‘Solo: A Star Wars Story’ lobotomises an iconic character with cold cliche
It is with a heavy heart that I have been forced to admit, since The Force Awakens was released in 2015 and with most assurance now, that the Star Wars I love is mostly the Star Wars of 1999 through 2005. I have accepted this after the lack of lightsabers, Jedi politicking, Clone Wars and such in Rogue One and now Solo has made me realise just how exceptionally boring I find the grungy, seeped-in-brown and CGI-lite Star Wars that Gareth Edwards and now Ron Howard have chosen to indulge in. Because, in a two hour twenty minute running time, the only moment in Solo that brought a smile to my face was a fleeting cameo from a Phantom Menace character; the truth suddenly dawning on me that I’d much rather be watching The Phantom Menace — as ridiculous its operatic tone, as pained its dialogue, as insufferable its Jar-Jar Binks — than the cold, clinical and colourless Han Solo origins story we’ve been delivered.
Solo’s main problem isn’t even its messy behind-the-scenes story, though the absence of Phil Lord & Chris Miller’s heavily ironic voice doesn’t help the film, but the total pointlessness of its existence. Rogue One was, at least, filling in gaps between existing Star Wars movies and answered some long-asked questions. There was absolutely no need for a Han Solo movie, and both Howard and screenwriters Lawrence and Jonathan Kasdan have doubled-down on affirming that argument. This film is so, so remarkably boring in ways one never thought a Star Wars movie could be.
There is no wonder, no spirit of adventure; just cheap cash-in-hand nostalgia perforated by the aggressively diluted personae of Woody Harrelson and Donald Glover, two of the most charismatic men in the business, who just seem dead inside in many of their scenes. The same, I’m sad to say, is true of Alden Ehrenreich, the terrific Hail, Caesar!/Beautiful Creatures breakout doing a weak half-Harrison Ford impersonation here, in a total misunderstanding of his appeal from those aforementioned films.
Perhaps Ehrenreich really was doing a terrible job in the Lord and Miller days of shooting, or perhaps LucasFilm weren’t fond of whatever Bit he was trying, but the performance given here has the strong sense of a young performer who’s lost his purpose in a role. The only member of the cast (the less said about the vapid Emilia Clarke and Phoebe Waller Bridge’s utterly insufferable Social Justice Droid the better) who appears to be having fun is Howard’s old friend Paul Bettany, brought onboard post-Lord and Miller and obviously not feeling the fatigue. Bettany is doing some Ben Mendelsohn-adjacent stuff and he’s rather delightful; even if all of his scenes do take place in one room (symbolic of a bigger issue with Solo; the scale feels — perhaps by necessity — extremely small).
But even the best among these players struggles with the absolute mirth they’ve been handed by the Kasdans: a script where almost every line ends with “babe”, “kid” or “son”. John Powell’s score is its own brand of Crime Against Star Wars: bastardising some Williams themes while adding appalling guitar strumming and choral wailing that instantly destroy the illusion that we are actually watching a Star Wars movie. There were so many ways to make a Han Solo movie — as desperate as that premise sounds — somewhat interesting: a lightweight Guardians of the Galaxy knock-off would be a lot more fun than this… this nonsense.
