Solo - A Star Wars Story (2018)

 

You know, making spin-offs or origin stories for characters from a beloved franchise seems like just printing money, but as we have seen with the X-Men, it often turns out for the worst. Heck, in the case of the mutants, we only ever got one with 'Wolverine: Origins' and the less said about that abysmal failure, the better. 'Solo' fares a lot better, but it still isn't great and even with all of its winks and nods, in the end it is too bland to really make an impression.

Which is also why Disney then shelved the origin stories, because money. 

As you can gather from the title, this is the tale of how Han Solo rose up to be the scoundrel most of us know and love. So we start off on the industrial planet of Corellia, where Han and his girlfriend Qi'ra steal stuff for a Lady Proxima (who is like this big slug/eel-thing) and Han already has the swagger, but fudges stuff up. They want to escape, but Qi'ra is captured and Han has to enlist in the forces in order to get away. He does swear to come back for her, though.

Also: his enlistment gives us the absolute dumbest explanation ever for his last name. I'm serious. It's so cringe-worthy.

During a massive conflict, Han is arrested for being bamboozled by a group of mercenaries/thieves and dropped in a pit, where he meets Chewbacca. He only survives because he suddenly speaks Wookiee. And even though this works in the film, it used to be canon that Han freed Chewie from Trandoshan slave traders, but well... 

His savvy leads him back to the mercs, who take both on as they are impressed and they pull a heist of highly volatile spaceship fuel, but things go south when a marauder named Enfys Nest interferes. Now they have to find a new way of repaying crime boss Dryden Vos. It is here that Han finds Qi'ra again.

Are you seeing the ridiculous amount of coincidences? Yes? 

Good.

They hatch an insane plot and they need a fast ship, so enter Lando Calrissian with the Millennium Falcon. 

Again with the forced coincidences. Egads, this is getting absurd.

In short: the heist works, Han has to set out with Chewie and a few nods, winks, hints and blatantly shoved-in-our-faces fingers point to the future in the storyline. 

The end.

Now to be fair: this isn't awful by any stretch of the imagination. It is a fun ride from start to finish, with some quirky characters thrown in. But in the vast scale of the 'Star Wars'-franchise, this is wholly unremarkable. Yes, the fact that this is an intergalactic heist-film is a fun idea, but it didn't have to be connected to Han Solo. 

Well, of course they did it to ensure someone would come and watch, but the hamfisted explanations for everything are a bit much. Also: did we really need to have so much backstory on Han? If anything, his character is pretty on point the first time we see him in 'A New Hope' and adding to his history this way actually detracts from his appeal. 

The actors are mostly passable. Alden Ehrenreich does a decent enough job playing a young Harrison Ford, but a lot of the others are a bit bland. Woody Harrelson is okay, as he is always at least okay and Emilia Clarke is passable if superfluous. Funnily enough, the ones to steal the show are Donald Glover and his sassy sarcastic female robot L3-37. She gets by far the best lines and arc of the story, and Donald Glover truly is a young Billy Dee Williams. No exaggeration: it is uncanny how close he comes to the voice and mannerisms you can recognize from 'The Empire Strikes Back' and 'Return of the Jedi'. But mostly 'Empire', as he didn't get a lot to do in the latter one anyway. 

So yes, this once can be fun if you want, but you won't be missing much if you skip this entirely. It's just not that interesting. It is by no means as bad as was made out to be, but at least you can get passionate about something terrible. This one is more along the lines of 'Meh.'.