Sunday, June 3, 2018

Solo: A Star Wars Story review

There are usually two types of “Star Wars” fans; the people who watch it for Darth Vader and the people who watch it for Han Solo. Nobody watches for Luke Skywalker (Sorry-not-sorry). Because we already have two trilogies essentially devoted to the rise and fall of Darth Vader, it was almost a foregone conclusion that someone would build a story around the cocky flyboy turned space outlaw originally played by Harrison Ford. Ron Howard, who previously worked with George Lucas on the 1988 fantasy film “Willow,” directs “Solo: A Star Wars Story, “a tangential prequel that helps fill the gaps between the larger sagas, primarily focusing on Han as a youthful runaway.

Father and son writers Lawrence and Jonathan Kasdan begin this movie showing Han (Alden Ehrenreich) escaping an enemy occupied planet without his lover Qi’ra (Emilia Clarke). Proclaiming that he will one day return to save her, Han assumed the moniker Solo and joined the Imperial military to steal something large enough to buy a ship and return to his girl. There he meets up with a group of competing smugglers led by the cynical Beckett (Woody Harrelson). After joining, he makes a deal to help the group steal a volatile weapons payload for a dangerous arms dealer named Dryden Vos (Paul Bettany).

 As the film progresses, we get to see the young Solo’s first encounters with the Millennial Falcon, the vein gambler Lando Calrissian (Donald Glover), and his destined lifelong partner Chewbacca. We should expect the character’s greatest hits and catchphrases within this style of conceptual universe building, but it also smells a lot like fan-service, and as each of these moments pass, you can almost hear Kasdan’s red pencil drag a line through the list of directives ordered down from Mount Disney. That’s why I felt slightly guilty by the big grin that came over my face as the movie plopped these elements into the story like farmer filling the trough for his hungry pigs. I’ll be the first to admit that even as I acknowledge the pandering here, I enjoyed almost all of it.

Howard handles the sci-fi/western themes and the action sequences well. Hints of Marvel’s “Guardians of the Galaxy” and the cult television series “Firefly” feel present here, even as those properties wouldn’t exist if it weren’t for the influence of “Star Wars” in the first place—a classic example of the pop culture snake eating its tropes.  Handheld shaky cam obscures some of the ground combat, and the runtime feels about 15 minutes too long, but any motion picture that gives us a train heist, a prison escape and an aerial dogfight all within the same theater experience at least has a good understanding of what populist filmmaking should be.

Is “Solo: A Star Wars Story” essentially Star Wars fan fiction? Yes, but that doesn’t automatically make it bad, even if it doesn’t move the needle very far within the overall mythology. Ehrenreich carries everything adequately, even if his boyish take on the character isn't the spot-on Harrison Ford impression people are expecting. The supporting cast is all given enough to do to keep us invested in their place within the story as well.  There’s almost nothing that’s essential or impactful about this franchise mortar of a movie, but it’s highly entertaining and full of characters (new and old) that we want to spend our time with, which is more than I can for almost half of the other entries in the Star Wars cinematic universe.

Grade: B

Originally published in Idaho State Journal/June-2018

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