- UK release: May 2018
- Director: Ron Howard · Writers: Jonathan Kasdan, Lawrence Kasdan
- Studio / distributor: Lucasfilm; Walt Disney Studios Motion Pictures
- Genre: Space opera / heist adventure · Runtime: 135 minutes (BBFC 12A)
- Main cast: Alden Ehrenreich (Hail, Caesar!) as Han Solo; Woody Harrelson (Zombieland, No Country for Old Men) as Tobias Beckett; Emilia Clarke (Game of Thrones) as Qi’ra; Donald Glover (The Martian) as Lando Calrissian
- IMDb: 6.9 / 10 · Rotten Tomatoes: 70% critics / 64% audience · My rating: 8 / 10
This is the Star Wars film that arrives trailing its own production diary. Phil Lord and Christopher Miller, the pair behind The Lego Movie, were most of the way through shooting it before Lucasfilm parted company with them and brought in Ron Howard to finish, reshoot and effectively re-author the thing. So Solo turns up with a question hanging over it that has nothing to do with the plot: can a film survive being made twice? The answer, slightly to my surprise, is that it can, and that the seams barely show. What it cannot quite survive is the suspicion that nobody was asking for the origin story of how a smuggler got his name, his ship and his Wookiee in the first place.
The setup
Han is a young chancer scraping a living on the shipbuilding world of Corellia, dreaming of a pilot’s licence and a way off the planet with Qi’ra (Emilia Clarke), the girl he loves. The escape goes wrong, they are separated, and Han falls in with Tobias Beckett (Woody Harrelson), a veteran thief running a crew through the grubbier corners of a galaxy squeezed between the Empire and the syndicates. One bungled train robbery puts the gang in debt to a crime boss, and the only way to clear it is a bigger, riskier job. Along the way Han acquires a co-pilot, a card-sharp acquaintance with a fast ship, and the first hard lessons about who in this line of work can actually be trusted.
It is, in other words, a heist picture in a Western key, dressed in Star Wars costume. No Jedi, no prophecy, no fate of the galaxy. Just a job, a crew and the long odds.
The cast
The casting gamble everyone fixated on was Alden Ehrenreich, asked to step into the most relaxed, most imitated swagger in popular cinema. He sensibly does not impersonate it. He plays the Han before the cynicism set in, eager and a half-step out of his depth, which is the right instinct even if a few of the cocksure beats land slightly soft. Woody Harrelson is comfortably within his range as Beckett, all weary charm over a readiness to cut and run, the sort of mentor whose advice you should write down and then ignore. Emilia Clarke, out of the armour of Game of Thrones, gives Qi’ra a guarded ambiguity that does more for the film than the romance strictly requires.
The one who walks off with the picture is Donald Glover. His Lando is pure poise, a gambler who treats every room as a stage, and the screen lifts whenever he saunters into it. The Han and Chewbacca partnership, meanwhile, is the emotional spine the film actually trusts, and it earns its warmth without straining.
The craft
Howard is an old professional, and the steadiness shows. Bradford Young’s cinematography commits to a genuinely murky, lived-in look, all smoke, grime and low light, which is a brave choice for a franchise that usually trades in clean spectacle, even if a couple of the darker sequences tip over into hard-to-read. The set pieces are the strongest material: a mountain-railway heist that earns its scale, and the Kessel Run finally staged as the white-knuckle smuggling stunt the original films only ever boasted about. John Powell’s score nods to John Williams without aping him, and slips in enough propulsion of its own to carry the chases. The pacing is brisk where it counts and only sags in the middle stretch, where the plot pauses to explain its own double-crosses.
How it stacks up
The natural comparison is Rogue One, the other anthology entry, and the two make an instructive pair. Rogue One was grim, war-film Star Wars, building to a gut-punch. Solo is the lighter cousin, closer in spirit to a Saturday-matinee heist and, in its banter and its scoundrels-on-a-job structure, to the cancelled-too-soon glory of Firefly than to anything in the main saga. It also sits in the slipstream of Guardians of the Galaxy, which proved how much fun this kind of disreputable-crew space adventure can be. Measured against the classic heist westerns it is clearly cribbing from, Solo is lightweight, but it knows it, and lightness handled with this much craft is not a failing.
Critics versus the rest of us
Critics have landed mixed-positive, around 70%, with audiences a touch cooler at 64%, and the recurring verdict is “entertaining but unnecessary”. Both halves of that are true. The film answers questions nobody needed answered, and a few of those answers (here is how he got the name, here is the dice) are groan-worthy fan service. The turbulent production and a general sense of franchise fatigue have coloured the reception more than the film on screen deserves. Strip away the expectations and what is left is a perfectly enjoyable adventure, which is roughly where the audience score is being unfair to it.
Verdict
I came to this braced for a misfire and found a genuinely good time. It is minor Star Wars, no argument, and it carries none of the weight of the saga films, but on its own modest terms it delivers: a likeable crew, a couple of excellent set pieces, Glover’s Lando, and the easy pleasure of watching a ship and a friendship come together. It is exactly the sort of film I happily put on again, undemanding, well made and warm, and that rewatchability does a lot of the lifting in my score. Judged as the breezy heist-western it set out to be rather than the event picture it was sold as, it clears the bar comfortably. 8⁄10.
Availability: On general release in UK cinemas now.
Update
Added since this review first appeared: Solo underperformed at the box office, which led Lucasfilm to pause the standalone Star Wars films, so the sequel its ending teases never arrived on screen. Qi’ra’s story and that final-act cameo were instead picked up across the wider franchise on Disney+. The film has been quietly reappraised since, with a fair number of viewers deciding it is the most purely fun of the recent run. It now streams on Disney+ and is available on disc and digital.
BBFC content advice
Rated 12A by the BBFC for moderate violence, threat.
The full BBFC content-advice breakdown for this release could not be retrieved at the time of writing; the BBFC release page was unavailable. The age rating and short consumer-advice line above are confirmed; the detailed notes by heading are omitted rather than reconstructed.
Source: British Board of Film Classification (bbfc.co.uk).
