This is part of a series.
- Here’s the last post on Lorne Balfe’s 2018 - https://www.filmtracks.com/scoreboard/forum.cgi?read=119482
- If you want the full set of links covering the Too Big To Fail era or earlier, click on my profile.
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Solo: A Star Wars Story (2018) - *****
John Powell; Han Solo theme composed & conducted by John Williams; add’l music & arrangements by
Batu Sener, Anthony Willis & Paul Mounsey; orchestrated by John Ashton Thomas; Geoff Lawson,
Tommy Laurence, Andrew Kinney, Randy Kerber, Rick Giovinazzo & Gavin Greenaway; London
orchestra conducted by Greenaway; Vanya Moneva Women's Choir conducted by Vanya Moneva;
Sofia Session Choir conducted by George Strezov; thank you to Edie Boddicker & Hans Zimmer
“[Star Wars] is our understanding of what the best of film music can be. I’d always found it to be intriguing how he had such catchy tunes, and they weren’t simplistic. People could hum them, but they were not easy to hum. That always puzzled me. I sat around for hours on this giant Pinewood set with the visual effects supervisor. We both geeked out; we’re about the same age, we’d grown up with it. ‘Did you ever believe when you were 15 you’d be working on Star Wars?’ And he was like, ‘No, I can’t believe I’m in charge of all this.’
If I’d told you in the late 90s that a new Star Wars film was someday going to feature music from someone who worked under Hans Zimmer, you might’ve thought there was a vast difference in what the music of the concept now sounded like, perhaps akin to a Man of Steel-like reboot where the themes and style of John Williams were replaced by something different, or maybe even that Jerry Bruckheimer had taken over. If I told you more specifically that the composer would be the guy that just wrote the last-minute replacement score for Face/Off, you may have thought something had gone horribly wrong. Instead, it turned out to be one of my ten favorite film scores of all time.
But things in fact did go horribly wrong during production, and the astonishing music for Solo: A Star Wars Story almost never happened.
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The Han Solo origins film was a doomed enterprise. There were disappointed and even toxic segments of the fandom in the wake of The Last Jedi, a sense of Star Wars fatigue with this entry coming only five months after that movie (something its composer would say “backfired on everyone”), and a mid-film production shake-up as Lucasfilm boss Kathleen Kennedy fired 21 Jump Street directors Phil Lord and Chris Miller and brought in Ron Howard. It was the first film in the franchise that could be appropriately categorized as a box office disappointment, though with Disney at the time having committed to pumping out a Star Wars film every year this was perhaps an inevitability; if it hadn’t been Solo, it probably would’ve been one of the other spin-off movies in development. Still, it was a bit of a shame because aside from a few groan-inducing moments (Han gets the last name Solo because an Imperial officer notices he is alone) the end product still made for an entertaining bit of escapism.
Composer John Powell had been avoiding live action films for a while, but Star Wars entries weren’t going to demand minimalist action music (not yet, anyway) or trigger his ethical concerns about dramatizing real-world violence. The job did come with some strings attached though. “I thought this could be too dangerous. [But] I said yes when they said, ‘John [Williams] will be doing a theme, and you are expected to take that theme and then write the rest of the music.’ John is incredibly humble; he said: ‘Are you okay with this? You don’t really need me.’ I said, ‘That’s very kind of you, however, the role of the composer is to make the music as good as he possibly can for the film, so not having you involved would be idiotic.’ I always thought it was normal when composers work together. Gavin Greenaway and I used to write together all the time. It’s like a songwriting partnership.”
Powell was in awe not only of Williams’ decades-old achievements but also his music for the prior year’s film. “It doesn’t comprehend in today’s Hollywood. He’s 85, but he can put more energy in music than a roomful of EDM fuckers. I love EDM, but you’ve got to admire the sheer velocity and kinetic energy in Williams’ scores, even today. It exhausts me to just do a minute of it.”
Powell would end up doing a few pieces of music while Lord and Miller were on the film, all meant to be played in the movie “like the Cantina band in the original” and in at least one case showing extremely unnecessary effort on Powell’s part. “I did the first version in a language I found online, and then Disney pointed out they might not own that language even though it was from the films, so there had to be an official translation into Huttese.” That would show up in the film, as would a bit of “Stormtrooper karaoke” that had Powell’s self-described ”shitty” singing voice which was written as a rush job request for Lord and Miller and almost ended up in the unused pile until Howard asked if Powell had any more source music laying around just before the release date.
Thankfully, Powell would survive the mid-film director swap. “I got a call from one of the producers. ‘Yes, there’s been a change but you’re not necessarily fired.’ Truthfully, I thought I was going to get fired. Ron probably called Hans as soon as he got the gig, and then I think Ron realized that they’d already hired a composer and called Hans and said ‘I’m sorry.’ And Hans, this is why we all love him, he’s like, ‘Johnny will be great! You’ll be fine.’”
But until Williams actually came around to watch the film it was “a hellishly frightening experience. Walking through a minefield in clown shoes. I spent months worrying, studying his stuff, worrying about studying his stuff. Kathy was the one pushing. ‘Let’s see how far we can go.’ That was my concern; how far can we push the fans away from what they’re expecting? The story was already doing that. There’s no mysticism to Solo, that religious aspect. It’s closer to The Italian Job than anything else I’ve done. It’s a heist movie with interesting characters, people trying to make it, backstabbing. You could make a $5 million version [of this story] in London.”
Perhaps not helping matters was that Powell, someone who’s acknowledged being heavily reliant on visuals for scoring inspiration, was dealing with the same challenges his contemporaries were with regards to visual effects. “I scored a movie that had half of the visual effects not done. I was on the set they shot the train scene on. [On my working copy] it looked like shit. And then I watched the premiere, it was bizarre, I was going ‘where did they shoot this?’ I forgot they shot it on [that] soundstage!”
Williams watched a cut of the film alongside Powell in November 2017 and recorded his ideas with an orchestra the following January; his work was originally intended to be just a theme for Han but ending up as two themes plus some scene-specific scoring. Powell would say once this was done “it was such a relief. I knew almost immediately how it would work. My involvement was finding other ways of using it. He wasn’t sure about his secondary theme and I said, ‘That for me is Han yearning.’ I’d written a bunch of themes and didn’t know if they’d be right. A lot of them did work once I had John’s material. He’d put these classic bricks down, and you see the brick and you know [that] it’s level, now I can build everything else around that as my reference.”
His own themes (all comfortable in the Star Wars universe and yet undeniably Powell creations) would at first glance seem to be more character-centric than usual. There are ideas clearly linked to the love interest Qira, Chewbacca, Woody Harrelson’s gang, the droid L3, and the villain Dryden. But Powell still thought of them as being attached to ideas in the story, which helped with their malleability and how he evolved them throughout the film. “There is a love theme, but love that’s lust is very different from true love. Chewie is the true love; the person who’s good for you is the unexpected person. I needed a theme for a gang being family. I needed a theme for freedom, which worked for [L3]. We needed a theme for Dryden, but [also] it represents secrets. The theme is literally three notes, but it’s like a rail that allows me to put other things on it.” That last point would be clear right from the start of the film where the secrets theme relentlessly tolls underneath a solemn statement of the Han theme as the main titles appear, all before a rowdy burst of the secondary Han theme introduces the film’s logo.
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“In college Gavin and I got let into studio 1 at Abbey Road. It was James Horner recording American Tail. The engineer was Shawn Murphy, who I use. And Kathleen Kennedy and Frank Marshall were there!”
The music for the train heist in the first third of the film was amazing, and I suppose I could’ve written 3,000 words just on the supreme might of that material. But the middle of the film has perhaps the most sensational 25-minute near-continuous stretch of film music from this decade, and as such it demands its own section.
As the crew approaches a mining planet, bass grooves and electric guitar provide one of the few Italian Job-style hints of the impending heist. The Millennium Falcon lands amidst a Williams-like fanfare. Tentative winds and strings play with Han’s theme as he’s “sold” to the operation, while a brief shot revealing Han holding his dice is treated to a twinkly take on Williams’ legacy title theme. After martial tones get the gang into position, the L3 droid goes into a revolutionary fervor and frees the mine’s human and robot slaves, and Powell would audaciously rework her theme into a fugal style of writing where (to greatly oversimplify things) the same melodic idea is played in an overlapping fashion by different groups, a style Williams had used in the franchise as well as the later parts of Jaws. Powell seemed to take this on as a dare to “catch up a bit with [Williams], keep that standard of writing. Kathy explained that [the] section needed to feel that it’s building up, getting better and worse simultaneously. The fugue seemed appropriate, but also dangerous. You [can] lose all your accuracy when the film is edited. But Kathy was really pleased.”
That fugal revolt would lead into a lengthy breakout and chase sequence, and Powell would unleash darn near every instrument and theme at his disposal. L3’s theme would morph into a resilient march for robot freedom, Chewie’s theme would shift from a soothing friendship idea to a rousing statement of heroic rescue, and both of Williams’ Han themes would reach energetic new heights. Powell would even sneak in some trumpet outbursts of Williams’ Rebel Fanfare as the Falcon heads back into space. As the Falcon then moves to evade TIE Fighters in a maelstrom of space fog and asteroids, Powell would sprinkle in some lightly rearranged portions of Williams’ Death Star motif, The Asteroid Chase from The Empire Strikes Back and TIE Fighter Attack from A New Hope, perhaps the only choice of his that would rank as even mildly controversial (and then only for a small subset of listeners). “I used some old cues like needle drops. We re-recorded them [and] I had to change keys. You shouldn’t fuck with that music, but as long as I can get it to work smoothly, it’s good.”
Powell would support the final stretch of the chase involving a space monster and a black hole with a cacophony of relentless string rhythms, nasty brass trills, and $3 vuvuzelas, bringing to mind Germaine Franco’s story about having to go out and buy cat toys for Robots. “I need to see what the finest players in the world who have [expensive] instruments would sound like on a big tube.” The chase sequence would be brought to an energetic close by exultant statements of Williams’ original title theme and Rebel Fanfare, followed by brass blasting out one last urgent statement of Williams’ yearning secondary theme for Han as the ship lands at its destination.
If you’re not saying “wow!” to yourself after this point, you may want to check if you have a pulse. Heck, I did it the last time I heard the score and that was probably well over my 200th listen to that portion.
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“One of the themes that I think Ron wanted to get was youth. He’s got more optimism than perhaps he had in the movies we know. I’m trying to create music less serious than the music we know for A New Hope.”
The score is such an embarrassment of riches that one could argue I’ve barely scratched the surface on what makes it so superlative. There’s the harsh Bulgarian choir used for Powell’s theme for the mercenary adversary that was both a way for Powell to get a distinctively aggressive sound (“I needed an exotic theme, something unusual; a normal women’s choir wouldn’t have worked”) and also him “trying to do my best at John’s writing for choir.” There’s the off-kilter ensemble used for a card game scene that calls to mind the various quirky scores Powell wrote in the aughts; only a madman would think to sneak slide guitar into a Star Wars score! There’s a jaunty major key version of the Imperial March done for an in-film recruitment ad, possibly as a nod to Powell’s beloved Ron Goodwin scores from his youth. Williams would at first nix that last item from the original album release, maybe thinking Powell and team were taking the piss out of one of his most famous creations, but apparently liked its usage when he saw the completed film, and Powell would include it on an expanded score album released a few years later.
And of course there’s the brilliant sonic cohesion of it all. This isn’t a Powell score with random bits of Williams thrown in, nor is it Powell completely subordinating his own voice to that of Williams and producing a simulacrum of the maestro’s music; the latter would’ve been fine but also basically the equivalent of any Star Wars video game score from the era. It is very clearly a John Powell creation of the 2010s, but it is one written in a style that is in complete harmony with the mannerisms of Williams for the saga, almost as if the composers’ identifiable styles are having a conversation with each other throughout the nearly two hours of original music written for the film. “I’m not quite equipped to sound exactly like John. I have my own strange ways of doing things and they make everything sound like me. So it was a trick of trying to transition carefully to try and honor the style. When I’m going for big action scenes, I wouldn’t quite put them together the way that John would, but hopefully you can definitely hear the influence there.”
Achieving this kind of precise balance isn’t easy. Just ask Michael Giacchino, who did a stellar job given the very little time he had to write music for Rogue One: A Star Wars Story less than two years earlier but didn’t quite nail the sublime intersection point Powell did on Solo. And not only was Powell taking Williams’ new Han melodies and doing fascinating things with them, but he was also giving fresh spins on several of Williams’ other ideas, including understated variations of Duel of the Fates for a character’s unexpected reappearance, a surprising burst of the Imperial theme from A New Hope during the train heist, and a brief bombastic declaration of the Imperial March filtered through Powell’s How To Train Your Dragon style during the early Mimban battle. “He told me, ‘Don’t feel that you must constantly honor the history of the music. It was just a gig for me. So do with it what you need to do.’”
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Disney didn’t submit Solo for consideration for Best Original Score at the Academy Awards (or at least didn’t submit it on time, per a later article in Variety), perhaps understandable as the organization had an inconsistent record when it came to permitting nominations for music with multiple credited lead composers, such as the ineligibility of The Dark Knight a decade earlier. But it was probably more of an effort on Disney’s part to put all its musical eggs in one basket, specifically the basket containing the music of Mary Poppins Returns. It’s hard to argue with Disney throwing its promotional muscle behind getting composer Marc Shaiman some well-deserved recognition; Shaiman not only showed impressive fealty to the music of the original hit film but arguably surpassed it in overall quality, producing one of the best original compositions for a movie musical of all time.
Yet it was still unfortunate that all that came at the expense of any formal promotion of Powell’s magnificent accomplishment (although the IFMCA did award it the year’s best score). Forget being in the same league as Powell’s earlier music for How To Train Your Dragon 2. His work on Solo is arguably the only other score in the Star Wars franchise that merits being in the same conversation as Williams’ work on the original film and The Empire Strikes Back (for me, it’s second only to Empire). That sentiment has proven even more true as Disney’s subsequent streaming series for the saga have migrated to a galaxy far, far away from Williams’ original design, one full of contemporary-sounding action scoring, abrasive electronics, and sound design.
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Powell would later laugh in an interview done around when Solo came out about the tactics his team had used to keep him aware of his deadline. “Batu started this countdown clock for the hours, minutes, [and] seconds up until I need to get into the car to go to London [to record]. You cannot write past this point. When it’s 60 days, you take the weekend off. When it’s 40, when it’s 14, it’s very effective. I just went down to the kitchen and Batu’s started it for the next one!” The release date for the final How To Train Your Dragon film was less than 10 months away when he said that.
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Next time: “It’s probably my most orchestral score.”
