Has there ever been a Star Wars movie with a more troubled production history than Solo: A Star Wars Story? Well, yes. But this one certainly hasn’t exactly been a walk in the verdant, moon-lit Endorian forests. A change of director, reshoots, talk of acting coaches for the new Han, Alden Ehrenreich – none of it, frankly, boded too well. But rejoice, for critics say Solo isn’t half as bad as you might have expected. In Ron Howard’s safe pair of hands, it has emerged as a veritable, if minor, critical hit, with a Rotten Tomatoes rating of 71% “fresh”.
Now that you’ve seen it, what did you think of Solo’s efforts to lend us insight into the early years of the galaxy’s most infamous risk-taking space scoundrel? Here’s a chance to give your verdict on the movie’s key talking points.
Alden Ehrenreich and the burgeoning curmudgeon of Han Solo
From the opening frame of Solo: A Star Wars Story, it is obvious that Ehrenreich isn’t Harrison Ford. In fact he doesn’t even appear to be making much effort to sound like Ford, which makes one wonder if all those reports of an on-set voice coach were baloney.
Ehrenreich’s tones are at least half an octave higher than his vaunted predecessor’s, which makes the actor’s task harder to handle than a cryonic carbonite hangover. He doesn’t have Ford’s gravelly curmudgeon, the bearing of a man who has “flown from one side of this galaxy to the other” and “seen a lot of strange stuff”, but ultimately this turns out to be a good thing. It’s impossible to imagine Han Solo as a wide-eyed ingenue, but Ehrenreich does a pretty decent job of convincing us that this is what the roguish Corellian smuggler might have been like before Jabba the Hutt put a price on his head and he found himself caught up in too many Imperial entanglements.
Filling the gaps in Han’s backstory
While Solo’s mission to steal a batch of priceless coaxium fuel provides one of the most memorable cosmic rollercoaster rides yet for the Millennium Falcon, did it really answer the age-old question of how our hero managed to complete the Kessel Run in a unit of distance – 12 parsecs – rather than time? I felt Han’s encounters with Donald Glover’s Lando Calrissian nicely fleshed out the impulses behind the pair’s love-hate relationship. Did you spot the golden dice, later to be seen hanging in the Millennium Falcon in 1977’s Star Wars, that played a key part in Solo’s relationship with Emilia Clarke’s Qi’ra?
Darth Maul
Is that really The Phantom Menace’s Ray Park beneath the red and black face paint? Well, it has been nearly 20 years since mini-Anakin and his ethnically troublesome pals first hit cinemas. If any character from George Lucas’s much-maligned prequel trilogy deserves another big screen outing, it is probably Maul, who was virtually mute in his previous appearance, and now gets a chance to play a more active role in proceedings going forward. Did you buy the final reveal in which it emerges that Qi’ra was out for herself – and happy to flirt with the dark side – all along? It certainly made sense of Clarke’s strangely enigmatic performance.
A diverse galaxy
It has always seemed a little strange that the Star Wars movies tend to teem with a plethora of alien races, yet are oddly short on black people. The latest trilogy of films has seen John Boyega’s Finn begin to subvert the picture, but it was fabulous to see Thandi Newton portraying Star Wars’ first ever non-digital black female lead in Solo, even if space rogue Val got hers pretty swiftly. Lando Calrissian surely deserves a spin-off of his own if Glover’s velvety-smooth performance here is anything to go by.
A place in the pantheon
Solo: A Star Wars Story felt to me like an enjoyable side dish to the main feast, rather than a classic episode, but perhaps that’s as things should be. If we want to immerse ourselves in this universe more regularly, fans are going to have to accept that not every episode can reach the epic heights of the original trilogy. Solo played more like a big-screen adaptation of one of the Expanded Universe novels than any other Star Wars movie thus far: a throwaway moment for those of us who long ago accepted we just can’t get enough of George Lucas’s long-running space saga. Did Howard’s effort do enough to have you girding your loins for Solo: part two, when it inevitably rolls around?
