With Solo: A Star Wars Story (great title, by the way) coming out soon, it’s time to take a look at the divide that’s going on with Hollywood Blockbusters. Young, quirky, weird directors are taking over Hollywood and it’s not right. I think it’s high time that such directors step aside and let the real Hollywood titans take over.
Solo ditched young up-and-coming directors Phil Lord and Christopher Miller – best known for The Lego Movie, 21 Jump Street, and 21 Jump Street 2: More Jump – to work with legendary director Ron Howard – best known for Apollo 13 and being the narrator on Arrested Development.
And I only see how this is a good thing. I love Ron Howard. He’s one of those directors with so much cache. All directors have their own little trademarks. You know you’re watching a Tarantino movie because of all the blood and snappy dialogue. You know you’re watching an Alfonso Cuaron movie because he uses lots of long shots and moving takes. You know you’re watching a Ron Howard movie because at the beginning it says “Directed by Ron Howard.” And that’s what I’m excited to see in Solo: A Star Wars Story.
This movie could have been a mess if it had been in the hands of those two less-experienced and more quirky directors. So, reflecting on that, let’s look back at some similar situations that went well, and some that didn’t.
Star Wars: The Last Jedi
Everyone knows just how bad Star Wars: The Last Jedi was. I don’t need to rehash it, but just in case, there’s this video, this video, and this article. And do you know why? There wasn’t enough studio supervision. (Not from Kathleen Kennedy though, her input doesn’t count.) (There wasn’t enough supervision from George Lucas.) Y’know why? Rian Johnson went completely off the rails. He got to WRITE and DIRECT the movie. That’s too much! Any movie where someone WRITES and DIRECTS is bad. It’s incredibly bad if they WRITE and DIRECT and PRODUCE. IF the studio had gotten someone like George Lucas to take over, we wouldn’t have gotten so much ridiculous stuff in Last Jedi, like Leia using the force to fly through space or hyperspace travel causing that kind of accident or Poe encountering some kind of difficulty where his hot-headedness gets him in trouble. That movie was full of preposterous stuff.
Ant-Man
Edgar Wright is so bad. His movies just don’t make sense. At first, he was set up to direct Marvel’s Ant-Man. He left over “creative differences” which is to say, Kevin Feige decided that he wasn’t the right man for the job. Feige instead decided that the right man for the job was visionary director (*Takes a moment to check notes*) Peyton Reed. And the Ant-Man that we got was the one we deserved, centered with an amazing villain and a me
morable score. It’s a lot better than Scott Pilgrim vs. the World and Hot Fuzz.
Thor: Ragnarok
Thor: Ragnarok was the opposite of Ant-Man, where Marvel did not intervene soon enough, and small-time writer director Taika Watiti was at the helm of their best franchise, Thor. Did you see Watiti’s first movie? NObody liked that. And nobody liked this one either. It was boring and uninteresting. Chris Hemsworth takes himself too seriously, Jeff Goldblum’s performance doesn’t make sense and seems largely improvised, and there just wasn’t enough Zachary Levi!
Psh, this movie is a mess. On to the next one!
Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban
Many people say that this movie is to blame for the silly notion that small-time quirky directors can handle big-budget franchises. There’s a lot of people who say that this movie is great, and there are a lot of people who say that this movie isn’t so great. But I side with the latter group. And so do most people. News flash Alfonso: Nobody cares about beautiful camera work or well-directed performances! Step aside and let David Yates take over.
So I hope this post summarizes what I think: Solo: A Star Wars Story is going to be a great movie because it’s not gonna be dragged through the mud by a young, hot-shot director(s) and doesn’t have to push The Last Jedi‘s awful-PC-feminist agenda. Go see it!
Pop Cultural Studies 