There is something to be said for leaving some questions unanswered and mysteries unsolved within a narrative. When George Lucas crafted his trilogy, he established an interesting canon with many weird quirks and questions. But in the ensuing years, with the prequels and Star Wars stories have sought to remove those enduring issues by placing a period where there was once a question mark. If that’s the movie you are looking for, then you’ll love Solo: A Star Wars Story. If not, it will be one of the year’s most useless films.
Solo: A Star Wars Story answers every possible question that you wanted to know about Han Solo (Alden Ehrenreich). The worst thing about this is that a much sharper movie could have worked these fan service moments in and not made them so blunt, but Lawrence Kasdan and his son, Jonathan Kasdan, don’t care. They don’t so much wink about these moments as they do putting neon signs worth of emphasis on lines and beats. Who were his parents? How did he become such a scoundrel? Where did he get the name? How did he meet Chewie? Did he actually do the Kessel run at 12 parsecs? All of those “pressing questions” and more are answered in this movie, thus stripping the character that Harrison Ford made iconic of any kind of mystique or intrigue it had gained over the years. It felt like this movie aimed to be the lowest common denominator movie it could but with enough to maybe keep you humming along. It’s also horribly violent, with enough violence depicted on screen to earn an R rating, but by virtue of being free of blood, it lands a PG-13.
This doesn’t give much room for the actors to breathe. It’s a miracle Ehrenreich is able to make anything at all with Han, given how much mimicry he has to do. He finds spots here and there as any capable actor should. Donald Glover and Woody Harrelson also provide adequate performances that help the movie move along. I wish we’d gotten more of them (or given their characters their own movies) because they were very interesting. As much as I love Game of Thrones, Emilia Clarke is the actor that’s stuck fighting against the movie’s current the most and doesn’t really get a chance to make the character her own. She does an admirable job though.
There are two saving graces of this movie and they come on the technical side of the production. Much has been made of the movie coats this film has and everyone was digging Lando’s style. David Crossman and Glyn Dillon do wonders with the movie’s limited costumes by giving us capes, prints, cool shapes, and refined looks of Han’s classic clothes. Matching them in visual excellence is Bradford Young whose cinematography would be a work of wonder even if it didn’t come under the direction of a pair of directors who got fired (Phil Lord and Christopher Miller)and another who isn’t known for his visual panache (Ron Howard). It’s to Solo’s credit that it doesn’t look like any other Star Wars movie and Young images and use of color to convey mood are spectacular. It’s just too bad his visuals couldn’t be for a movie that deserved them.