“Solo: A Star Wars Story” (about nothing in particular)
I went into this movie in a foul mood: it was a bad weather, low energy February afternoon and I just wanted to be entertained with a library DVD. I was not. At two hours and fifteen minutes, this bloated lucadisney package was an hour and fifteen minutes too long. I’ll attempt to summarize the plot, but it’s been four days since I watched the movie and my notes were written in pencil and stained with bong water, so, no promises.
“Solo” is another Ron Howard directed movie, and, sorry to say, he’s not improving with age. The movie starts out on some trash hole planet. Young Han (Alden Ehrenreich) is a scavenger in a colony of child scavengers working for an evil tube wormess, Lady Proxima. He has a hot British gf (Emilia Clarke), also trapped in the runaway kid factory. Han has found some amount of valuable fuel to bribe customs with, and he and his girl manage to cause enough of a distraction to escape their tube worm overloads and flee in a stolen cruiser—things are looking up. But only Han makes it onto the freighter bound for distant lands; his hottie is re-snatched by the wormies. Oh, and for anyone who cares, this is where Han becomes Han Solo (“Family name?” some uniform asks. “Uh…I don’t have one.” Uniform face: "Han…Solo.”) There are a few other “reveals," but none worth my time to recount. If this has been boring to read, please blame the screenwriters, actors, and Ron Howard—they aimed for marketshare mediocracy and only hit that once in a while.
Apparently Han is so bummed out about losing his little hottie that he joins the empire’s ranks as a pilot, gets shipped to some swamp planet, survives a pointless battle scene, and joins up with Woody Harrelson and some other lovable scoundrels posing as soldiers to raid Imperial supplies. I don’t remember Harrelson’s character’s name or care to look it up; I’ll assume he took this pitiful role to pay for some hydroponic upgrades on his coffee/pot farm in Maui. Oh, right, around here is where Han meets Chewbacca, in a mud pit fight to the death. As Han is tossed in to meet his furry fate, he tries to explain to a faceless guard who Woody Harrelson actually is. The guard yells in response: “I don’t care!” If that’s all that holds the entire plot together, why should I care either? You know what? I’m done with the story line. From here on out, the movie is just one kabooming chase scene and a bunch of bad lines.
If you must know, Han reconnects with his old flame on some British bad guy’s space yacht and she travels with him, Chewy, Lando Calrissian (Donald Glover), and Lando’s spunky robot girlfriend (easily the most interesting character in the movie) to some far away land to steal mega fuel to give to the British bad guy and his mob. A few of the things I did during their long, boring trip to the mining planet: washed my hair, pumped 30 arm curls, made ikebana, texted, planned out a few clothing dye projects, wrote two bad poems.
When the grumpy cast finally got to wherever the hell they were going, I was reminded of how every planet the Empire colonizes looks like a Roman coliseum: there’s a big stagey area inside high stone walls where slaves in chains shuffle around getting whipped by overlords. Which brings me to another point about the Empire: everyone in this future reality has a British accent. Okay, fine, it’s all filmed in Britain now, but when masked rebel fighters and evil mob overloads have the same London city accent, it strains my ability to be “emotionally engaged” (or any other kind of engaged).
In case you’re wondering, yes, bad guys shoot at the fleeing Han and company from ten feet away and miss. Someone shoots a laser canon 20 feet from the Millennium Falcon and misses it. Yeah, not much to hold my attention.
A little bit on the actors, then I’ll wrap up this review. The guy who played Han Solo was able to match Harrison Ford’s performances, if that counts for anything. His girlfriend turned mob princess/dark side apprentice was okay, but she didn’t have much to work with. I was constantly reminded that acting was not the point of this movie; “Solo” was more about licensed spinoff video games and happy meals toys.
Production values? C+. Some CGI studio wage slaves worked hard; most of the landscapes and some of the alien creatures were cool. But that’s the Star Wars brand. If there weren’t interesting planets and trippy aliens this movie would just be a few bored actors standing around in furry coats and leather boots. The music is nothing spectacular, just the usual SW theme songs plus tense plucky violins when dialogue was especially lame—so much marketable mediocracy.
“Solo” claimed 2 hours and 15 minutes of my life and left me feeling hollow: yet another bite had been taken out of my early movie memories. I saw “The Empire Strikes Back” in the theater when I was 3. And I remember parts of it, it was so damn exciting. There’s nothing exciting, new, or notable about the “Star Wars” franchise anymore—it’s past time for it to fall quietly into a black hole.