Solo- A Star Wars Story

[zico]

7/10. A rather modestly titled stand-alone Star Wars action movie but without the tedious bits of the Star Wars universe, so Star Wars for people who aren’t that keen on Star Wars movies. Good mix of action and tongue-in-check humour, and enjoyed it a lot more than I expected.

I only went to see this because I have a Cineworld Unlimited card and so could see it for free (and even for free, was wondering if it was worth 2 ¼ hours of my life). I’m not a Star Wars fan, so wasn’t overly thrilled by a spin-off starring the rather dull pairing of Han Solo and Chewbacca. Pity the poor Shakepearean RADA-trained actor who gets to play Chewbacca and the only dialogue they ever get to say is either “RrrAARGGGH!” (action sequences) or “RrrAARGGGH?” (questioning Solo’s plans) accompanied by some random arm-waving.

This is just a straightforward caper/heist movie with planets, rockets and as usual, lots of surprisingly inaccurate laser pistols, but without the irritating faux-mysticism of the Dark Force or wizened bat-eared philosophical creatures with sentence structures annoying, they have. The film is light and fun.

This is just a Han Solo and Chewbacca “origins” story, so they can do whatever they like here, as long as our two heroes survive for the other 90 Star Wars sequels. The film starts unpromisingly with some on-screen texts setting the scene with EXPLANATIONS that resemble Trump’s TWEETS in their random USE of capitalisation. Basically, bad guys, oppressed people, and HYPERFUEL is really important and expensive. We meet Solo as a streetwise youngster on his grotty home planet, full of dilipidated grey concrete buildings, chemical smog and desolate wasteland (filmed entirely on location in Middlesborough) where all the inhabitants are forced to speak criminally bad dialogue.

Fortunately, Solo escapes these horrors in an exciting scene where he negotiates a range of queues at ID and boarding check-points at a spaceport and then he’s off to more interesting and scenic planets, with better dialogue and impressive mountain ranges, having adventures and meeting up with wisecracking renegades (are there any other kind?) to zoom around doing daring heists of dilithium crystals (or hyperfuel), before getting in trouble and then having to do other heists for different renegades while still other outlaws get involved, and somewhere along the line, being paired up with the Millenium Falcon. I have to say the Falcon seems to have rather too many Jumbo-jet style levers to pull and buttons to press considering it's a futuristic spaceship. You half expect the cockpit to have a BHS video player.

Woody Harrelson is good in this even though he seems to have skim-read the script and acts like he thinks it’s a Western. Emilia Clarke (Khalessi from Game of Thrones) demonstrates her range of acting abilities all the way from “A” to “B”, convincingly showing that with Star Wars, it’s really not about the acting. In a couple of movie firsts, we get a character with freckles (and lots of them) and hallejulah, at last a non-irritating Star Wars robot with a neat line in sarcasm.

It just wouldn’t be a Star Wars film without a spaceship going through impossibly narrow gaps, and this film doesn’t disappoint on that score. There’s a good balance of action, wisecracks and banter, with also some good visual jokes and I like the overall tone much more than the normal pretentious and ponderosity of the usual Star Wars genre.

Apparently this film was massively edited, after running into trouble with the original director and virtually starting again from scratch, but you can’t see the joins.