If Lucasfilm and its parent company Disney are going to keep making unnecessary Star Wars installments, then there’s only one thing that can really, truly keep the heart of the franchise beating: story. Good story structure with clearly defined stakes and characters whose motivations are pure. Good, solid story is why Rogue One is a better film than The Last Jedi (search your feelings, you know it to be true), and it’s why Solo: A Star Wars Story — despite the many issues that plagued its production — is a fun and delightful movie.
Last summer, with the majority of Solo’s principal photography already shot, Lucasfilm fired original co-directors Phil Lord and Chris Miller, replacing them with Ron Howard. But as the film opens on Solo’s home planet of Corellia, it’s easy to think that this thing might be a mess after all, despite Howard stepping in to save the day. It’s dark — literally more than figuratively — and our villain is a malevolent, light-averse space worm who values shiny bangles more than human (or alien) life. But once we’re off Han’s home world, Solo transforms into the Western we were promised, full of train heists, double crossing, card games and gunfights. It’s more Wild Bunch, Rio Bravo or Fistful of Dollars than Phantom Menace. We likely have co-writers Lawrence Kasdan (who penned the scripts for The Empire Strikes Back, Raiders of the Lost Ark, Return of the Jedi and The Force Awakens) and his son Jonathan Kasdan to thank for that more than Howard.
We can’t go any further without talking about Alden Ehrenreich’s performance as young Han Solo. Early reports that producers brought an acting coach on set to give Ehrenreich’s performance a boost didn’t bode well, and anyone who’s seen the guy knows he doesn’t have a fraction of Harrison Ford’s charisma. Ehrenreich is somewhat diminutive on screen (he’s four inches shorter than Ford), and there are times in the movie when it seems a bit like we’re watching a kid in a Han Solo Halloween costume. He doesn’t particularly look like Ford, nor more importantly does he really feel like him. But he isn’t a bad actor, and the sooner you’re able to accept him as a smaller and less-confident-but-still-likeable ruffian scoundrel, the sooner you can forget about the differences and simply enjoy the film. After all, we’ve got Woody Harrelson as Han’s mentor-slash-foe-slash-partner Tobias Beckett to fill the scenery with gun-slinging self-assurance.
Solo’s high-falutin’ heavy is murderous gangster Dryden Vos, played with villainous prowess by Paul Bettany, who we last saw as Vision, the purple android who is a constant liability in Infinity War. Vos heads up the criminal outfit Crimson Dawn and more or less enslaves Han’s would-be girlfriend Qi’ra (Mother of Dragons herself, Emilia Clarke) from aboard his glistening space yacht. Our MacGuffin is a massive payload of extremely expensive starship fuel (it’s called coaxium, but who cares), and our goal is simple: steal a bunch of the stuff and get it to Vos to pay off our debt, or else everybody dies.
Of course, fan-service Easter eggs abound, from jokes about Kessel Run parsecs to costumes and characters we know will show up again on down the line. There’s even, finally, a full-on display of Chewbacca’s talent for violence. We all know that Chewie is liable to rip a person’s arms out of their sockets if he’s upset with them, but have we ever really seen him do it? Don’t we all want to watch him beat the hell out of a bunch of guys? Good news: Chewbacca beats the hell out of a bunch of guys in this movie.
Donald Glover continues his 2018 takeover with a charming turn as young Lando Calrissian, a smooth-talking, impeccably dressed gambler (and possible robosexual?) from whom Han must beg or borrow the Millenium Falcon. As with any good Western, there are deaths and twists. There’s a lounge-singing alien who looks like Krang from Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles. There’s one turn at film’s end that might confuse even those who are pretty familiar with the Star Wars universe. But most of the jokes land, and all of the important characters are interesting.
There was a time in my life when I wanted perhaps nothing more than for there to be more Star Wars films. This curious galaxy long ago with its mystical Force and innumerable monsters in spacesuits — it’s practically all I could think about, and I had the action figures to prove it. But then the prequels came and went, with their Jar Jars Binks and their Generals Grievous, and a little something was lost forever. This is not a hot take. I’m not the first critic to say that the beauty of the original Star Wars trilogy is its limitations, its space-opera cheesiness and its now-dated special effects. Those things can almost certainly never be recaptured. So what is it we’re looking for now that Disney has a hold of the franchise? Now that filmmakers can put just about anything imaginable on screen, what are we looking for in a film like Solo: A Star Wars Story, wherein we set off on new adventures with old characters?
The answer, I think, is simple: Films that value a good story most of all. Solo may be entirely unnecessary, but at least it does that.
