Directors Phil Lord and Christopher Miller have made some of...
| |  | | | | Alyssa Rosenberg on culture and politics | | | | | | Peter Mayhew stars as Chewbacca and Harrison Ford as Han Solo in "Star Wars: The Force Awakens." (Film Frame/Lucasfilm via AP) | Directors Phil Lord and Christopher Miller have made some of the movies that have delighted and surprised me most in recent years, from their remake of “21 Jump Street” to the unexpected joy that was “The Lego Movie.” So when the news broke that Kathleen Kennedy, who is overseeing the unfolding “Star Wars” universe, had fired them as directors of a forthcoming movie about the young Han Solo, I felt a double loss. I wouldn’t get to see a new Lord-Miller collaboration. And I sensed a darkness in the franchise. Let me be clear: I am, at every step of the way, rooting for all forthcoming “Star Wars” projects to be great. The “Star Wars” movies and Expanded Universe were my greatest pop culture loves as a child and young teenager, and certainly the franchise that did the most to shape my sense of what ongoing big pop culture series can be. I’m not exactly sitting around crabbily waiting for “Star Wars” to fail so we can get back to arcane French cinema (in my ideal world, we can do both). But thus far, the “Star Wars” movies have lacked what I loved best about the original trilogy and the best of the Expanded Universe novels: a sense of clear and specific personality. (I will admit that the Force itself has always been the least interesting major part of the franchise for me, and I prefer stories on the periphery of the Jedi, or that shake up the collective sense of what the Jedi are supposed to accomplish.) “The Force Awakens,” which I thought was the stronger of the two movies so far, and “Rogue One” have not yet had a moment that is the equivalent of Luke Skywalker’s (Mark Hamill) boast about womp rats, or a relationship even remotely equivalent to the squabbling romance between Han Solo (Harrison Ford) and Leia Organa (Carrie Fisher). The whole point of hiring directors like Lord and Miller is for their senses of humor and specifics, qualities that are exceptionally important in a movie about young Han Solo. Firing them, especially in conjunction with the two new “Star Wars” movies that have been released so far, suggests that these are not valued qualities for the new regime. Of course, “Star Wars” will always have a chance to turn it around for me — and as a critic, whether I like it or not, I’ll be seeing and reviewing them. But I do hope that Kennedy can get to a place where she’s confident enough to experiment with tone and humor the way Marvel has done, and where she recognizes that there’s more to Star Wars than devotion to an ancient religion. | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | |
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