I had a bad feeling about this. I love Star Wars and Han Solo is my favorite character, but I had little interest in a prequel movie about him. Solo is also the latest example in a disturbing Hollywood trend of big movies that are essentially made twice. Original directors Phil Lord and Chris Miller (the duo that brought us the 21 Jump Street movies and The Lego Movie) were fired by Disney executives with only a couple of weeks of shooting left. Rumor has it that there is even a trailer for that version of the movie, but it’s heavily guarded by Mickey Mouse’s minions. Disney brought in Ron Howard to basically refilm the entire movie, which didn’t exactly fill me with confidence. However, I’m happy to report that this is not the trainwreck that I expected it to be. It still feels pretty damn unnecessary, but it’s fun enough to justify its existence.
We meet a young Han Solo and his girlfriend Qi’ra (played by Emilia Clarke) as forced laborers on a slave planet. He escapes but is separated from her, and then we follow Han’s quest to get her back and become an expert smuggler and pilot in the process. The rest of the plot doesn’t so much feel like a story as it does a checklist of fan service moments that we’ve heard about in previous movies. We see him meet Chewbacca, meet Lando, get on the Millennium Falcon for the first time, etc. Herein lies the film’s greatest problem: There is really no weight or consequence to any of this because we basically know what’s going to happen. We know what will happen to Han, Lando and Chewbacca and we know that the new characters won’t amount to much or else we would have heard of them before. One could argue that Rogue One (which I love) and the prequel trilogy (which I don’t love) have the same issue. However, those films were showing major events and characters that were only alluded to in the previous films. There was more intrigue in actually seeing those events played out. I can’t even watch A New Hope now without being irritated by the lack of appreciation shown toward the characters in Rogue One (Jyn Erso deserved some sort of ceremony or statue or fucking something). Solo just doesn’t have the same gravitas to it.
It may just be two hours of fan service, but that doesn’t mean it isn’t fun. Things like the Kessel Run (mentioned in A New Hope) and the train robbery (Han’s first job as a thief/smuggler) are good fun and more epic than I imagined as a kid. My favorite scenes are the card games between Han and Lando as they try to size each other up and outsmart each other. Could that work just because of nostalgia? Yeah, maybe, but the scenes are legitimately well done. The true strength of the film is the performances, though, which make the slight plot far more entertaining that it probably should be. Emilia Clarke is excellent (as usual) and brings an unexpected depth to what could easily have been a generic throwaway character. Casting Woody Harrelson as Han’s smuggling mentor was brilliant. This is the kind of shifty motherfucker that Harrelson could play in his sleep and it’s a bit of casting that’s almost too obvious, but it works. The highlight, though, is probably Donald Glover as Lando. I don’t know who the fuck Donald Glover is (is he Danny Glover’s son?), but its goddam creepy how much he acts like a young Billy Dee Williams. I hope we get a movie just about that guy now. And Alden Ehrenreich as Han is…. okay. He has moments of the suave cockiness of the character and it works well enough without being spectacular. I can’t really fault the kid, as Harrison Ford can turn a cocky asshole into an endearing character like no other.
SPOILERS IN THIS PARAGRAPH One thing is really bothering me, though. Can somebody please explain the last 20 minutes to me? When does this movie take place? It’s revealed near the end that the big bad guy is none other than Darth Maul. Now, I had assumed that this movie was taking place sometime between Episodes III and IV, but Maul died in Episode I. That doesn’t make any fucking sense for a number of reasons, not the least of which being Han Solo’s age. If this is taking place prior to Maul’s death in Episode 1, then Han would have to be around 50 when we first meet him in Episode IV. Additionally, the Empire is clearly formed in this movie (which means it has to take place after Episode III) and the Rebellion isn’t formed yet (which means that it has to take place before Rogue One). I can’t imagine that a movie of this magnitude would be released with such an enormous continuity error, so there has to be a way for this to make sense. Somebody please help because this is consuming me. END SPOILERS
I figured that Disney hired Ron Howard to remake this movie because he’s a safe choice. He’s a veteran filmmaker that will bring a steady hand and deliver a marketable and relatively crowd-pleasing product. And that’s exactly what he delivered, more or less. It’s also fairly self-contained, so non-Star Wars fanatics should be able to follow it without much problem. In the context of the recent films, I enjoyed it more than The Last Jedi but not nearly as much as Rogue One or The Force Awakens. Not great, but solid. Give it a shot.
Image By: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solo:_A_Star_Wars_Story#/media/File:Solo_A_Star_Wars_Story_poster.jpg
