'Solo: A Star Wars Story' Is Reasonably Enjoyable, but Ultimately Unnecessary

Early on Solo: A Star Wars Story, I thought it was going to be awful.  The opening minutes were quite unremarkable, and then, it arrived at a key scene which did something so atrocious that I thought the movie would never recover from it – explaining why Han Solo is named “Han Solo.”

Wait, what?!

Everyone thought that the movie being named Solo instead of Han Solo was just for stylistic purposes.  But apparently, that wasn’t the case.  Rather, it was possibly titled Solo because the movie intended to reveal where the “Solo” in “Han Solo” came from.   For decades, the presumption is that “Han Solo” has always been the iconic character’s name.  So, it came as a huge shock that, though “Han” has always been his first name, the “Solo” surname was something assigned to him.

Giving an origin for Han Solo’s name is an incredibly bad move.  First of all, it’s completely needless.  “Han Solo” is not the kind of name that requires a story behind it.  But what’s worse is that the surname-origin reveal was done in the most uninventive and cheesiest manner possible.  People make fun of the “Martha” thing in Batman v Superman; the origin of the “Solo” surname is way, way more ridiculous.

Fortunately, Solo as a whole is not the dumpster fire I thought it was going to be from that Solo-surname scene.  Thankfully, it does have ample moments of fun, excitement, humor, and appeal.  And considering the production problems it underwent – in which original directors Phil Lord and Christopher Miller had a falling out with Disney, and had to be replaced by Ron Howard, who reshot about 70% of the movie – it has no business of being as adequately coherent and reasonably entertaining as it turned out being.

Nevertheless, the movie tends to over-explain Han Solo.  And this is its biggest pitfall.  In the first place, nobody asked for a Han Solo origin movie.  He’s already an established, realized character, and expanding his backstory from what has already been given in the original Star Wars trilogy is counter-productive.  In fact, it can even be argued that the sense of mystery of his past only makes him more interesting as a character, and any attempt to explore that past would only compromise the mystique that has been attributed to him by the longtime existing material.  Thus, even on paper, tackling his past is already disadvantageous – much less over-explaining particular facets of the character.

That Solo-surname scene was the worst instance of such, but it wouldn’t be the last.

Throughout the movie, references are made to certain Han Solo character details depicted in the original trilogy, and almost all of them lack nuance and thoughtfulness.

The referencing of the “Han shot first” element is probably the most forced.  In that scene, Han simply proceeded to shoot first.  There was no real build up to it; there was no real rationale on why Han was compelled to shoot first.  It was simply put there so it could basically mirror the Greedo scenario in Episode IV.  That’s lazy.  In my opinion, a more effective way to reference the “Han shot first” element is to show a moment wherein a fatal consequence (maybe like the death of Qi’ra, his love interest in this movie) came as a result of Han failing to shoot first.  That way, we get to have a deeper understanding on why Han was the type of person who would shoot first when we first encountered him in Episode IV.

However, there’s at least one good thing in having this Han Solo prequel.  And that is, we finally get to witness his legendary Kessel Run, which is easily the most thrilling sequence in the movie.

Another notable positive is seeing how the iconic partnership of Han Solo and Chewbacca started.  I don’t know if it’s the result of good execution on their narrative or it just successfully tapped into my nostalgic fondness for the duo.  But, regardless, I really enjoyed the dynamic of Han and Chewie in this movie.

As for the cast, it’s brimming with star power.  It’s like a bizarre team-up of Daenerys Targaryen, Haymitch Abernathy, the Vision, Childish Gambino, and Maeve Millay.  And, yet, the performances in general felt kind of underwhelming, and none of their respective characters gave off the impression that they are worth immortalizing.

Alden Ehrenreich is passable – not terrible, nor amazing.  At times, he seems to be effectively projecting the roguish swag that Harrison Ford’s Han Solo is known for.  But, overall, he – and the script – couldn’t deliver a convincing case that he’s Han Solo incarnate.  To succeed, he needed to pull off the kind of embodying of a legacy character that Chris Pine and the rest of the cast of the 2009 Star Trek reboot had accomplished with the Enterprise crew, but he just was unable to.

On the other hand, Donald Glover was a perfect cast for young Lando Calrissian.  But portraying him as a pansexual by establishing a romance between him and his droid just disappointingly degrades the originally cool character into a deviant.  Meanwhile, many found his droid/romantic interest, L3-37 (voiced by Phoebe Waller-Bridge), to be an undesirable presence because she was seemingly pushing a Social Justice Warrior agenda.  But I actually liked her, as I thought her characterization came off as something intended to make fun of SJWs rather than celebrate them.  And thus, I thought her “woke” personality was hilarious rather than obnoxious.  Nevertheless, in her quirky iciness, she’s far from being as endearing as Rogue One’s K-2SO.

As for the rest of the characters, well, they aren’t necessarily unpleasant or bland, but they don’t come off as striking characters either.  They’re just… there.

In the end, I managed to enjoy Solo: A Star Wars Story as the run-of-the-mill science fiction adventure film that it is.  However, ultimately, it’s a completely unnecessary Star Wars film.  It adds nothing to its much-revered franchise.  On the contrary, it only ruined some aspects of one of its most beloved characters.