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(THIS REVIEW WILL CONTAIN SPOILERS)

I’m really, really not sure what to make of Solo. That’s part of why this review has taken me so long to finish (that and work)- it’s a bit far afield from the other three recent Star Wars movies, and part of me wonders how much I can really complain given the difficult production and how good it is in spite of it.

In brief, I think I enjoyed it a little more than The Force Awakens, but not as much as Rogue One or The Last Jedi (although it was a massive improvement on Show Dogs, which my friends convinced me to come see with them the same day I saw Solo and which felt like having my soul gouged out by a spork), and for the most part, the production troubles don’t rear their ugly head particularly often in the grand scheme of things. But despite that, I can’t shake the feeling it could’ve been better.

An uncertain amount of time before the events of A New Hope, a young Han escapes his backwater home planet of Corellia by escaping an Imperial patrol and signing up to join the Empire. (That gives way to a personal annoyance of mine- the revelation that Han got the name ‘Solo’ from saying to the Imperial officer running the sign-up point he was a loner.) A few years later, he finds himself in the midst of an Imperial mission and discovers smugglers hiding in the midst of the infantry he’s assigned to, and when he’s accused of deserting by them, he’s thrown into a pit and meets Chewbacca, and after getting out together, they join the smugglers to get off world and attempt a heist to steal coaxium (a valuable fuel) from an Imperial train. However, after this goes awry, their employer Dryden Vos instructs Han, Chewie and the sole survivor of the heist, Beckett, to find coaxium somewhere else, and together with Qi’ra, Vos’s lieutenant and Han’s old lover, they seek out the experienced starpilot and gambler Lando Calrissian, who helps them get to the coaxium mines of Kessel and then to the refinery on Savareen to make the coaxium for Vos.

In effect, Solo is sort of a heist movie. Oceans Eleven: A Star Wars Story, if you will. And on that level, it works; it’s an enjoyable plot with plenty of twists and turns, engaging action setpieces, and fun memorable moments. It has a noticeably lighter tone than many prior Star Wars movies, with some clearly jokey parts worked in which are fun to watch and don’t come off as particularly jarring, possibly as a result of being toned down from how the film was planned to play out before Lord and Miller were removed from the directorship, although with the production troubles it’s hard to know.

Admittedly, part of why Solo didn’t resonate with me so much as prior movies might be because crime thrillers like this aren’t really my scene genre-wise, but at the same time, it feels like it doesn’t really have the stakes of its predecessors. Rogue One was impactful because we got to meet a whole cast of smaller players in the Rebel Alliance trying to get the plans for the Death Star and escape alive, and seeing all of them die hammers home how much luckier the major players in the series have tended to be. The Last Jedi tore into the audience’s preconceptions of the Jedi more actively than any previous Star Wars film, and gave us a deeper look into not only the new characters of the third trilogy but also Luke himself. Solo doesn’t really have anything that interesting to offer, at least not to my mind.

I actually came out of the cinema thinking Solo was ‘fanservicey’. But the problem with that is that to say that word assumes I think it was a bad thing; ironically, it’s what underpinned one of my favourite parts of the movie, the sequence in which we actually get to see the Millenium Falcon do the Kessel Run in less than twelve parsecs. It’s one of the movie’s flashes of brilliance, turning a throwaway line in A New Hope into an engaging, memorable action sequence which shows the audience how great a ship the Falcon is and what great pilots Han and Lando are. To me, that’s what a Star Wars prequel should do: give an engaging backstory to things established in the later movies which are glanced over.

Unfortunately, it’s the only time the movie does something that interesting with the Star Wars mythos. To be honest, I think the moment that let me know I wasn’t going to enjoy the movie on as visceral a level as I did Rogue One or Last Jedi was when, immediately after Han signs up for the Empire, we skip ahead a few years past any and all of his training. I think it could’ve been really engaging seeing an insider’s disillusionment with the Empire grow, but instead it stems from his desire to get back to Qi’ra, which turns out to barely go anywhere because she got offworld herself, is implicitly engaged to Vos and turns out to be plotting against Han and his allies.

 On top of that, Han’s development is a little questionable. To an extent, it’s fitting that he ends up betrayed by Qi’ra and Lando, given that it shows why Han was disillusioned and pragmatic and at first didn’t personally support the Rebel cause in A New Hope; he learned not to make personal connections from being betrayed by people he thought he could work with and trust. On the other hand, the movie kind of blows the atmosphere of greyer morality that it builds up by having Han and Chewie discover the damage the coaxium mining is doing to the Savareen ecosystem and 180 on their previous plan, Vos be damned. It’s like Han’s going through the same character development he went through in A New Hope several years prior to the events of that movie, which to my mind seems fairly futile because the lesson isn’t going to stick with him, something Solo apparently doesn’t pick up on.

Personally, I wasn’t keen on how the movie handled Lando either. Donald Glover’s performance was strong and there are some enjoyable character moments with him (like the brief glance Han gets at his cheating hand before he suavely celebrates his victory in their Sabacc game, or him flying off in the Falcon surlily after the group crashes on Savareen), but he feels rather underused and doesn’t get many moments to shine besides those. 

 Similarly, while I’m definitely happy he’s been confirmed as canonically pansexual by Glover and Jonathan Kasdan, but it’s a shame it doesn’t really come up in any meaningful way. Effectively, it’s the opposite queerbaiting problem shows like Sherlock have- instead of heavily implying a character is queer but refusing to come out and say it, the cast and writers are saying off-screen Lando is queer without putting anything in the actual film to show it. Did they think he must be pan because he’s attracted to a droid?

Speaking of the droid, L3-37 might be the most controversial part of the movie, and the ultimate magnet for people who wait for Star Wars movies to come out so they can complain about SJWs ruining the franchise (as if they liked the prequels, but NOW it’s being destroyed) since she’s effectively a cipher for minority rights and liberation, starting a droid rebellion which costs her her life. I have no problem with any of that- in fact, it’s a pretty decent setpiece, including the entertaining visual of the traditionally ineffectual Gonk Droid helping smash up a console.
Unfortunately, though, L3-37 spends most of her earlier scenes being a big ugly strawman as the movie brushes off her concerns about sentient robots fighting each other in the cantina Lando frequents and him being constantly flirtatious to her when she clearly isn’t comfortable with it, so while I did like that sequence, it sort of felt like too little too late, in spite of the excellent execution of her rebellion and death. K2-SO sleeps soundly tonight, I’m afraid.

Fortunately, while the film dropped the ball with numerous characters, one character I think was handled well was Beckett, Woody Harrelson’s character, who’s been described as a sort of pastiche of Long John Silver in terms of his demeanour, although I’m not sure I’d call that accurate. Beckett serves as a sort of corrupt mentor to Han, encouraging him to trust no one, always be on his toes and take smuggling and crime seriously. He also has a really nicely handled death scene, where having been double-crossed by him a couple of times, Han shoots and kills him in a stand-off, thus showing the extent to which Han has learned of the instability of alliances in a life of crime.

It’s nicely framed and really encapsulates the mood the movie probably wants to go for, with more ambiguous morality to its characters than regular Star Wars movies have. But frankly, I still think Last Jedi handled the theme of ambiguous morality better because the characters’ attitudes were more consistent; Kylo Ren wanting to rule the universe his way, Rey wanting to turn him away from the dark side; or their motivations for changing made sense; Luke is swayed from ignoring Rey’s pleas by the assertions of Yoda that he has to leave the past behind and learn from his mistakes, and Holdo is convinced to fight back against rather than flee the First Order fleet. In Solo, Han simply changes his ways because he finds out the refining is bad for Savareen’s natives. Admittedly, that’d be an understandable motivation for most characters, but it doesn’t seem befitting the guy who in a movie which takes place after this declared that the Death Star run was suicide.

Probably my biggest gripe, though, is that the movie’s ending is just so cluttered. The sequence with Han killing Beckett is pretty good, but it just drags on for a long time between that and Han beating Lando at Sabacc and winning the Falcon at last. But what particularly annoyed me was the scene in which Qi’ra communicates via hologram with Darth Maul. I have a few pressing questions: how the hell is Darth Maul alive? How did he come back from being cut in half by Obi-Wan Kenobi and falling down a shaft in The Phantom Menace? Why is he communicating with Qi’ra? Why does she have associations with the Sith? How are there even Sith still around when the only one who seems to be about is Darth Vader? And most importantly, how is this important to the story of Solo?

That last one is the real bugbear. Rogue One teases A New Hope, of course, but it did so because it actively led into the events of that movie to the point that one starts almost immediately after the other ends. But Solo was marketed as a Star Wars movie that functions on its own with a self-contained plot about the story of how Han became Han. 

I’m sure there’s some expanded universe mythology explaining how Darth Maul is fine, but bringing him back for people who’ve just seen the movies and that’s about it is an odd decision. It’s not like the Jedi ghosts concept where the logic is clear, or General Grievous being introduced in Revenge of the Sith having been in the Clone Wars beforehand- the movie should’ve provided some kind of explanation why Darth Maul isn’t in two halves at the bottom of a big pit on Naboo. It’s not even like we know if he’s going to be in Kenobi: A Star Wars Story when that comes out or anything, he’s just here because he’s Darth Maul and apparently we’re supposed to care, even though he has nothing to do with anything.

So yeah, in summary while Solo is a fun experience and I recommend it to any Star Wars fans out there, I can’t say I loved it or anything. It was a decent movie with some very good standout aspects, and certainly not the worst thing ever to bear the name Star Wars, but at the same time we’re used to the franchise being more interesting at this point, and having more to say. It’s a fun distraction before we get Episode IX and a resolution which hopefully won’t screw up the really interesting storytelling of Last Jedi, and not really much besides.

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