Solo: A Star Wars Story (2018)

There's a question that haunted me for most of Solo: A Star Wars Story, and it's a pretty damning one for a blockbuster with this kind of budget and legacy behind it. The question is: why does this exist? Not in a cynical, arms-folded way, but genuinely. What does this film add? What does it give us that we didn't already have? Two hours later, I still don't have a satisfying answer.

Solo isn't a disaster. I want to be clear about that. It's competently made, it moves along well enough, and there are action sequences that do the job. But competent and functional are about the kindest words I can find for it, and that's a sorry state of affairs when you're making a film about one of the most beloved characters in the history of popular cinema.

The elephant in the room, of course, is Alden Ehrenreich. He works hard, I'll give him that, and there are flickers of something likeable in his performance. But he's not Han Solo. He's doing an impression of Han Solo, and not always a convincing one. It's like watching a tribute act at a pub night: occasionally fun, but you're always aware it's not the real thing. The roguish charm, the swagger, the sense that this bloke could talk his way out of anything and shoot his way out of the rest, it's just not there in the same way. Harrison Ford made that character feel effortless. Here, you can see the effort, and that kills the magic.

And then there's Donald Glover, who wanders in and completely ruins the film for the wrong reasons entirely. He's so good as Lando Calrissian, so effortlessly smooth and charismatic and genuinely fun to watch, that every scene without him feels like a step down. I'd watch a whole film about Lando without a second's hesitation. Lando: A Star Wars Story? Take my money now. Instead, he's a supporting character in someone else's origin story, and it feels like a genuine waste.

Emilia Clarke is another problem. Her character, Qi'ra, is written to be intriguing, layered, a woman with secrets and history and complexity. What we get on screen is someone who feels vaguely mysterious without ever becoming actually interesting. Clarke has a tendency, and I've noticed it across several of her roles, to play this slightly cool, slightly smug archetype that never quite lands the emotional weight it's reaching for. I didn't care about Qi'ra's arc. Not even a little.

The plot ticks along. There's a heist, a train sequence, some world-building that's fine in isolation but never builds into anything that feels vital or exciting. The whole thing has the energy of a box-ticking exercise rather than a genuine adventure. And the ending, with that cameo that clearly had a room of executives punching the air, is fan service so gratuitous and unnecessary that it almost felt like a parody. I genuinely groaned.

What's frustrating is that you can see what this wanted to be. A scrappy, roguish caper in a galaxy far, far away, with a young Han finding his feet and his moral compass. That's not a bad idea on paper. But ideas are only as good as their execution, and somewhere between conception and screen, all the rough edges that would have made Han Solo interesting got sanded down into something safe and smooth and forgettable. This pairs awkwardly well, in a "big budget, thin soul" sort of way, with something like Transformers (2007), another film where spectacle shows up but genuine personality mostly doesn't.

Two and a half stars. Not awful. Not great. Just painfully, stubbornly meh. The Star Wars universe is vast enough to tell genuinely exciting stories. Solo: A Star Wars Story proves, more than anything, that having a great character to start with is no guarantee you'll make a great film about them.

Rating: ★★½  | Year: 2018  | Watched: 2018-12-04

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