So, as the title of the movie suggests, this is all about Han Solo, a young Solo. A character I have grown up with. A character I like very much for multiple reasons such as his ice cool look and seriously sweet name...that I have now discovered was simply given to him off the cuff by a random Imperial Officer (ugh!!). The movie basically follows Solo as he flees his homeworld of Corellia by joining the Imperial Navy. Then frees Chewie and flees the Imperial Navy by joining a small team of mercenaries. Then helps the mercs attempt to steal Coaxium (starship fuel) for a crime boss, which goes wrong. Then has to steal more Coaxium to repay the debt.
In all honesty I wasn't exactly charged up for this movie considering what I'd heard and seen of the box office performance. Unfortunately the movies opening sequence did not give me a very good first impression. Set in the shipyards of Corellia it was dark, murky, very metallic, and difficult to make out what was what. Solo (Alden Ehrenreich) and his girlfriend Qi'ra (Emilia Clarke) are being forced to steal for a local gang which appeared to be made up of really corny looking cloaked henchmen (and bad alien suits), and a large centipede-like female alien which looked horrifically bad. The duo then proceeds to escape which leads to a really uneventful and unexciting speeder chase. Everything in this initial opening looked like it was made for a TV series with a high budget.
From there Solo needs to escape the planet so he literally walks up to an Imperial Naval recruitment booth and joins, just like that. Obviously that won't have been the entire process but he literally gives his name and walks in. Skip on a few years and he's been kicked out of the flight academy and is now a bog standard infantryman. Its here he meets up with Tobias Beckett (Woody Harrelson) and his gang who are all posing as Imperial troops. One of Beckett's team is a really bad four armed CGI alien which confused me. Marvel can get Rocket to look amazingly real, so how come Disney and LucasFilm couldn't make this guy look as good?
It's at this point that I realised how bad of a decision it was to cast Woody Harrelson. Now I've got nothing against Harrelson. He was a firm favourite of mine back in my younger days growing up throughout the 80's and 90's with various action flicks. But Woody just doesn't fit the bill here and his southern twang just doesn't fit in. He didn't even look right, what the hell was going on with that hairstyle?? It was like a huge floppy comb-over or something. I did like how they killed off Beckett's whole team in the first action sequence though. I thought that was a good ballsy move which was most definitely a surprise to me and made things much more interesting.
It's also at this point I should mention that Qi'ra never managed to escape from Corellia with Solo, she was captured by the gang. Solo vows to go back and rescue her, which is his initial story arc. Raise money, buy , go back and save Qi'ra. But when Solo and Beckett visit Dryden Vos (Paul Bettany) about the first batch of which they lost, Qi'ra is there because she's now a high ranking lieutenant in this crime syndicate. Thing is we never really learn how she got to this position. How did she get off Corellia? How did she get involved with Vos? I also think her character turns up way too soon after she splits with Solo. And the fact Solo finds she escaped Corellia herself, kinda renders his more interesting story arc defunct.
Lando Calrissian (and his fecking annoying robot). OK so this I don't get. The one thing I heard from almost everywhere was how Donald Glover was one of the only aspects of this movie that was semi-decent. Really? Is this an identity politics thing again? All I saw was Glover doing his best (and not very good) Billy Dee Williams impression. He didn't even look the part for fecks sake. I know you're not gonna find an exact double but surely there might have been lesser known actors out there who were a better fit visually.
Don't get me started on his robot (which apparently fancied him hence pansexual Lando (?). 2018 & Twitter folks!). I'm still not really sure what the angle was here. Was this mocking modern day social justice warriors or appeasing them? Was it meant to be mocking Kathleen Kennedy?? (what I read somewhere). Was it meant to be serious? Were they genuinely trying to shove in social commentary? Or was it all just for laughs? If so I certainly wasn't laughing, in fact I literally cheered when the fecking thing got blasted to pieces. I think the fact that the robot didn't actually sound like a robot but merely like some permanently angry British feminist activist, is what really got on my nerves. Why am I seeing this?? Who's bright idea was it to do this??!! Who actually thought this would be a good idea??
The Kessel Run: I think I had a bad feeling about this (guffaw!). K I really didn't get what they did here, well I got it, I just thought it was crap and nothing like I always thought it would or should be. So the planet Kessel is basically engulfed or orbited by a huge highly dangerous electrical storm which is down to a black hole. The only way to reach Kessel is via the Kessel run which appears to be this manmade tunnel through the storm (complete with lights?). So setting aside the question mark over how Kessel doesn't get eaten by the black hole, how does this 'tunnel' remain intact?? Oh, there's also a big space monster that somehow lives in the storm. It got sucked into the black hole. How did this not happen before? So by completing the Kessel run in record time would indicate that someone flew down this tunnel bloody fast avoiding danger (even though there is little because this tunnel is the safe route).
But here's the thing. Solo flies the Falcon outside of the tunnel through the storm to lose some TIE fighters and dodge a Star Destroyer. So essentially he took a shortcut...right? He basically cheated and didn't do the Kessel run properly...right? Solo always said he completed the run in 12 parsecs, which we now know is distance not speed. So I suppose you could say he covered the distance faster than anyone else. But he didn't exactly do it himself, the rest of the crew helped. And he also utilised the power of the Coaxium onboard to boost the Falcon (almost like nitro), so again he kinda cheated...right?
My initial reaction after seeing this was simply, why did this have to be about Solo? They could of quite easily made this movie without Solo and just focused on a new band of smugglers and scoundrels. Let's be honest here Ehrenreich was always gonna be compared to Harrison Ford and no one will ever see Ehrenreich as Han Solo. So this whole idea was just plain stupid from the start. I mean Ehrenreich was OK, but he wasn't Solo to me. He didn't look like Solo, didn't sound like Solo, didn't act like Solo, even his hair was wrong! He was just a random Star Wars character like the others. And I'm willing to bet many thought the same, which leads me to think this would have worked better without Solo.Most of the nod and winks to the previous movies were pointless as usual, but thankfully not as blatantly offensive as some Star Wars movies. Well I say that but...Darth Maul much? So not only was Qi'ra part of a criminal syndicate, she was also in cahoots with a Sith Lord too! She's been flippin' busy since Corellia. No Jabba?? In-fecking-credible! How did they stop themselves from that? Was I the only person who noticed the other Wookies looked awful? What went wrong there? And why would the Empire need to transport cargo on a train? Nice setup sure, nice little western concept. But surely they'd use a ship, there's a crap-tonne to choose from.
Did I like this? No not really. Did I hate this? No not really. It was generally fine, completely borderline, completely average. I did find it somewhat boring for the most part, it didn't really engage me at any time. The movie has bad pacing issues. The movie was visually ugly. I also think the movie was badly edited, messy, but we all know the reason for that. There were a lot of things I would have done differently. I guess I have to admit it wasn't the total trainwreck I thought it might be, is that a positive?
5.5/10
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