When you announce a film about a different interpretation of an established character, especially one as legendary as Han Solo, audience expectations will rise accordingly.
While it is certainly not a reboot, Solo focuses on a younger version of the titular smuggler, before he fully understood his capacity for heroism. It’s a great adventure story—the pacing is excellent, the visual effects are superb, and most of the characters are engaging. While it isn’t a necessary extension of the Star Wars mythos, it’s a technically well-made blockbuster for summer moviegoers.
After growing up on the shipbuilding planet Corellia, Han (Alden Ehrenreich) enlists in the Imperial army, reluctantly leaving his partner and lover Qi’ra (Emilia Clarke) behind during an escape attempt. During this time, he meets a group of criminals, led by the charismatic Tobias Beckett (Woody Harrelson), becoming embroiled in their schemes in the process.
His first encounters with a younger Chewbacca (Joonas Suotamo) and the cocky Lando Calrissian (Donald Glover) are shown, along with some of his earliest troubles with gangsters—including the syndicate head Dryden Vos (Paul Bettany). Indebted to Vos, Han and his newfound allies hatch a plan to retrieve a supply of highly unstable hyper-fuel to settle the score.
Ehrenreich is neither a disaster nor a brilliant emulator of Harrison Ford’s original portray of Han Solo. He portrays a more youthful and emotionally unchecked version of Han than the version we see in A New Hope. Where Rogue One is a direct prequel to A New Hope, this takes place quite a few years before the latter, allowing Ehrenreich to explore the process of growing into a character we know rather than only imitating what we’ve already seen.
We also see a more playful version of Lando, played well by Glover, but without the complex character beats of The Empire Strikes Back. Harrelson is always excellent as the rogue with loose morals, Clarke plays Qi’ra as a mysterious foil to Han’s more focused character motivations, and Phoebe Waller-Bridge provides comic relief and a rebellious spirit as Lando’s droid co-pilot L3-37.
Solo’s production troubles were very public before the film’s release. Directors Phil Lord and Christopher Miller (The Lego Movie, 21 Jump Street films) were replaced by Ron Howard (A Beautiful Mind, Apollo 13) after months of filming, with Howard completing the shoot and subsequent re-shoots.
Howard’s reported fidelity to the original script—as well as a commitment to tone and style—is what probably saved Solo in the end, despite re-shoots usually being associated with a sub-par final product. From space opera to space western, the film’s tale of outlaws and wrongdoers fighting amidst competing interests and exotic landscapes is an infectious throwback to classic genre films, and a perfectly fine—if not necessary—Star Wars film.
