Jon Kasdan writes as a fan with a key to the building: a franchise co-writer who can rebuild someone else's world to the inch and has yet to show us one of his own. The craft is tidy. The reason for the story is usually missing.
Fi1m perspective
Solo: A Star Wars Story (2018) is built as a heist: a crew, a boss, a job that goes wrong and a bigger job to put it right. Jon Kasdan wrote it with his father Lawrence, and the two of them keep it moving; its 135 minutes rarely drag, and there is a fine Donald Glover and a funny droid along the way. But every scene is there to explain something, how Han met Chewbacca, how he got his ship, how he turned into the man Harrison Ford was playing in 1977, and none of it needed explaining. The film is competent from first shot to last and it is not necessary.
He came to it as the most familiar kind of insider. A child actor in his father's films from 1983, he wrote an episode of Freaks and Geeks (2000) and several of Dawson's Creek (2000–2002) before his writing-directing debut, In the Land of Women (2007), and a second small feature about teenagers, The First Time (2012). We have not reviewed either, and the critics who did found the first sentimental and too close to the John Hughes template. He directed episodes of Californication and Roadies, then went back to the house of Lucas for Solo and, as creator and showrunner, the Willow series (2022–2023), a sequel to the 1988 film made with Warwick Davis in the title part.
The pattern is a writer most at ease inside a world someone else built. Kasdan has said that as the son of someone like Larry he is "the most reverent fan ever of their work. And the least", and Solo shows the reverent half winning. Reverence has its uses; it is why the heist mechanics sit so neatly under Ron Howard's direction. It is also why the film cannot leave Han alone, and why a man whose appeal in 1977 lay in nobody knowing where he had been arrives with his past fully itemised. We sat through Solo waiting to feel something about a boy's first sight of his ship, and felt only a mild, well-mannered interest, because we were being told things, politely, that we had been happier guessing.
The small films and the Freaks and Geeks episode suggest the interest in teenagers and families is real, not borrowed. His stated hope for Willow, to make children laugh and to frighten them, is a better brief than any Han Solo backstory. What we would like from him is the thing he has not yet given us: a story with his own name on the front and nobody's world behind it. Until then he is a reliable pair of hands in other people's houses, which is no small thing in a franchise, though it is not the same as having something to say.
Biography
Jon Kasdan is an American screenwriter, director and actor. Born in Los Angeles on 30 September 1979, he is the son of screenwriter and director Lawrence Kasdan and writer Meg Kasdan (née Goldman), and the brother of director and actor Jake Kasdan.
Kasdan's first professional writing credit was on the television series Freaks and Geeks (1999), for which he received story and teleplay credits on one episode. He later wrote episodes of Dawson's Creek and contributed to series including Californication and Roadies. His feature screenwriting credits include In the Land of Women (2007) and The First Time (2012), both of which he also directed.
Kasdan co-wrote the screenplay for Solo: A Star Wars Story (2018) with his father and wrote for the series Willow (2022). He made his acting debut as a child in his father's film The Big Chill (1983) and has appeared in several other productions.
