show us who he truly is and why we really like him so much: he doesn’t fucking change. The secret to Han Solo’s moral and emotional resiliency is nothing more than halted development. The same old inner conflict between the tough, ruthlessly self-interested persona he does his best to project for everyone around him and the consistent reality of his soft insides was presented in his first scene way back in 1977, and we’re now sure that he was unable to make any progress toward its resolution despite openly and obviously brooding over it for an entire lifetime: from at least as early as his young adulthood in this film until his death at the hands of his little Sith son. There is 0 variation. He always comes back for the cause at the crucial moment after declaring himself through with it. Without fail, he’ll sacrifice the entirety of any self-making enterprise for just about any underdog with a problem who crosses his path. (Which probably explains his constantly-fleeting success as a smuggler well into gray hair and jowls.) Solo is abundantly clear about Han’s true nature and very willing to expose how uninteresting it is. When he first proclaims to Qi-ra that he’s become “an outlaw,” she shuts him down with the film’s ultimate quote, insisting that she “knows who [he] really is: the good guy.”
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