Solo: A Star Wars Story

Doomacheal
Jun 8, 2018
3 min read

Solo: A Star Wars Story directed by Ron Howard is an origin story about Han Solo. Instead of the iconic Harrison Ford, Han is now portrayed by relative unknown Alden Ehrenreich. The story told in Solo takes many of the elements found in the now decanonised legends expanded universe, Han is an orphan who grows up on Corellia, running scams to survive. He becomes sick of his life and looks to escape with his love interest Qi’ra played by Game of Thrones Emilia Clarke. He dreams of becoming a pilot and ends up joining the Empire only to be thrown out. A lot of these element were things that I kind of expected to happen. Actually much of what took place in Solo was very predictable. There were only a few plot points that really surprised me. I was a bit disappointed that the life debt Chewie is meant to have with Han is never mentioned at all, that was a missed opportunity. Alden did a pretty good job of Han but he just didn’t totally convince me. Sure there were times when he had some of the classic Han mannerisms but overall I just wasn’t able to look at him and go yep that’s Han Solo. And that’s no fault of Alden, it’s more the fault of Lucasfilm for thinking that making Solo was a good idea in the first place. It’s by no means a bad film, far from it but did we really need it so soon? In my honest opinion I don’t think those three original trilogy heroes Han, Luke and Leia should have been touched for many years and with the case of Solo such a close timespan before A New Hope. It’s just such a hard pill to swallow for me. Donald Glover’s portrayal of Lando Calrissian however was simply fantastic. He plays the character to an absolute tee with the voice and movements really capturing what made Lando such a fan favourite. This film like a lot of Star Wars films to date went through a lot of troubles in production with the firing of Phil Lord and Chris Miller but I don’t think that any of these issues impacted that badly on the end product. Solo was a fun that was as all Star Wars films are visually stunning and had a score to remember. The theme for Han that John Williams created is very good and melds well with other classic themes that have also been associated with Han. I loved the inclusion of the TIE Fighter Attack Theme yet again and the fact that they were able to remix it further into something fresh and exciting. It was also fascinating to hear the Impirial March used as diagetic music that characters in the film could hear and that they played it in a major key to make it sound upbeat and positive. That was very cool. Solo is on its way to lost 50 million dollars which makes me really sad because I never want to see a Star Wars film fail but it begs the question, was this the right time for this to be made? Solo is enjoyable enough but unfortunately it didn’t tell me all that much about Han Solo that I didn’t already know. There wasn’t any kind of revelation about him that made me go wow and the things that I did think they may have made a big deal about simply boiled down to nothing. Out of all of the new Disney produced Star Wars films Solo would have to be my least favourite and I really hope that Lucasfilm think more wisely about their future standalone films.