Solo’s Fun Summer Heist

Rather than waiting for the usual Christmastime crowd, the latest chapter of the Star Wars franchise decided to jump into the summer rush with their second spinoff film. Despite the fact that the film explores the backstory of one of the franchise’s favorite characters, Han Solo, it has not performed up to usual standards at the box office. Personally, I think that most people are having a hard time separating their actual feelings about Solo: A Star Wars Story from their feeling for the Star Wars franchise as a whole. There is so much Star Wars material coming out now that the fatigue is affecting movies that are definitely not bad – I mean, Solo is easily better than The Phantom Menace and Attack of the Clones – and people are voicing their anger for the entire franchise and aiming it directly at this one movie. There’s also something to be said for its ability to hone in on some of the little details, which are part of the magic of the original Star Wars mythology. That’s not to say that Solo is perfect by any means, because it isn’t, but it is fun – as a summer movie should be.

Han Solo (Alden Ehrenreich), an orphan on the ship-building planet of Corellia, dreams of taking to the skies as a pilot and escaping the slums in which he lives with the girl he loves, Qi-Ra (Emilia Clarke). When he finally gets his chance, Solo is forced to leave Qi-Ra behind and join the Galactic Empire, where he is immediately punished for having a mind of his own. After deciding to try an escape from the Empire, Solo runs into the smuggler Beckett (Woody Harrelson) and his crew attempting a heist of some hyper fuel that has become the ultimate prize across the galaxy. Determined to make enough money to buy his own ship and go back for Qi-Ra, Solo teams up with Beckett’s crew and brings along the previously enslaved Wookie Chewbacca (Joonas Suotamo). As Solo gets drawn into the criminal underworld of the galaxy, he must decide what kind of man he is going to be and what he is willing to sacrifice to achieve his ultimate goals.

Since this is a side story in the Star Wars universe, we get both the pleasure and slight frustration of getting a bunch of new characters who are cool, but unlikely to last more than the one film. And, because it’s only the one film, sometimes it feels like you’re not getting nearly enough of them. Phoebe Waller-Bridge in particular follows in the path that Alan Tudyk laid out before her – an awesome droid who does not get the screen time she deserves. It definitely proves that the droids of Star Wars can be way more fun than  some of the humans (C-3PO excluded). I’d like to give a lot of credit to Ehrenreich, who was given a pretty thankless job when you think about it. After all, no one was EVER going to be better at being Han Solo than Harrison Ford – NO ONE – but someone needed to be cast, and Ehrenreich had a pretty small presence before landing the role of the greatest scoundrel in the universe. For me, at the very least, he exceeded all expectations for a second Han Solo. It was established that Ehrenreich was not going to copy Ford’s performance, but bring his own spin to a character we all know an love. While a little more earnest and puppy-dogish than I really believe Han Solo was ever capable of being, he definitely had the facial expressions down, and I can believe that this is where our favorite scruffy-looking nerfherder got his start. Donald Glover also works well as the younger Lando Calrissian, and his interactions with Ehrenreich are as fun as we imagined the first meeting of Solo and Calrissian to be. There are characters, however, who don’t quite live up to their potential because this is a story about Han Solo, and they are written to help build him up. Harrelson’s mentor to Solo and Clarke’s love interest are both a bit bare, as well as exactly what you would expect from those actors. You can tell Paul Bettany had fun getting away from his continual goodness as Marvel’s Vision in the villain Dryden Vos, but even his enthusiasm can’t quite save a cliché mob boss character. After that, it just gets to a point where we don’t see the character nearly enough to get as attached as we could have been.

Now, I think Solo is getting a raw deal because of the time where Disney chose to release it. Usually there is one Star Wars film coming out a year, and while that is definitely more than we were getting when the universe was still the sole property of George Lucas, it’s also not so often that we get tired of the universe (as some people are starting to become with Disney’s other property, Marvel, which put out three films in the first half of this year). Solo, however, comes just five months after the release of The Last Jedi, which was hitting audiences awkwardly anyway. While I get what they were trying to do – capitalize on the anniversary of A New Hope – it’s hard to fully enjoy the film that is a little unnecessary, a backstory about a character that most people didn’t really need, and ultimately too soon after a movie that you either loved or hated. That doesn’t mean that Solo isn’t something you can enjoy – if anything, it’s a nice palette cleanser to the rest of the franchise, which is starting to get more convoluted as it goes along. Solo just wants to be a heist film in space, one that features some characters we already know and like, and for the most part, it succeeds at this. You can tell when some of the rewrites made their way into the film though; the final act decides to take a break from the heist film and become the usual Star Wars film, explaining how the heists we have been watching feature into the galaxy-wide war that we have seen defeated several times throughout our childhoods (assuming you watched the series as much as I did, of course). There’s also the fact that small details are attempting to bring the television series’, Clone Wars and Rebels into the film series canon; while I do not object to this, because those shows are awesome, I would advice caution. Not everyone watches them, so Easter Eggs might hinder the movie more than help the show, and with the spinoff films’ future no longer assured, it might be a risk to avoid.

3 / 5

What I wouldn’t give to listen to L3 talk with C-3PO. She would rip him to shreds and it would be amazing.