Blu-ray Review: 'Solo: A Star Wars Story (Multi-Screen Edition)'

-
(C) 2018 Buena Vista Home Entertainment and Lucasfilm Ltd. (LFL) 

On Tuesday, September 25, 2018, The Walt Disney Company’s home media division, Buena Vista Home Entertainment, released Solo: A Star Wars Story in four formats – DVD, Blu-ray, UHD 4K Blu-ray, and digital download. The home media release of Solo – the 10th live-action entry in the Star Wars franchise and fourth produced in the post-George Lucas era – comes six months after the release of Star Wars: The Last Jedi on home media; it is widely seen as Disney’s attempt to recoup the financial losses from Solo’s underperformance at the box office earlier this year.

Board the Millennium Falcon and journey to a galaxy far, far away in Solo: A Star Wars Story, an all-new adventure with the most beloved scoundrel in the galaxy. Through a series of daring escapades deep within a dark and dangerous criminal underworld, Han Solo meets his mighty future copilot Chewbacca and encounters the notorious gambler Lando Calrissian, in a journey that will set the course of one of the Star Wars saga's most unlikely heroes. – Package blurb, Solo: A Star Wars Story

I have already reviewed Solo: A Star Wars Story here; since I’ve critiqued the film and given A Certain Point of View’s readers a brief account of the film’s troubled production, I’ll just focus on the Multi-Screen Edition I got from Target last Tuesday.

Now, I’m not an expert on the technical aspects of home video; I couldn’t tell you what “crushed blacks” or “digital noise” are, for instance. Those details are the purview of people who know more about the art and science of digital technology, home electronics, and A/V stuff. 

However, I am a long-time DVD/Blu-ray consumer and a Star Wars fan from way back (the fall of 1977, to be precise), and I do know what I like in home media releases of movies and shows set “a long time ago in a galaxy far, far away.”

Overall, the Solo Blu-ray is a solid offering from Buena Vista Home Entertainment. I have the Multi-Screen two-disc edition, which consists of:

Disc One: The Feature Film. As you might expect, this disc contains Ron Howard’s 2-hour and 15-minute film set approximately 13-10 years before the events depicted in Star Wars – Episode IV: A New Hope. It presents the second Star Wars Anthology film in 1080p high definition video, with four audio tracks (English 7.1 DTS-HDMA and 2.0 Descriptive Audio, Spanish and French 5.1 Digital sound) and subtitles in English (for the deaf and hearing impaired), French, and Spanish.

Disc Two: Blu-ray Bonus Extras. Because Buena Vista Home Entertainment dropped several editions in different formats (DVD, UHD 4K, HD Blu-ray, and digital copies for download and streaming, the extras will vary from one edition to another. The multi-screen one I got at Target last week offers the following featurettes:

Solo: The Director & Cast Roundtable (1080p, 21:44): Ron Howard moderates a discussion between members of the film's major cast. Alden Ehrenreich, Donald Glover, Joonas Suotamo, Emilia Clarke, Phoebe Waller-Bridge, Thandie Newton, Woody Harrelson, and Paul Bettany. discuss how they got their roles, talk about auditions, dissect various scenes, character relationships, and backstories, and give viewers an inside look at how the film was made. 

Kasdan on Kasdan (1080p, 7:50): Lawrence Kasdan and his son Jonathan talk about their long association with the Star Wars franchise and Lucasfilm, and Larry explains why Han Solo is his favorite character of the saga.
Remaking the Millennium Falcon (1080p, 5:36): This featurette gives viewers a brief overview about the Falcon’s role as a “supporting character” in the Star Wars saga and how the Solo team worked to redesign it to reflect Lando’s influence on the ship he owned till he lost it to Han in a high-stakes card game.

Escape from Corellia (1080p, 9:59): A discussion of the movie's timeline and how Solo fits into the overall Star Wars mythology. There’s a detailed breakdown of a pivotal chase sequence on Han’s homeworld of Corellia.

The Train Heist (1080p, 14:30):  Like the previous featurette, this is a detailed breakdown of one of the film's largest action pieces. 

Team Chewie (1080p, 6:41): A brief exploration of the “When Han Met Chewie” story element of Solo: A Star Wars Story

Becoming a Droid: L3-37 (1080p, 5:06): An exploration of the character, Phoebe Waller-Bridge's performance, and the practical and digital effects that bring her to life.

Scoundrels, Droids, Creatures, and Cards: Welcome to Fort Ypso (1080p, 8:02) A look at the sequence in which Han and Lando become Star Wars’ most prominent duo of “frenemies.”
Into the Maelstrom: The Kessel Run (1080p, 8:28): A look at how the production crew created one of the most famous elements in Han Solo’s backstory.

Deleted Scenes (1080p, 15:13 total runtime): Included are Proxima's Den, Corellian Foot Chase, Han Solo: Imperial Cadet, The Battle of Mimban: Extended, Han Versus Chewie: Extended, Snowball Fight!, Meet Dryden: Extended, and Coaxium Double-Cross.

My Take
Overall, I’m pleased with my Multi-Screen Edition Blu-ray of Solo: A Star Wars Story. It’s not my favorite Star Wars film; 41 years into the franchise’s storied history, that honor still goes to the original 1977 film written and directed by the Maker himself, George Lucas. Still, as I said in my review of the film, Solo “is a fun, exciting romp set in a galaxy far, far away.” It has an excellent script, outstanding visuals, good pacing, and a crackling score by John Powell (aided by a new original theme composed and conducted by Star Wars composer John Williams).
The Blu-ray was mastered from the original film’s digital files, so if it looks a bit murky or washed out in comparison to, say, Rogue One: A Star Wars Story or the Saga films, it’s because Solo was shot that way. The visuals are supposed to convey Han’s hardscrabble life as a scrumrat on Corellia and his subsequent involvement with the galaxy’s criminal underworld. As a result, the images are not as pretty or awe-inspiring as those in The Empire Strikes Back, The Force Awakens, or The Last Jedi.
The extras? Well, I’m extremely picky about behind-the-scenes materials and tend to favor in-depth documentaries that aim to inform the viewer about how a film was made rather than simply be another tool in the promotional department’s toolbox at Buena Vista Home Entertainment to sell the movie to skeptical viewers.
For me, there were two major letdowns regarding the Blu-ray extras: the superficiality of the extra features and – once again – the lack of a director’s audio commentary track in the first edition of a wide-release Blu-ray.
First, as I suggest above, the extras listed above are okay for casual viewers and young kids who could care less  about the firing of Phil Lord and Christopher Miller, the pitfalls of Disney greenlighting so many Star Wars projects at once, and the fallout from the expensive reshoots and Solo’s unfortunate failure at the box office. I assume that Lucasfilm would rather accentuate the positive in these situations, so on that level, I understand why the negative issues related to Solo were glossed over.
On the other hand, the tone of the extras – especially the Roundtable with Ron Howard – feels too much like the studio said, “Okay, let’s not even go there with the Lord/Miller issue. Let’s just gloss that over as if it never happened.” Heck, even the Alien Quadrilogy addressed the conflict between 20th Century Fox and Alien 3 director David Fincher – and in great detail, too. So, yes. That omission, while understandable to some degree, was unnecessary, to say the least.
Second, my biggest beef when Buena Vista Home Entertainment is that with the exception of The Last Jedi, the wide-release Blu-rays lack audio commentary tracks by the director and/or cast and crew members. 20th Century Fox Home Entertainment and Lucasfilm had, in the pre-Disney purchase era, included commentary tracks on the various DVDs and Blu-ray releases of the Star Wars Prequel and Classic Trilogies. Heck, Warner Bros. had audio commentary by Dave Filoni and Catherine Winder on the Star Wars: The Clone Wars movie’s home media release. BVHE, in its infinite wisdom, either saves those tracks for the expensive 3D Collectors’ Editions or avoids them altogether. Bad decision, I say.
Mainly, though, Solo: A Star Wars Story on Blu-ray is a solid, watchable home media release. On a good 1080p TV with a home theater sound system, the viewing experience is an enjoyable one. Not as good as, say, watching  Solo in theaters, but it’s a close second.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

How many movies have been made based on Stephen King's 'It'?

-
Image
How many movies have been made based on Stephen King's It ? It  has been adapted twice for filmed audio-visual media. The first filmed version of  It was a TV limited series; the second was a duology of theatrically-released movies.  The first adaptation of Stephen King’s 1986 doorstop of a novel was a 1990 adaptation made as a two-part ABC miniseries for television. Among the cast members: Tim Reid, Harry Anderson, Annette O’Toole, John Ritter, and Richard Thomas. The miniseries also featured Tim Curry as the evil Pennywise the Clown. Adapted for television by director Tommy Lee Wallace and Lawrence D. Cohen (who also adapted King’s  Carrie  for director Brian De Palma in 1976),  It  was okay but a watered-down take on the scary novel about a group of friends who must face off against a monstrous entity known as “It” twice. Once as kids in 1960, then again as adults in 1990. (Like  11,22.63,  the TV version of It avoids the year ...
Read more

Talking About 'Band of Brothers' (HBO Miniseries): Why were there no black soldiers in the Band of Brothers TV miniseries?

-
Image
Band of Brothers,  sadly, reflects one of the sad realities of American society in the 1940s - racial segregation in the armed forces. Although there  were  a few all-Negro (as blacks were referred to in those days) units in the U.S. Army and the Army Air Forces that served with distinction in the European Theater of Operations, most black servicemen were assigned to non-combat units in Supply of Services and other support forces. Most of these soldiers were truck drivers, anti-aircraft gunners, barrage balloon handlers, engineers, stevedores, clerks, cooks, corpsmen, and so on. Only late in the war (fall of 1944 and winter/spring 1945) did large numbers of black infantrymen see combat against German forces, and even then they served in all-black units commanded by white officers. © 2001 Home Box Office, Dreamworks SKG, and Play-Tone Pictures The 101st Airborne Division was an all-American unit made up of individuals from many different groups - Easy Company’...
Read more

'The Boy in Striped Pajamas' movie review

-
Image
(C) 2008 Miramax, Heyday Films, BBC Films Writer-director Mark Herman’s 2008 film “The Boy in the Striped Pajamas” is a faithful but (necessarily) condensed adaptation of John Boyne’s 2007 novel about a German boy, Bruno (Asa Butterfield), who befriends Shmuel (Jack Scanlon), an eight-year-old inmate in a Nazi concentration camp during World War II.  Like Boyne’s novel, the film is not a definitive history of the Holocaust. It’s not as graphic or historically accurate as Steven Spielberg’s 1993 classic “Schindler’s List,” nor was it intended to be. (Indeed, Herman says in the behind-the-scenes featurette “Friendship Beyond the Fence” that he doesn’t consider “The Boy in the Striped Pajamas” to be a “Holocaust film.”) Set in the early 1940s at the height of Nazi Germany’s power, the film follows Bruno on a journey that takes him and his family from Berlin to German-occupied Poland. His father Ralf (David Thewlis) is a newly-promoted SS officer with a new posting: commandant...
Read more