Solo serves as a mix of fan service fill in the story blanks from the original trilogy, and well, little else.
If someone asked you to describe the plot to a Han Solo stand alone film I don’t think it would be much different than what eventually is seen on screen. On one hand it’s paint by numbers because we know pieces and results of the story. We know about the Kessel Run; we know he gets the Millennium Falcon from Lando Calrissian through gambling. We know pieces. The problem is Disney plays it super safe. One: they want to make a ton of money. (You can’t win them all!) Two: Star Wars has a pretty toxic, unrelenting fan base. (Not you, of course.) There’s little room for creativity when someone is ready to yell “Canon! But the canon! But!” at any whiff of something outside of a character’s preconceived traits. I suspect this is one reason the original director was fired during production and replaced by a much safer choice in Ron Howard.
What we get is a very Star Warsy movie. There’s no doubt what you’re watching. It’s relentlessly Star Wars at all time. Exhaustingly so. We pick up this very Star Wars film with Solo and his love interest Qi’ra (Yeah, I looked it up. I try just to not care usually. Sorry.) trying to escape Corellia. Corellia appears to be a purposely dark slave planet of some sort. In the course of their daring escape Han makes it out, but Qi’ra gets left behind. This sets up Han’s motivation in the film. He plans on making enough money to buy his own ship, and return to Corellia to save her. Along the way, and while working for the Empire he comes across a band of mercenaries led by Tallahassee from Zombieland in a surprise crossover. Trying to save his own hide, he gets Solo thrown into a pit where he has to fight and eventually befriends Chewbacca. (What a wookie!) Chewbacca and Solo escape together, and convince Tallahassee to let them join his band of merry men in order to steal dilithium crystals from the empire for an evil Star Wars villain guy. Solo will have enough money from the heist to finally rescue his love. After a very exciting battle that cost a lot of money, and had many Star Wars sounds and music in it they fail miserably. Many extraneous characters are killed off.
Downtrodden they go to the very Star Wars villain’s oddly shaped ship that would never ever be able to fly in real life to face the music. At this point the movie goes completely off the rails for me. Solo discovers that Qi’ra is now working for the very scary Star Wars villain. The entire purpose of the plot as stated many times was for him to rescue her. This pivots the entire movie. It shifts course into them needing to steal more dilithium crystals since the original heist went so poorly, and her joining the team. It’s never really explained how she escaped Corellia outside of she had to do bad things. She’s woefully underdeveloped. Regardless, through this they meet Lando and his sassy woman droid. The droid’s major concern is droid rights. Which, I think they cribbed from an episode of Futurama. While, I’m not going to get into the last act blow by blow during this dilithium crystal heist, just know that the weapons sound like Star Wars weapons, it looks like Star Wars, and people say very Star Wars like things. It’s all so Star Wars. In a twist, Han is killed and it turns out he has an identical twin brother who takes his spot.
OK, maybe that didn’t happen, but the movie was filmed so darkly that it was hard to see what was happening. Was this a cost cutting measure because they basically had to start over again halfway through with a new director? You can’t know what’s cheap in the background when you can’t SEE the background. If Tatooine has two suns, the rest of these planets have one between them, and it’s very far away. Even the Millennium Falcon is brutally dark. Chewbacca would be hitting his head constantly.
In general, this could have been a fine Saturday afternoon Sci-Fi flick that’s mostly mindless fun. You know, like Star Wars was in the first place. Those days are long gone, and any semblance of fun was obviously voted on by committee over various conference calls. Who is this film is really for? It seems made to try and keep the most ardent Star Wars fans happy. The film soullessly checked many boxes as I said before, and even retconned what Han meant by completing the Kessel run in less than 12 parsecs. That nod was a little too wink wink to be clever, however.
The reality is casual Star Wars fans, and the greater movie audience, like Harrison Ford as Han Solo. Young Harrison Ford, that is. Solo was never going to appeal to a larger audience even if it is Star Wars. Star Wars films no longer feel like an event. Even the terrible second trilogy had excitement in the air when the Fox logo was on screen, and then the score kicked in. This was not a movie that should have needed to make 750 million dollars worldwide to break even, and I read there are 7 (!) more Star Wars movies planned. There may be a full revolt by then when you consider how much people disliked The Last Jedi, and have flat out rejected this movie. If movie franchises were stocks I’d downgrade Star Wars to D.C. Universe films.
As for the film:
Emilia Clark’s eyebrows:
