Solo: A Star Wars Story just doesn’t fly
The publicly maligned Han Solo origin story finally arrives to answer a series of questions no one needed the answers to.
Franchise fatigue is real and it’s acutely felt in a galaxy far, far away.
When Kathleen Kennedy and the gang at LucasFilm announced plans of releasing a Star Wars film every year, didn’t we all think somewhere in our minds that the cookies, once fresh and crisp from the factory, would start to seem burnt as time went by? Or maybe that was just me.
The 2016 release of Rogue One was the first sign of trouble after on-set issues left audiences with a movie that suffered from too many cooks in the kitchen. But with the announcement of Solo: A Star Wars Story, audiences had hope. How could a movie showing the origins of our favorite outlaw with a heart of gold possibly stumble?
Solo is too big to fail and yet said failure is because of what it is expected to achieve. The desperate need to hit specific, well-documented facets of Han Solo’s personality has glimmers of fun at times but feels terrified of making its hero too outrageously extraordinary.
The hardcore fanboys will certainly love Solo, purely out of a nostalgic love for all things Star Wars. The film certainly understands the basic facets of what makes Han Solo a compelling figure. He’s a dashing, devil-may-care rebel who’s just as comfortable stealing a car — recreating a Baby Driver-esque car chase with a hovercraft — as he is trying to help a contingent of revolutionaries make a last stand. He doesn’t want to be the “good guy,” no matter how often other characters seek to remind him that he is, but deep down he knows it.
And much of that is evident in the over two-hours Solo: A Star Wars Story plays. The audience meets our boyish Han Solo (played by Alden Ehrenreich) as he’s living on the Blade Runner-esque planet of Correllia with his lady-love Qi’ra (Emilia Clarke). The two crazy kids have a dream: to get a ship and sail the galaxy together. But because this is a movie — with a plotline that you can date back to classic cinema — the two’s amour fou is ruined and they’re separated for several years. Han enters the army, desperate to become the “best damn pilot in the galaxy” to go back home and save his girlfriend. One guess how that works out.
The much-publicized behind-the-scenes issues involving fired directors Phil Lord and Chris Miller, and the eventual hiring of Ron Howard to complete the film, loom over every frame of Solo. It’s impossible not to see the seams fixing everything. There’s a serious “move and distract” mentality to everything, with scenes ending, characters dying, and the narrative moving to something completely different. The opening title crawl introduces Correllia and its overlord, Lady Proxima (voiced by Linda Hunt), but the audience spends less than 10 minutes on the planet before Lady Proxima disappears, never to be seen again. It’s a repetitious series of events that happen in every scene. A character is introduced only to die or leave. Characters are chess pieces, merely created as a means of moving Han further down the road to becoming Harrison Ford.
It’s a problem associated with needing to create the appropriate legend we’ve all seen in the original trilogy. Questions are posited here that no one particularly demanded answers to. Why does the audience need to know WHY his last name is Solo? His parents couldn’t have just been Mr. and Mrs. Solo? No, and thus we’re gifted one of the worst name reveals this side of The Dark Knight Rises.
The rest of the things we know about Han are also explored in excruciating detail, from his first meeting with Chewie, to his acquisition of the Millennium Falcon, even how his name is pronounced! Alden Ehrenreich has charisma if you’ve watched his other features, but here he’s on the knife’s edge of charismatic and anesthetized. He’s not trying to channel Harrison Ford, but it’s hard to feel he’s trying to do much of anything. He smiles a lot, tries to jump into the fray with a laser blast here and there, but there isn’t much for him to do. The movie may have his name, but like the other characters, he’s simply moved from location to location.
Scenes move and planets change, but there’s an air of stagnation to Solo, possibly a result of the editing needed to paper over the issues with Lord and Miller. Han’s attempts to be a pilot see him inducted into the army where he meets Woody Harrelson’s Beckett and his gang of marauders. After a large action scene that quickly excises one of the main faces used in the marketing, Han becomes enmeshed with Qi’Ra, now the property/prostitute/somehow committed moll of the true villain, Paul Bettany’s Dryden Vos. None of these moments feel organically created to tell a story but storyboarded highlights that needed to have things added in between them.
By the time Han finally finds a grander purpose, the end credits are waiting right around the corner. And because we know none of these characters factor into the other films made before and after it, their lives and deaths have no meaning. They’re a series of one-note character drafts.
Other than Ehrenreich, who does try to make something out of playing Han, the rest of the characters are colorful cannon fodder. Harrelson and Thandie Newton are the wizened rebels Han looks up to, and Beckett’s nihilism about untrustworthy people could have worked if it didn’t feel derivative of other characters. Phoebe Waller-Bridge’s L3-37 makes the most of her voice work, but it’s hard not to feel the character is the butt of a joke. Emilia Clarke plays the pretty vixen just fine, but it’s a far cry from her fierce warrior woman on Game of Thrones. And Paul Bettany makes the most out of 15 minutes of actual villainy. The true stealer who has received most of the fan goodwill is Donald Glover as cardsharp Lando Calrissian. He’s not in the film nearly enough — a running problem in Solo — but he’s more charismatic and fun to watch than the lead. Give Lando his own film, stat!
Solo: A Star Wars Story is more upbeat and watchable than Rogue One, but it’s another in a continued string of movies that try to appease a specific fandom as opposed to telling a good story. Solo is another movie that feels as if it was created in a screening room. The characters could be fun if given a chance; the story feels fractured and the acting feels unbalanced. This is for die-hards only.
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