Solo: A Star Wars Story - Dir. Ron Howard


In the feverishly franchise focussed Hollywood of 2018, the days of a 3-year wait between Star Wars movies are long gone and this fourth film in as many years arrives a fraction over 5 months after the last adventure through hyperspace. Solo: A Star Wars Story brings the earlier years of Han Solo to the big screen with Alden Ehrenreich stepping into the role that Harrison Ford has inhabited for 40 years, which doesn’t sound daunting at all <gulp>.

After being thrown out of the Empire’s pilot academy, a young Han Solo finds himself on the front line of the Empire’s march to bring new planets under its control. Sensing the limited prospects in a future as an infantry soldier, Solo talks his way onto a crew of thieves, led by Tobias Beckett (Woody Harrelson), who have their own orders to follow.

Image via Lucasfilm
Those orders take Han on a fun adventure with a more carefree tone than the Skywalker saga’s more operatic one. It’s funny without being flippant and zips through its 135-minute running time much better than many of its fellow blockbusters, with set pieces that don’t overstay their welcome. Top marks too for John Powell’s score: his sprightly and energized compositions sit well alongside remixes of old Star Wars themes.

Ehrenreich gives a performance that avoids outright imitation and is his own take on the character, but is still compatible with Ford’s; his Solo is more chipper but the film’s overarching story sets him on the path to becoming the older cynical scoundrel. The rest of the cast acquit themselves well too particularly Paul Bettany, as the villainous yachtsman Dryden Vos, who may just about be having the most fun out of everyone.


Image via Lucasfilm

Despite all that’s fun about Solo, the film remains inescapably inessential; there’s little to return to once the film has finished as it’s focussed on little more than hitting story references that were just the detail to add specificity to George Lucas’ dialogue. We get to see Han perform the Kessel run in under 12 parsecs because it was something that he said he had done, but I don’t quite understand how news of Han’s feat spread throughout the galaxy on just the word of two rogues and a Wookie – I thought there’d be an official adjudicator or at least someone with a clipboard.


Image via Lucasfilm

That leaves all of the material needed to connect those reference dots, which has the most scope for fresh ideas, sorely lacking. The old characters aren’t given anything surprising to do and the new ones (bar Emilia Clarke’s Qi’ra) are built up from their function to the film’s plot. The heists are fun but aren’t tricky enough to flummox the Logan brothers, let alone Danny Ocean and his crew. There are hints at tangents that could’ve been explored further, such as Enfys Nest and the Marauders, but they are brushed aside in favour of some questionable attempts to further tie this film to some of its predecessors and to set up potential sequels.

Solo ends up as a film that doesn’t reach its full potential, but the fact that it tells a coherent story with a consistent tone may well be relief enough for those at Lucasfilm, given the film’s well-publicised production issues. Ron Howard took over directing duties from Phil Lord and Chris Miller several months into filming, when the tensions arising from contradictory ideas and working styles finally bubbled over (you only have to look at the behind the scenes featurettes from 22 Jump Street to see why this possibly didn’t work out). It’s perhaps unfair to expect Howard to deliver a more distinctive experience under the circumstances; to right a ship as vast and seemingly wayward as quickly and as well as Howard has done is also not something that should be dismissed so easily.


Image via Lucasfilm

Early box office reports suggest that Solo won’t achieve the same colossal grosses of its recent predecessors. Even with those under par opening weekend figures, there’s no need to feel sorry for Disney; the four films that they’ve released so far in 2018 have taken a total of over $3.5 billion at the global box office (for an average of nearly $882 million per film), it’s their own fault if they can’t run a viable movie business with those numbers. In recent years, other studios have found out that simply resurrecting any existing intellectual property isn’t enough to get people into the cinema anymore (see Pan, The Man from UNCLE, Power Rangers), especially when competing with Disney’s mega franchises. So it was perhaps inevitable (and undoubtedly healthy for cinema) that one of Disney’s releases should befall a similar fate.

I have a memory of watching a programme on the release of The Phantom Menace back in 1999. It ended with Ewan McGregor talking about the plans to release Episode II in 2002 and Episode III in 2005 which sounded unfathomably far into the future to my 9-year old Star Wars mad self. My fervent enthusiasm for all things in a far away galaxy may have subsided in the almost two decades since Star Wars made its first return to the big screen, but a new Star Wars film on the horizon remains something to look forward to, for now. Solo: A Star Wars Story is a stumble rather than a disaster, but hopefully Lucasfilm will reign in their pervasive plans for the series’ future, so that I don’t come to feel wary of a new Star Wars film.






SOLO: A STAR WARS STORY
was released in UK cinemas on 25th May 2018



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