STAR WARS NEEDS STEWARDS, NOT AUTEURS
The minds behind Star Wars, the brand, want to ensure that there will be at least one Star Wars, the movie, on big screens every year, in perpetuity, until we are dead and buried — or, given the current state of the world, blasted into little bitty irradiated pieces, like so much Alderaanian space dust.
In odd-number years, it seems, we’ll get new Episodes — such as VII: The Force Awakens or VIII: The Last Jedi — and in evennumber years, we’ll see Star Wars Stories, like last year’s Rogue One.
The latest Star Wars Story has been a truly suspenseful journey through the stars with many nearmisses and outright disasters.
But all that drama has nothing to do with what’s on the screen (material we won’t see until the middle of next year, at the earliest).
Instead, it revolves around those who many thought would be a new hope for the franchise: Phil Lord and Chris Miller, the directing pair behind 21 Jump Street and The Lego Movie.
While much remains uncertain, this much seems clear: Executive producer Kathleen Kennedy and screenwriter-longtime Lucasfilm hand Lawrence Kasdan were unhappy with the work Lord and Miller, the directors of the as-of-yet-untitled Young Han Solo movie, had so far done. As a result, Kennedy/ Kasdan removed the duo from the film (or, alternately, the duo resigned) and replaced them with Ron Howard, the director of Apollo 13 and A Beautiful Mind.
Regardless of what actually happened, the simple fact of the matter seems to be that the comedic stylings of Lord and Miller — best understood as a mélange of self-referential irony and on-the-spot improvisational humour — were simply not a good fit for the Star Wars universe in general or the character of Han Solo in particular. They brought a style and a tone and a sensibility to a franchise that has never really needed any of those things to strike a chord with audiences.
Bluntly, Howard, a director with a long track record who can handle big-budget action scenes, but isn’t wedded to any particular esthetic, seems like a far better choice to helm a title in a series whose better entries — Empire Strikes Back, Return of the Jedi and The Force Awakens — were handled by directors who either hewed to George Lucas’s visual style while improving the level of acting (Irvin Kershner, Richard Marquand) or whose own sensibility is so inseparable from the Lucas/Spielberg esthetic (J.J. Abrams) that it blurs the line between homage and theft.
Kennedy and Co. are more or less emulating the Marvel model, mapping out a cinematic universe that has a clear house style and hews to an overarching storyline even as individual plots show some variation.
There’s a reason why Iron Man’s Jon Favreau, who Slate’s Sam Adams once described as “the ghost in the highly successful machine,” was the perfect director to kick off the Marvel Cinematic Universe: His hypercompetent anti-style more or less defines the look and feel of that entire franchise.
It’s why Edgar Wright was an odd choice to direct Ant Man, and it’s why I’m a bit anxious about Ryan Coogler’s Black Panther and Rian Johnson’s The Last Jedi.
As the Washington Post’s Alyssa Rosenberg has noted, the limitations on creative freedom that come with helming a franchise entry render the gigs relatively pointless — and deprives viewers of truly original, auteurist works.
So maybe we should be happy that Howard is slipping into the director’s chair of Han Solo: The Kid Years — or whatever it will be called.
And maybe we should hope that studios realize that hiring seasoned vets and less experienced, more easily guided younger directors is a better way to go than throwing the latest hot big name into the franchise meat grinder.
The latest Star Wars Story has been a truly suspenseful journey ... with many near-misses and outright disasters.