As unnecessary prequels go, “Solo: A Star Wars Story” isn’t bad. It’s not great, either, though—and despite spirited performances, knockabout humor, and a few surprising or rousing bits, there’s something a bit too programmed about the whole thing. It has certain marks to hit, and it makes absolutely sure you know that it’s hitting them. Everything that you expect to see visualized in “Solo,” based on your experience with previously stated “Star Wars” mythology, gets served up on a silver platter, from young Han Solo’s first meeting with Chewbacca to Han winning the Millennium Falcon in a card game from its original owner, Lando Calrissian, and making the Kessel Run in less than 12 parsecs (that parsecs are a unit of distance, not time, is properly explained at last), to the fact that Wookiees hate to lose at three-dimensional chess and are strong enough to rip people’s arms from their sockets. We also get to see what some of our favorites were like when they were younger (Donald Glover’s Lando walks off with the movie). It’s fan service of a high order.ADVERTISEMENT
Whether you consider that a bonus or plus will depend on what you want from a “Star Wars” movie. In some ways, this movie is the antidote to the sort of “Star Wars” movie that viewers who despised the prankishly irreverent and oddly introspective “The Last Jedi” seem to have wanted: one where the payoffs to setups are italicized so that nobody can miss them, artistic license is subordinated to brand management, and every reference, no matter how small, that was so lovingly memorized by devotees of the franchise is placed under a spotlight for the audience’s recognition and self-congratulation.
It’s checklist mythology, but thankfully served up with enough panache to make the trip engaging. There are also quite a few scenes that fill out the “Star Wars” universe in ways that only tangentially have to do with Han Solo, Chewbacca, and other established characters (I’d rather not say which ones, because a couple of them are genuinely delightful). These tend to be the most engrossing sections of “Solo” because they treat your eye to vistas that you probably haven’t encountered before, unless you’re familiar with the older cultural sources that the filmmakers are raiding for inspiration—and even then, director Ron Howard (replacing Phil Lord and Christopher Miller) freshens them up and makes them feel lived-in.
We meet young Han (Alden Ehrenreich) and his girlfriend and partner-in-crime Qi’ra (Emilia Clarke) on a mining planet that’s completely covered by industrial structures and runs on forced labor, some of it involving children; the charcoal-smudged visuals, narrow streets and alleys, and hardbitten street urchins with English accents add up to high-tech Charles Dickens. When Han signs up for the Imperial Navy but ends up serving in the infantry in a pointless campaign where he meets his future smuggling partners Val (Thandie Newton) and Tobias (Woody Harrelson), the images of suicidal cavalry charges and muddy trenches are straight out of a World War I picture like “All Quiet on the Western Front” or “Paths of Glory.” A heist of a fuel train—more like a mountain monorail that seems to slither around the peaks like a metal snake—evokes an old Western where cowboys jump from horses onto the sides of locomotives. And so on.
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