‘Solo: A Sorry Story’ or — The VERY Dark Side of Star Wars ?

So I’d heard that the visual look and colour palette of ‘Solo: A Star Wars Story’ (2018) was somewhat unappealing but bugger me backwards, I was not expecting it to be THIS constantly and consistently ugly. This is, without a doubt or recourse to exaggeration or hyperbole, the most unattractive looking movie I’ve seen in the last five years, maybe even of this century… and the longer it went on the more I resented it. Looks wise, this movie is disgusting.

I’m not even going to bother with the plot or characters because it’s pointless when they’re slathered in such a revolting veneer that no film, no matter how good, could cut through. The story might have something to do with Han Solo and things called the Crimson Dawn and something to do with hyperfuel but all I remember was that this is a movie that starts off dark and dingy then gets dark and dusty then proceeds to dark and smokey before climaxing in dark, dingy, dusty and smokey. I actually started playing a game an hour in trying to guess when there’d be a shot without any smoke or dust and not only did it never happen but the movie actually double-downed on all the impenetrable shit by shifting the action into a fucking mine-shaft where it was smoke and dust and darkness galore. It was at this precise moment I thought the movie was sentient and actively persecuting me.

For example — take the introduction to the Millennial Falcon, one of the greatest spaceships of all time. This is the moment when Han, her future captain, claps eyes on her for the first time… and how do we/he see her for the very first time? With quite a lot of difficulty because she’s nothing more than a brown smudge on a brown background covered in brown smoke. This is a ship that looks stunning gleaming white against the black of space but it’s hard to get excited about this spaceship when it feels like you’re looking at it through a pair of 200 denier American tan tights. It is the most uninspiring introduction possible and illustrative of the central problem of this movie, a problem so profound that no ship, no matter how fast, can escape its gravity well.

The result of all this atmospheric muck is a movie that feels visually claustrophobic, totally boxed in with no room to breath and a lifeless affair. It’s like the entire film itself has been frozen in carbonite. Even when they blast into space the sensation of confinement actually increases, a seeming impossibility all things considered, but ‘Solo’ even manages to make space seem small and grubby. I was baffled and left sitting shaking my head asking both ‘how’ and ‘why’?

I disliked this movie intensely and if people ever ask me why I have this allergic reaction to some filmmakers taking the dark, smokey, urine-yellow light aesthetic to extremes then I will happily point to ‘Solo: A Star Wars Story’ as the prime example of its dangers.

Also, is it my imagination or does Solo, at one point, make a lightspeed navigation using only his naked eyes? Quite a feat, especially as I had trouble even making anything out on the fucking screen at all let only anything that infinitesimally small.