By Jack Jenkins
In 2012, Disney bought LucasFilm for four billion dollars, giving it complete ownership over the Star Wars Franchise. Many hardcore fans worried that it would become Hannah Montana (but with lasers), yet the recent flurry of films have been surprisingly decent. Solo, the newest addition to the universe, exudes the enjoyable mediocrity which characterises the majority of Hollywood films. However, a close reading of background shots, plot functions and character motivations will hope to prompt a reconsideration of our favourite lightsaber fairytale.
Star Wars had always seemed to be a World War 2 parable. ‘The Empire’ embodies many of the defining aspects of the Nazi party; the love of uniform, uniformity, obedience and domination, race wiping weapons and foot-soldiers called Stormtroopers. Mainstream culture is saturated with depictions of the Second World War; narratives which tend to deify the British, ignoring atrocities such as the enforced starvation of the Bengali people, or lazily whitewashing the allied success as seen in the recent film Dunkirk. It seemed a tired allegory of good-vs-evil, indolently aligned with the dominant narrative of Hollywood and Western political discourse. Yet, if we were able to shift this allegorical position, then the subtext of the film might become more insightful, might provide us with a message with which to address the contemporary world.
Solo is a stereotypical and largely predictable heist movie, led by a rough ’n’ ready group of interplanetary bandits on a series of increasingly hazardous high-stakes missions. The gang of half-hearted actors, led by Aiden Ehrenreich, attempt a train robbery which goes disastrously wrong when it is sabotaged by competing criminals, The Cloud Riders. The purpose of train freight in a universe where matter can be transported at light-speed is not touched upon, but we do find out that the Coaxium, a highly valuable rocket ship fuel, is being stolen on behalf of the criminal syndicate Crimson Dawn.
The crew attend a mafia party, headed by Dryden Voss, where they agree upon threat of death to re-steal the Coaxium. At this gathering, stylised like a 1920’s mobster film, we see high-ranking officers of The Empire hobnobbing with the criminal elite. Until this point I had conceived of The Empire as an oversimplified ‘evil’, like Sauron from Lord of the Rings, seeking domination for ambiguous and nefarious purposes. However, this simple shot shows how entwined the military structures are with the gangsters who run things on the ground. We could begin to make parallels to many of the sinister organisations who hold power over the governments of nations - G4S and Royal Dutch Shell being but two examples. The Empire thus becomes less a generic ‘baddie’ and instead a shady elite, in violent control of the galaxy.
The gang steal the Coaxium from Kessel, a planetary mining facility which uses slave labour to extract raw materials. They have enlisted the help of a young Lando Calrissian - Donald Glover delivering perhaps the movie’s only convincing performance - and his co-pilot/love interest L3-37.
Since the classic cantina scene, Star Wars has portrayed the droids as an oppressed group, a not-so-subtle or nuanced parallel to race-relations in America, and across the Western world. Unlike the loveably hopeless C3-PO, however, L3-37 takes matters into her own hands. During the heist she instigates an uprising, the slaves murdering their masters and storming the mining facility. It serves primarily as a plot function, allowing the crew to escape amidst the carnage, yet clearly shows us a solution to being consigned to a lifetime of labour!
As they escape to the processing facility, they find their route restricted by an imperial blockade. Once again this serves as a plot function, allowing Han to pilot the ship through dangerous territory and thus confirming his presence as ‘the one’, a predictable hero archetype which pervades all the Star Wars films. However, the blockade furthers the argument for a contemporary re-reading by the very fact that the empire takes steps to crush the rebellion. Strikes and protests must be broken up by force to ensure production continues. The Empire, therefore, becomes less a symbol of pure hate i.e. the Nazi’s, and instead a demonstration of the suffering that takes place when cheap labour and raw materials are brutally extracted. We learn that Chewbacca, one of the most enduring figures of the Star Wars canon, is cut adrift from his people, his home violently colonised, his kinfolk enslaved. For all its shortcomings, Solo portrays a galaxy with far more complexity, where war and colonialism have a true and enduring cost.
The gang finally reach Savareen, where the Coaxium is to be processed, and are ambushed by the Cloud Riders, the gang who disrupted the first heist. After a stand-off straight from a Wild-West B-movie, they reveal that they are in fact rebels, their homes destroyed or colonised, locked in an insurrectionary war with the criminal syndicate Crimson Dawn and the imperial forces.
The whole narrative of the classic Star-Wars trilogy was rebellion, yet as already discussed the oversimplified portrayal of the empire rendered this a basic story of good-vs-evil. When Han betrays Crimson Dawn and gives the Coaxium to the Cloud Riders, it seems like a far more contemporary message. Arm the rebels, the film says, overthrow the factories, wage war against those who try to control you. Hollywood have provided us with a badly acted, predictable motion picture, characterised by the usual visual brilliance and seeming lack of substance. Yet, because a heist movie must revolve around money, or some interchangeable commodity, they have accidentally impregnated the Star Wars universe with an anti-capitalist parable. Perhaps they think us all too docile to act on subtext, perhaps they fail to see revolution even when they write it. Either way, the film has a clear message; when faced with an oppressive and unequal world, violent revolution is often the only way to make change. If you hate that, then blame George Lucas. Or Walt Disney.
