The Regression of Han Solo

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bdrErkGQPB0

Last time, the audience was forced to sit through a collage of coincidences that all took place inside a few minutes. No doubt the writers were in a hurry to give Han and Chewie their big entrance, but now that Rey and Finn have met these two classic characters, what does the audience learn? That Han has gone back to smuggling, which presumably—and this is later confirmed—means that he and Leia are no longer together, and just like any standard episode of terrible television, things have returned to a homeostasis.

Three films’ worth of character development has been undone. Only it’s much worse. Abrams seems to have a fundamental misunderstanding about Han’s original character from A New Hope.

Han and Chewie enter the ship, find Finn and Rey and eventually decide that they are going to put the two in a pod and drop them off on the nearest habitable planet. Rey and Finn obviously don’t agree with this, so they explain to Han that BB-8 is carrying a map to Luke Skywalker. This changes things, and Han has BB-8 show him the map.

Now, this sequence already has numerous details that only add confusion to what is going on. We’ve already talked about one detail, that is, how Han lost the Falcon in the first place, but another issue is that Finn knows Han as the rebellion general, and Rey knows Han as a smuggler. This returns the audience to the same issue that was presented when Rey said that she thought Luke Skywalker was only a myth. How? It’s only been thirty years. How have events of the original trilogy already been forgotten?

The ‘why?’ is much easier to guess. Abrams was apparently not content to mimic A New Hope when it came to the world-building but decided to also regress the characters back to their original states from the first movie. The problem is Abrams didn’t understand Han from the first movie at all, as is demonstrated in the following scene.

Han has apparently caught three dangerous aliens on his ship. He hears a noise and is afraid that one of the creatures might’ve escaped. Instead, another group of thugs have boarded his ship. Han appears to have some idea why they’re there and decides to try and smooth things over.

He tells Rey and Finn to hide under the floor of his ship, but he also decides to take BB-8 with him and Chewie. There’s no practical reason for this. This decision is just meant to facilitate the next event in the plot, whether it makes sense or not.

But, regardless, as Han is speaking with the first group of thugs, he’s cornered by a second group, and during this scene it quickly becomes apparent why he’s in trouble, and this encounter reveals the fundamental misunderstanding Abrams had of this character.

The thugs say that Han has swindled them because he’s retrieved two payments for the same job, one from each group. They claim there is no one left in the galaxy for him to swindle. Here’s the issue. Han was a smuggler, not a swindler.

The original Han was a cynic, an otherwise good man forced into a corrupt line of work due to circumstance, or more specifically, the Empire. Han’s existence within the story is in some measure tied to the world-building of the original trilogy. Han is cynical, brutally honest, but ultimately virtuous.

As is demonstrated by his loyalty to his friends. He is judged to be a rogue, but the audience is meant to understand that this is not the case, and it is Luke who brings out his true nature by the end of the first film.

Han stands in direct contrast to Lando, who is sleazy and corrupt and only decides to switch teams when the Empire’s mistreatment becomes too much. Han’s character serves as a subtle reminder of the Empire’s overbearing presence because, presumably, such an honest and virtuous man would not fall into this line of work unless driven to it.

He’s become something he otherwise would not have been without the Empire’s economic pressure. Does the movie say this? No. But it can safely be inferred that this is the case because there are plenty of archetypes that match Han’s profile, and Lucas was borrowing from the rules of classic storytelling when creating Star Wars.

Han is the mercenary, or assassin, or thief, or, in some cases, the harlot with a heart of gold, and the unifying feature of such characters is that circumstance drives them to behave in a manner that they would’ve rejected in another reality. Whether this is the real nature of how men are driven to do right or wrong is another question, but from a storytelling standpoint, the victim of circumstance is well-established.

Abrams doesn’t seem to understand this. He seems to have conflated Han with Lando. Lando is the typical rogue, charming but dishonest. Han never acts this way. Han tells Leia directly that he is in this for the money, not the revolution, which is not something a typical sleazy character would say.

He’s honest to a fault, and this character trait’s juxtaposition against his occupation is what implies that he is really a decent man underneath. Lando doesn’t act this way. Lando lies and such characters typically wield and deal until their options run out, as is the case with Han in The Force Awakens.

So, Abrams has not only regressed Han by making him a smuggler again. He’s to use the common nomenclature, character assassinated Han by writing him as a typical sleazy rogue who’s talked himself into a corner.

Just because Han has a debt to the Huts in the first movie does not mean that he was in the habit of cheating people, and Lucas took great care to demonstrate that Han was really virtuous underneath his gruff demeanour. Anyone who doesn’t believe this can look up the “Han Shot First” controversy.

Since Abrams failed to understand Han’s true character archetype, he treats Han like the typical roguish buffoon. Han comically fails to persuade the goons to spare him and Chewie. Then, because the plot needs to happen, the goons recognize BB-8 and prepare to kill Han and Chewie so they can take the droid.

Luckily, Rey is there. She tries to shut the doors between Han, Chewie, and the goons but ends up releasing the giant creatures instead. The creatures begin attacking the goons, and I’ll cover what happens then in the next review.