After an infamously troubled production and months of promotion and speculation, Solo:
A Star Wars Story has finally arrived.
It features great action, top-notch special effects, and a handful of genuinely memorable
performances.
Still, it's far from perfect.
Buckle up for hyperspace - there are going to be plenty of spoilers ahead as we take
a deep dive into the five best and five worst things about Solo: A Star Wars Story.
Best: Lando steals the show
Who didn't see this one coming?
A lot of people have been excited to see Donald Glover's debut as legendary wheeler-dealer
Lando Calrissian.
Fortunately, Glover's performance delivers.
He's everything a young Lando should be.
He's suave and talented, yes, but also constantly posturing and clearly insecure.
Glover is at his best in Solo when acting out Lando's more narcissistic tendencies…
and reveling in his own fashion.
I have an everyday cape, a sister's wedding cape, intergalactic president's day cape."
He even nails the tone and inflection of Lando's speech without ever doing an outright impersonation.
Throw in his chemistry with his droid copilot L3-37 and you've got a character who steals
every scene he's in.
Worst: Lighten up
Solo has a couple of moments that are very well framed, but as a whole the movie is a
bit of a visual letdown.
This is particularly evident in the first act, which takes place mostly in seedy alleys
and crime dens.
These sequences are terribly lit to the point that it's nearly impossible to follow the
action.
There's a difference between dim lighting and bad lighting.
It's not an issue present throughout the entirety of the film, but it doesn't get much better,
either.
There's some competence to the cinematography, but it never wows or feels as though it has
purpose.
Best: Ante up
The Star Wars saga is filled with some of the most memorable action of all time.
Lightsaber duels and epic battle sequences are the franchise's bread and butter.
So it's interesting that the most memorable scene in Solo doesn't feature so much as a
blaster.
It's simply two over-inflated egos sitting across from each other at a table and egging
one another on.
The moment Han and Lando meet for the first time immediately feels as momentous as it
ought to.
There's a palpable tension as the two size one another up, and once the card game begins,
it cranks it into lightspeed.
When Lando finally lays down a full sabacc hand, it feels like the final crescendo of
a symphony.
Solo's train heist and the thrilling double-crosses in the finale can't compare to Lando and Han
sitting down for a game of cards.
Worst: Dryden Vos disappoints
Even when the franchise is at its worst, Star Wars has a knack for great villains.
We're not saying Solo is the worst, but its primary antagonist, crime boss Dryden Vos,
definitely isn't going into the Hall of Fame any time soon.
You can't help but feel a little bored with the character, even without the knowledge
that the character was originally going to be a half-animal creature performed by Michael
K. Williams.
"He was half mountain lion, half human."
Paul Bettany is an immensely talented actor and seems to be doing the best he can with
the material, but a suave, violent crime boss is nothing we haven't seen in a hundred movies
before.
Best: Alden Ehrenreich sticks the landing
It's not a stretch to say that Han is one of the most beloved movie characters of all
time - thanks in no small part to Harrison Ford's performance.
Ford is inseparable from Han, and any actor stepping into the role has some big shoes
to fill.
Despite those massive expectations, Ehrenreich does the seemingly impossible in Solo: he
makes you forget he's not Harrison Ford.
Ehrenreich never seems to be doing a Ford impression, which would have been an understandable
approach to the role.
Instead he makes it his own.
His Han is still witty and caustic, but in a way that feels like youthful bravado rather
than scorn.
He also gives Han a naive optimism that plays out beautifully.
Worst: The first act struggles
Solo's troubled production is common knowledge at this point, and the first act of the film
is the portion that seems to have been most affected by the film's production issues and
reshoots.Various tones and moments are struggling for dominance, which is to be expected from
a movie with multiple directors.
Nothing about the first 20 minutes of the film really works, and it's largely because
it doesn't seem to have any sense of where it stands.
Once Han, Chewie, and Beckett board Vos' ship, Solo finds itself, but it takes longer than
it should to get there.
Best: Worldbuilding
Solo is at its most engaging when it's building the criminal underworld of Star Wars.
Crimson Dawn, a syndicate of mob bosses who run the shadier corners of the galaxy, is
an immediately intriguing concept ripe for further exploration.
And the fact that the outfit is headed by Darth Maul is even better.
On top of that, Solo's introduction of Enfys Nest and her Cloud Riders, a gang of renegade
refugees, is a fantastic piece of new Star Wars lore.
These bits of expansion come in small pieces, but as a whole form a very engaging look at
corners of this galaxy we've never seen before.
Worst: Over-explained
The ways Solo builds on Star Wars are great.
But it also goes out of its way to explain details perhaps best left to the imagination.
The most prominent example is the Kessel Run, in which Han and the crew make the run, only
narrowly avoiding death by giant tentacle creature, is awesome.
But finding out what the Kessel Run is to begin with still feels somewhat unnecessary.
Similarly, certain aspects of Han's origin are inevitable, like how he and Chewbacca
come together.
But did we really need to know how he came into possession of his signature blaster?
The abundance of explanation that nobody asked for in Solo serves little purpose — and
ultimately shrinks some of the possibilities in its massive universe.
Best: Bringing it home
You expect Solo to have a solid plot twist or two.
This is a movie about criminals, after all.
And there's a major plot twist that moves the final act into motion, one that's legitimately
surprising: Enfys Nest and her Cloud Riders aren't smugglers at all, but refugees forming
the first seeds of what will become the Rebel Alliance.
There's always a war to be fought in these movies, and Solo seems like the first installment
in the franchise whose focus is elsewhere.
Enfys Nest reminds the protagonists of Solo that not only is there a war out there but,
consciously or not, they're playing a part in it.
Without this, Solo is just a fun space adventure.
With it, it's a proper Star Wars movie.
Worst: It doesn't feel necessary
When you get right down to it, Han Solo never needed an origin story.
He isn't a figure shrouded in mystery like Boba Fett.
He's just a talented pilot who gets himself wrapped up in a fight for the fate of the
galaxy.
Everything a great origin story needs is already present in Han's arc in the original trilogy
- his journey from cynical smuggler to true believer in the noble cause of the Rebellion.
So why does this movie exist?
That's ultimately Solo's biggest flaw: it fails to justify its own existence.
None of this means you'll regret seeing it, but at no point does any of this become anything
truly special, or answer the question of why this Star Wars Story needed to be told.
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