Movie Review: 'Solo: A Star Wars Story'

Solo: A Star Wars Story (2018)

Written by: Lawrence Kasdan and Jon Kasdan. Based on characters created by George Lucas

Directed by: Ron Howard

Starring: Alden Ehrenreich, Woody Harrelson, Emilia Clarke, Donald Glover, Thandie Newton, Paul Bettany, Phoebe Waller-Bridge, Joonas Suotamo

On May 25, 2018 – 41 years after the premiere of George Lucas’s original Star Wars film, Walt Disney Studios Motion Pictures released Solo: A Star Wars Story, the second standalone movie in Lucasfilm Ltd.’s series of Anthology films set “a long time ago in a galaxy far, far away.”

Written by Lawrence Kasdan (The Empire Strikes Back, Raiders of the Lost Ark) and his son Jon, Solo: A Star Wars Story was originally directed by Phil Lord and Christopher Miller, the filmmaking duo behind The Lego Movie and 21 Jump Street, but they were replaced four-and-a-half months into principal photography and replaced by Academy Award-winning director Ron Howard. It is based on characters and situations created by George Lucas, and it is set between 13 and 10 years before the events of 1977’s Star Wars (aka Star Wars – Episode IV: A New Hope).

It is a lawless time.

CRIME SYNDICATES compete for resources – food, medicine, and HYPERFUEL.

On the shipbuilding planet of CORELLIA, the foul LADY PROXIMA forces runaways into a life of crime in exchange for shelter and protection.

On these mean streets, a young man fights for survival, but yearns to fly among the stars...

Solo: A Star Wars Story begins on the Imperial shipbuilding world of Corellia. Here, the Empire has a shipyard where Kuat Drive Yards builds fast, powerful starships like Star Destroyers and other cruisers for the Imperial Navy. But as in many planets under Emperor Palpatine’s New Order, life for many of Corellia’s population is harsh and unforgiving, especially for streetwise orphans, outcasts, and runaways – scrumrats – who live in the shadowy slums and alleyways of Coronet City.

One of these scrumrats is a teenaged boy named Han (Alden Ehrenreich). Orphaned before his adolescence, Han survives by lending his talents as a scrounger, thief, Sabacc player, and an uncanny ability to drive or fly anything with a lot of speed to a local gangster named Lady Proxima (voiced by Linda Hunt). His only friends are fellow scrumrats in Lady Proxima’s White Worms gang – and the woman he loves, Qi’ra (Emilia Clarke).

But after Han botches an assignment from Lady Proxima to acquire one of the galaxy’s most valuable commodities – coaxium, aka “hyperfuel – the hotshot teen and Qi’ra attempt to escape from Corellia and make a new life for themselves offworld. But when they reach the spaceport in Coronet City, they are separated at the emigration line. Han manages to persuade an Imperial officer to let him through; Qi’ra is stuck on the other side of the gate and remains on Corellia, while Han – who is given the last name “Solo” by an Imperial officer who signs him up to the Imperial Navy Academy on Carida – enlists as a flight cadet for the Empire.

But Han is too independent to fit in a strict, by-the-book environment such as the Imperial Naval Academy, and although he is a naturally-gifted pilot, he is impatient with rules and insubordinate to his superiors. Sure enough, his refusal to obey orders during a training flight earn Han an appearance before a military tribunal and a transfer to the Imperial ground forces.

Three years later, Han Solo finds himself on the boggy planet Mimban, where the Empire has been waging a war against the Mimbanese Liberation Army to “bring peace, prosperity, and security” to a population who doesn’t want Palpatine’s New Order imposed on it. Stripped of his status as an officer-in-training, Solo is now a “mudtrooper” who sees action on the front lines – and watches many of his fellow soldiers dying for an unjust cause.

It’s here that Han first crosses paths with “Captain” Tobias Beckett (Woody Harrelson),  a smuggler, thief, and con man who, along with two members of his gang, is in disguise as a member of the Imperial Army as part of a planned heist.

It is Beckett – prompted by one of his team member’s apprehensions about young Solo – sets in motion the events that lead to Han’s fateful meeting with a 200-year-old Wookiee named Chewbacca (Joonas Soutamo), a daring attempt to steal  a shipment of coaxium  from a train on Vandor, and the first meeting of Han and Lando Calrissian (Donald Glover) – the dashing captain-owner of a YT-1300 ship named the Millennium Falcon.

My Take

Solo: A Star Wars Story is Lucasfilm’s 11^th feature film in the Star Wars franchise, the last project in which George Lucas was directly involved – the now-retired founder and CEO pitched a Han Solo “origins” movie to Lawrence Kasdan in 2012 – and the first Star Wars film to bomb at the box office. Its troubled production resulted in expensive reshoots that ballooned the ,movie’s budget to $237 million; it had a weaker-than-expected opening ($103 million in its first week of release) and underperformed in the world-wide box office, earning only $320 million overall.

But even though Solo: A Star Wars Story was not a financial success, it is not a bad movie. Not at all. In fact, the collaboration between Lucas (who got the ball rolling even as he was about to sell his company and its intellectual property to Disney), the Miller-Lord team, the Kasdans, and Howard resulted in a fun, exciting, and highly enjoyable Star Wars adventure.

Like many of my 1977 Generation contemporaries, I’m a big Han Solo fan. Yes, Luke Skywalker is my favorite character in the series, but Han (as played by the great Harrison Ford) was a close second. I think that Solo is the most relatable of the Rebel-affiliated characters, and also the most fun to watch and listen to. He was as fast with a quip as he was with his modified DL-44 blaster., plus he was the archetypical “scoundrel with a heart of gold,” a character based on many rough-and-tumble anti-heroes who hide their nobler instincts behind a façade of cynicism and self-interest.

Han’s pre-Rebellion backstory has been told in various non-canon novels, including two trilogies by two writers who are no longer with us: Brian Daley and A.C. Crispin. Solo: A Star Wars Story doesn’t use any details from the Crispin Han Solo novels; however, the presence of a crystal skull in crime lord Dryden Vos’s  (Paul Bettany) office is a nod to Daley’s 1980 novel Han Solo and the Lost Legacy.

Solo: A Star Wars Story is, in essence, a sprawling space-going Western, with elements of classic 1960s heist movies, war films, and noir crime dramas from the late Forties and early Fifties tossed in for good measure. It borrows a few details from lore that was created in the Star Wars Expanded Universe/Legends, such as Han’s connections to the Empire as a young Imperial officer, and it shows us how and why, over time, the young hotshot hid his idealism behind an “I stick my neck out for nobody” mask.

In many ways, Solo is a very 1940s-style movie retooled for the Star Wars franchise. Han is a space-faring mix of Humphrey Bogart’s  Rick Blaine (Casablanca)  and Errol Flynn’s Robin Hood. Here, Alden Ehrenreich’s Han sets off from Corellia with dreams of becoming a pilot and returning to Corellia to rescue his girl, only to get “a little sidetracked” into a new world full of intrigue, illicit activities, and a web of deception and betrayal.

And by the time Solo fades to black with hints of a few sequels a la Indiana Jones adventures, we understand why Han only trusts Chewbacca (Joonas Suatomo, who inherited the role from Peter Mayhew, who worked on the film as an adviser) and his blaster, as well as his on-again, off-again friendship with Lando Calrissian.

Director Ron Howard shares credit with Lawrence and Jon Kasdan for the qualitative success of Solo: A Star Wars Story. Howard is an experienced filmmaker who has told stories across a wide spectrum of genres that range from comedies such as Splash to Academy Award-winning bio-pics (A Beautiful Mind) and based-on-true-story films (Apollo 13). Howard also has a long affiliation with Lucasfilm; he co-starred in American Graffiti and More American Graffiti in the 1970s; he also directed the fantasy adventure Willow and was one of George Lucas’s picks to direct Star Wars  - Episode I: The Phantom Menace. (Sadly, Howard demurred, thinking that the job was too daunting for him, a sentiment shared by so many other directors that Lucas ended up directing the entire Prequel Trilogy himself.)

With such an impressive track record, it’s not surprising that Lucasfilm called Howard in to take over  - late in the shoot – from Phil Lord and Christopher Miller, the film’s original directing team.

By all accounts, Lucasfilm fired Lord and Miller because the duo wanted to make Solo a comedy with a lot of improvisation from the cast, while the studio wanted a more conventional Star Wars movie laced with some comedic undertones. Lucasfilm also asked Lord and Miller to provide the editors with multiple versions of scenes – a technique that has been used in all of the Star Wars films – but the duo refused. Larry Kasdan also objected to the change in tone and the directors’ intentions to veer away from the script. Consequently, the studio fired Lord and Miller; the duo ended up settling for credits as executive producers in exchange for not challenging Howard’s director credit.

Lord and Miller deserve kudos for choosing most of Solo: A Star Wars Story’s cast; most of the principals were personally vetted by the movie’s first directorial team during the casting and pre-production stage of development. The sole exception is actor Paul Bettany; he was hired to replace Michael Kenneth Williams, who played crime boss Dryden Vos throughout much of Solo’s principal photography. Williams was not fired; he had shot his scenes – which involved a lot of makeup as Vos was more alien than human – before the Lord & Miller/Lucasfilm fracas and couldn’t come back during the reshoots with Howard because he was working on another film.

As a less alien-looking humanoid, Bettany’s Dryden Vos is more than a match for Ehrenreich’s Han and Woody Harrelson’s Tobias Beckett. Where Beckett is a reluctant mentor and rough-around-the-edges rogue uncle figure for Han, Vos is a deceptively charming but lethally mercurial Godfather figure. His elegant clothes, refined tastes in food and women, and luxurious traveling headquarters are meant to impress and disarm clients and competitors alike. But there is a mix of cold calculation and barely repressed anger in Vos; clearly, this is  one criminal underboss you don’t want to cross.

The main cast – all holdovers from the Lord & Miller period – is one of the best ensembles put together for a Star Wars film outside the main Saga Episodes. Alden Ehrenreich doesn’t look a lot like Harrison Ford, but he does capture Han’s swagger and bluffing skills and makes the role his own. I was impressed by how Ehrenreich performed in Solo: A Star Wars Story, and if Lucasfilm does make two more stand-alone films with Han and Chewie as the featured characters, I’ll be in line on opening day.

Emilia Clarke was also fun to watch as Han’s former flame Qi’ra. She has a challenging role in Solo: A Star Wars Story because her character is the epitome of a femme fatale in the tradition of The Postman Always Rings Twice and The Maltese Falcon. She, like Han, is an orphan who turned to a life of crime in order to survive on Corellia’s mean streets. Yet, unlike her former lover, Qi’ra has embraced her darker side – ambition and love of power – as Vos’s trusted lieutenant.

Donald Glover is excellent as a younger version of Lando Calrissian. He doesn’t look or sound like Billy Dee Williams, but he carries himself in the same roguish man-about-the galaxy style established in 1980’s The Empire Strikes Back. In the behind-the-scenes materials that come with the Blu-ray, Glover says that Williams gave him some pointers on how to play Lando, and that this informed his performance as the renowned gambler, smuggler, and first captain of the Millennium Falcon in Solo: A Star Wars Story.

In spite of its underperformance at the box office, this first Star Wars movie with no mention of the Jedi, Sith, or the Force is a fun, exciting romp in that galaxy far, far away. I enjoyed it immensely, and I heartily recommend it.