Solo: A Star Wars Story stays on target

Jonathan Kasdan & Lawrence Kasdan wrote the screenplay.

Woah! The Han Solo Rotten Tomatoes score is in, and it’s not too good for a Star Wars or Disney movie!

Considering all the drama surrounding its production – directors Phil Lord and Chris Miller were fired four months into principal photography by Lucasfilm head Kathleen Kennedy, who hired veteran filmmaker Ron Howard to reshoot reportedly 70 percent of the movie – it’s a wonder that Solo: A Star Wars Story is as entertaining and tonally cohesive as it is. You can bet we’ll make it to the theater in less than 12 parsecs when the next entry in the Star Wars canon takes off May 25. Unlike a character from a book or a play, Han Solo didn’t exist outside of Harrison Ford, and the two are now linked by over 40 years of goodwill and nostalgia. But do we really need to get into that? The supporting cast – filled with veterans like Woody Harrelson, Paul Bettany, Thandie Newton, and one character voiced by Jon Favreau – are all great and mesh perfectly with the leads.

Part space western, part heist film, “Solo” delivers the origin story of Han Solo and several other key “Star Wars” players and offers plenty of thrills and eye-popping spectacle along the way. This theme is driven home in the film’s worst passages of dialogue, a lot of them between Solo and Qi’Ra, who ominously assures him she’s not the same girl he once knew. A lot of this was because of the character of Han Solo; he had the coolest ship, he was charming and amusing, and his best friend was a giant bear dog who could rip people’s arms out of their sockets.

Ehrenreich continues to amaze by channeling Harrison Ford’s devil-may-care attitude without ever trying to do an impression of Ford’s unforgettable character.

In a two-and-a-half star review, he calls it “thinly-sketched”, says it’s “hobbled early by a herky-jerky start”, and says the creative team “defaults to tiresome and dutiful when they might have blasted off into creative anarchy”.

GAME OF THRONES star Emilia Clarke looked out of this world at the premiere of Solo: A Star Wars Story.

Disney/LucasfilmThe official screening for “Solo: A Star Wars Story” is set on May 23, but select audience members were already taking to social media to share their first reactions on the new Han Solo, as played by Alden Ehrenreich.

PLOT How a street-wise youngster became the intergalactic outlaw Han Solo. “And we got to revisit stuff that normally you don’t get to have a second chance on”, Clarke explained to Variety.

Bryan Bishop, The Verge: “But Solo succeeds because it’s not interested in just being a greatest-hits mixtape”. Despite the strong performance from Ehrenreich and the hint of future adventures to come, I can only hope that this young Solo gets better stories and better direction that play into the character’s personality. And if the goal here was to really understand how a brash kid from a backwater planet became an amoral smuggler, Solo failed. I kind of wish this movie was titled, Han Solo and the Kessel Run, or whatever, and we just jumped into the action. The film also manages to touch on a host of issues including racism, sexism, cultural and political imperialism and even, I guess, droidism. And there’s another meet-cute, come to think of it: the love that flowers between man and machine, between the reckless pilot and the sleekly iconic Millennium Falcon. He’s also paired with a sassy robot co-pilot, L3-37 (Phoebe Waller-Bridge) that is a total scene stealer. “Most importantly, Han has his first encounter with the prototypical Allied resistance against the Empire“.