Review of Solo: A Star Wars Story (2018) by Carlos S — 14 Jun 2018

The second STAR WARS film in the anthology series and the first STAR WARS film in just over five months (Disney seriously needs to settle down with this franchise, we've already had four of these movies in less than three years. Remember when we'd only get one every three years? I digress.) follows the early adventures of our favorite smuggler, Han Solo, and how he became the person we came to love in the original trilogy. We get to see how he meets Chewbacca and the two pair up in a heist that involves them meeting Lando Calrissian and obtaining the Millennium Falcon.

Though I was looking forward to this movie being a STAR WARS fan, I wasn't excited as much as I was for the other recent films in the franchise. After the previous anthology film, ROGUE ONE, I had this feeling that these "stories" don't have very reasonable explanations for existing. ROGUE ONE existed only to fix a plot hole made in A NEW HOPE. Now we have SOLO only because Han Solo is a character so many people love, and stand-alone movies based on characters we already know seems to be a popular idea. But I always thought people love Han Solo because he's such a mysterious character, I really liked the idea of having some nobody on a desert planet dealing with criminals becoming a hero and bonds with some good people. Showing a backstory to this character does seem to take away his mysterious nature. But with Phil Lord and Christopher Miller, the guys behind THE LEGO MOVIE, directing this movie, I feel that they'll give us something really fun, witty, and smart... until they had to leave and have Ron Howard take over. Well, there went a lot of my excitement that I originally had for this movie. Don't get me wrong, I have nothing against Ron Howard, he's directed one of my favorite movies of all time, APOLLO 13. He's a very competent filmmaker, but he seems to be really hit or miss as a director. I guess since I really enjoyed all of Lord and Miller's films because of their wit, they seem to be the perfect fit to direct a movie about a character who's known for his witty personality, and I think they're clever enough to bring something new to this character. But whatever, it's still STAR WARS and I'm sure there's going to be an exciting adventure to look forward to.

I still went into this film with low expectations, at least for STAR WARS, which I'm glad because I did end up enjoying it, at least more than I thought I would. There were some clever ideas involving Han as a character, I liked that he was once a part of the Imperial Navy and went into war, I like how much they explore the galaxy with him, and I like how we never see anything involving the Force as we've noticed, of course, in every STAR WARS film. It adds meaning to what Han says about seeing a lot of strange stuff but has never seen anything for him to believe "this one all powerful Force" controlling everything, as he said in A NEW HOPE. His relationship with Chewie I believe is the strongest aspect of the film, even with a different actor portraying Han they still have excellent chemistry. Although the scene when Han first meets Chewie feels a little silly to me, I needed to realize that STAR WARS had always had some silly moments and the scene kind of grew on me. I also thought his relationship with Lando was pretty well executed, I like how we see him as more of a cheater and Han learns from his tricks. Donald Glover probably goes down as the best actor in this movie, he imitates the attitude as well as the voice of Lando perfectly. Speaking of which, as for Alden Ehrenreich, I think he does just fine. Even though he doesn't have the same look nor voice as Harrison Ford's Han Solo, he does capture that same attitude which is most important, but probably not enough for me to believe that he's the only actor who could pull it off. I felt like a lot of other actors could've played Han while I felt Donald Glover was the best choice to play Lando.

It's good that they got the most important characters right because I honestly wasn't remotely interested in any of the other characters. Well, except for maybe Qi'ra only for that scene at the end. The problem with these characters is pretty obvious since we already know they're not going to be in the following movies, we know that they're either going to die or break up and never see each other again. Because of that, I hardly felt any chemistry between Han and Qi'ra. They try to make it interesting, but it comes off as a bland romance subplot that the movie didn't really need. Neither any of the characters that Han comes across during the heist were interesting either. Again, I know they're trying to make them interesting, but half of them are killed off before the halfway point of the film and the other half have them reveal their true motivations towards the end of the film, a cliché we see in so many other action movies. That whole climax was a big confusing mess.

With this film being a prequel to the original trilogy, it goes through a lot of problems that are typical for prequels, they always need to give the audience what they already expect. It's very similar to a problem we see in REVENGE OF THE SITH: it feels like a bunch of scenes crammed into one movie that needs to properly play into A NEW HOPE - we need to see Han meet Chewie, we need to see Han meet Lando, we need to see Han win the Millennium Falcon, we need to see the Falcon make the Kessel run in 12 parsecs (that scene is actually pretty awesome), we need to explain how Han ends up on Tatooine, we need to see Chewie rip someone's arms out of their sockets, we need someone explain to Chewie how to play that hologram chess game; this whole movie feels like a checklist.

With Lawrence Kasdan involved in the writing of this movie along with his son Jonathan, if there's anybody who knows the character of Han Solo, it's the person who wrote the script of THE EMPIRE STRIKES BACK. But there wasn't anything special about the writing, it doesn't really deepen the character of Han in any way. Sure, there are some witty lines here and there, but there wasn't much to him that we haven't already seen from him before, he does pretty much exactly what we expect to see him do. It's both a good thing and a bad thing; good because they stay true to his character, bad because they play it too safe and leaves us wondering what the point of this whole movie was. If you're not going to give the character any more depth, why bother even giving him a stand-alone movie other than to just see him in more action scenes? And that's another thing, the action felt kind of underwhelming to me. After watching the movie, I hardly remember what even happened during the action, it wasn't very well shot and didn't look very clean. The one exception being the Kessel scene, that whole middle part of the movie was easily the most exciting part of the movie, it should've been the climax.

While this film is deeply flawed, it was still better than I thought it was going to be. With all the production problems it had, I thought it was going to end up as one big mess. While there are a lot of things happening, they kept it focused on where it should be, on Han and who he comes across. Alden Ehrenreich was good as Han, Donald Glover is awesome as Lando, and Han and Chewie's friendship is great. But the new characters definitely could've used more development, the writing was nothing special, the story added hardly anything new, and the action was just alright. So far, these anthology stories aren't doing much for me, and with Disney planning on making more of these stand-alone movies like a Boba Fett movie and an Obi-Wan Kenobi movie, I hope they can add something new and interesting to these characters.

Grade: B-.