Alden Ehrenreich is no Harrison Ford. That's the bad news about Solo: A Star Wars Story.
Everyone who feared Ford was irreplaceable as the iconic character was right. Ehrenreich would never be mistaken for Ford in any sense. We've seen better impressions of Ford's drawl on Saturday Night Live.
But that's also the great news about Solo: A Star Wars Story. Rather than try to mimic Ford's work beat-for-beat, Ehrenreich has found a way to make the role his own, and in doing so to show us this familiar character from a fresh perspective.
That reassurance comes quickly, thank goodness. Your mileage may vary, but it took this reviewer about seven minutes to decide she was fully on board with this version of Han.
Which is fortunate, because Solo really only works if you care a whole lot about Han – either because you're a diehard fan from way back, or because you're a newbie who simply likes the cut of Ehrenreich's jib.
For once, this is a Star Wars movie that's more interested in the small picture than the big one. Solo is the most intimate, ground-level Star Wars movie we've ever gotten, and the visuals are correspondingly gritty and grimy.
Solo really only works if you care a whole lot about Han Solo.
Just about everything is rendered in mud-brown or concrete-gray. Lando, with, his technicolor dream capes, is one of the only reliable sources of color in this entire thing. The action ranges from messy to exhilarating, and all of it has a desperate edge that fits with the story Solo is trying to tell.
That grayness, thankfully, does not extend to Solo's tone. This movie is plenty funny, even if it's not the all-out comedy fans may have expected when directors Phil Lord and Chris Miller were in charge.
Whatever measures Ron Howard (their replacement) took to right the ship seems to have worked – you'd never know this film suffered so much turmoil behind the scenes if you hadn't already read the reports. Justice League this ain't.
As for the drama unfolding on the screen, Solo doesn't even bother trying to pretend we don't already know how things play out afterwards.
Instead, it alternates between exploring characters, relationships, and events that we don't already know about, and explaining every little detail ever established about its hero.
We get answers to questions we never thought to ask in the first place, and they'll matter to you exactly to the extent that Han himself (or his friends and foes) matters to you.
Those other characters can be a mixed bag. Donald Glover's Lando Calrissian is exactly as perfect as you'd imagine – the man knows how to rock a space cape. And his droid pal, L3-37 (Phoebe Waller-Bridge) seems destined to be Solo's breakout character.
Others, like Qi'ra (Emilia Clarke), feel undercooked, almost more like setups for spinoff novels and comic series than fully developed film characters. By the end, it becomes difficult to keep track of some of these people – what they want, what they're trying to accomplish, why they're doing whatever they're doing.
Solo reminds us that the galaxy far, far away has room for all kinds of stories, from the epic and glossy to the small and scuffed-up.
But if Solo feels, at times, like the writers are going down a fan service checklist – here's how Han met this character or that one, how he acquired this or that, how he got here or there – at least the line items are handled with enough care and affection that it's easy to forgive any narrative jerkiness.
The "fuck yeah!" moments deliver. The emotional beats hit. Solo might not be exactly what you expect from a Star Wars movie, and that's okay.
Just as Ehrenreich expands our understanding of Han by showing us his interpretation, Solo reminds us that the galaxy far, far away has room for all kinds of stories, from the epic and glossy to the small and scuffed-up.
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Topics Star Wars
