Watching Solo solo

This evening I went by myself to see Solo. All of my fellow Star Wars fanatics had already seen it, and the name itself suggested that a solitary experience might be apropos.

I found it to be an excellent action adventure film, and I liked the way it smoothly filled in the gaps in Han Solo’s history. Weirdly, though, he was definitely not the character that Harrison Ford played more than four decades ago.

This guy is simply too nice. Han Solo is one of modern pop culture’s best exemplars of that classic literary figure, the lovable rogue.

He is our era’s equivalent of Lord Byron, who was, as Lady Caroline Lamb famously quipped, “Mad, Bad, and Dangerous to Know.”

Back when Star Wars first came out, everybody fell in love with Han Solo precisely for that wild streak. For all his charm, there’s something dangerous about him, and that’s his real super power.

Kind of like Humphrey Bogart in Casablanca, come to think of it. Which is why I was vaguely disappointed when the movie ended and our hero never actually said the line I was secretly hoping to hear: “Chewie, I think this is the beginning of a beautiful friendship.”

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