Solo: A Star Wars Story (Review)
Why there is the constant fixation with Star Wars prequels, origin stories, and past events, is beyond me. Even Lucas himself didn’t know how to take the franchise forward, opting to rather play it safe by giving us episodes one, two, and three. Even Disney, it seems, is stuck in a rut. Out of the four post-Lucas films, only The Last Jedi has really pushed the narrative forward. The rest have all been recounting the past, or just repeating the past.
This isn’t necessarily a bad thing: both Rogue One and The Force Awakens were good films in their own right. But in a universe that has so much potential, sticking solely to a few single, already known, events and established characters feels a bit like it’s being underutilised. Case in point: Solo: A Star Wars Story, which, as the name suggests, is Han Solo’s origin story. And to be honest, I can’t really say I asked for this. What you got in A New Hope, and the rest of the original films, was really the full package. He was a scoundrel and that was more or less all you really needed to know. What made his character interesting was not so much where he came from, but who he was to become.
But nonetheless, we got a Solo movie, which, reportedly, is just the first in a planned series of origin stories. Apparently Kenobi is already on the drawing board.
The story is pretty simple. A young Han Solo (Alden Ehrenreich) lives the criminal life along with his lover Qi’ra (Emilia Clarke). A job goes bad and the two are forced to flee from their gang. But before they can board a ship, Qi’ra is captured. Han vows to return to the planet and rescue her. Han enlists with the Imperial Navy, figuring this to be his best shot at becoming a pilot. Three years later and he’s been demoted to ground infantry, fighting in wars he has no interest in. But, as luck would have it, he meets a band of thieves in the trenches, led by Tobias Beckett (Woody Harrelson), who might be his ticket to reuniting with Qi’ra, provided he’s willing to help them on a job.
From there on the film is mostly pretty much hits every expected note: the past catching up with him, some cloak and dagger intrigue and the expected “trust no one, kid” foreshadowing. Yes, it also covers the most expected plot details like how he met Chewbacca and Lando Calrissian (Donald Glover), how he got the Millennium Falcon, and, obviously, doing the Kessel Run in twelve parsecs. It’s a bog standard checklist of all the most well-known Solo-isms. I was surprised they didn’t shoehorn a whole scene where Solo attends a seminar on the value of always shooting first.
So is it worth it? Despite how unnecessary this film is, it turned out well enough. It’s above serviceable but not exactly on par with the rest of the franchise. But again, it’s the best a film of this subject matter can probably be. The cast has some good chemistry and despite the rumours of acting coaches and on-set tensions, Ehrenreich does a pretty good job of filling in for Ford. Harrelson does Harrelson, which is always fun to watch, Clarke is proving she’ll probably be one of the few Game of Thrones actors to escape the whirlpool once HBO pulls the plug, and Glover was on point as Calrissian. Paul Bettany is also on board to shake of some of that Vision nice guy-ness as Dryden Vos, the film’s main antagonist. The strong cast manages to carry the film through the pretty tepid first two acts. Luckily the film has a pretty strong finale, which comes just in time to upend the most basic expectations. There is also a pretty unexpected cameo which should set fan forums ablaze with chatter.
The film is still drenched in that Empire Strikes Back grey colour palette, like most of new films, and while I get it, I don’t necessarily have to like it. I actually miss some of the vibrancy of the prequels; if anything it at least gave the films a unique visual aesthetic. Having everything look so dour makes a “galaxy far far away” seem like it all just takes place on two planets: generic ice land and generic sand land. I get that it’s all about scoundrels, backstabbing, criminal underworlds, and shady dealings, but again, I didn’t ask for this, so allow me the chance to vent.
All in all Solo exists because world building is in right now, and Disney is the only studio that seems to get it right. But whether or not Star Wars lends itself to the MCU treatment, which was built from the ground up as a large interconnected franchise, remains to be seen.