Solo: A Star Wars Story arrived in 2018 as the second Star Wars anthology film, following Rogue One. Ron Howard directed it. Lawrence Kasdan and Jonathan Kasdan wrote it. It runs 135 minutes. It tells how Han Solo met Chewbacca and Lando Calrissian, and it is one of the most expensive films ever made, with a budget near $300 million. It is also the least necessary Star Wars film, and that is the whole problem.
Trailer, via Star Wars.
Alden Ehrenreich Picks Up Harrison Ford’s Blaster
Alden Ehrenreich plays Han Solo. Harrison Ford, who played the character in earlier films, met with him and gave him advice. That is a hard seat to fill, and Ehrenreich fills it without ever quite owning it. His Han is more of an idealist than the smuggler audiences know, as the actor put it: “I think the main thing that’s different is that the Han we meet in this film is more of an idealist. He has certain dreams that he follows, and we watch how it affects him as those dreams meet new realities—realities that are harder and more challenging than he’d expected.”
That is a fair description of the movie’s plan. The film wants to show the dreams before the cynicism. It mostly shows the seams.
Donald Glover Steals Every Scene as Lando
Donald Glover plays Lando Calrissian, a smuggler and gambler on the rise. Billy Dee Williams, who played Lando in the earlier films, met with Glover and gave him advice. Glover is the best thing in Solo. He plays Lando as a man already performing himself, and the performance is funny and light in a movie that otherwise grinds. Phoebe Waller-Bridge voices L3-37, Lando’s droid navigator and companion. She is the second-best thing.
The rest of the cast is deep and underused. Woody Harrelson plays Tobias Beckett, a criminal and Han’s mentor, a character based on Long John Silver from Treasure Island. Emilia Clarke plays Qi’ra, Han’s childhood friend and romantic interest. Thandiwe Newton plays Val Beckett, Beckett’s partner. Paul Bettany plays Dryden Vos. Joonas Suotamo plays Chewbacca. Erin Kellyman plays Enfys Nest. Linda Hunt voices Lady Proxima. Jon Favreau voices Rio Durant.
The Kessel Run and the Coaxium Heist
The plot is a chain of heists. On Corellia, orphans Han and Qi’ra try to escape a local gang. They bribe an Imperial officer with stolen coaxium, a starship fuel, for passage on a transport. Qi’ra is captured before she can board. Han vows to return for her and joins the Imperial Navy as a flight cadet, where he is given the surname “Solo.”
Three years later he is an infantryman on Mimban, expelled from the Imperial Flight Academy for insubordination. He meets a trio of criminals posing as Imperial soldiers, led by Beckett. Han tries to blackmail his way into the crew. Beckett has him arrested and thrown into a pit to be fed to a Wookiee prisoner named Chewbacca. Han can understand Chewbacca’s language. He talks him into escaping together, and the two get out alive.
Beckett enlists them to steal coaxium on Vandor-1. The Cloud Riders, space pirates led by Enfys Nest, arrive to hijack it. The shipment is destroyed. Val and the crewman Rio die. Beckett admits he was stealing for Dryden Vos, a high-ranking boss in the Crimson Dawn syndicate. Han and Chewbacca volunteer for another job to clear the debt.
They go to Dryden’s yacht. Han finds Qi’ra there, now Dryden’s top lieutenant. Han proposes stealing unrefined coaxium from the mines on Kessel. Dryden approves but sends Qi’ra along. She takes them to Lando, who they hope will lend them the Millennium Falcon.
A Schedule That Never Lets Up
The film moves through its set pieces at a steady clip, and the shape of it is easy to lay out:
| Point in the film | What happens | Where |
|---|---|---|
| Opening | Han and Qi’ra try to escape a gang | Corellia |
| Three years later | Han meets Beckett’s crew | Mimban |
| First job | Coaxium heist goes wrong | Vandor-1 |
| Second job | Dryden Vos orders repayment | Dryden’s yacht |
| Third job | Unrefined coaxium is stolen | Kessel |
| Later | Lando and the Falcon enter | — |
That is a lot of movie. It is also a movie that keeps explaining things nobody asked about. The Kessel run, the surname, the blaster, the friendship. Every beat is an answer to a question the original trilogy never needed answered.
Ron Howard Replaces Phil Lord and Christopher Miller
The production history is part of the story. George Lucas began developing a Han Solo prequel in 2012 and hired Lawrence Kasdan to write it. After Lucas sold Lucasfilm to The Walt Disney Company in 2012, Kasdan was hired to write The Force Awakens, and his son Jonathan finished the Solo script. Principal photography started in January 2017 at Pinewood Studios with directors Phil Lord and Christopher Miller. Both were fired in June 2017 after creative differences with Lucasfilm. Howard replaced them.
That is not gossip. It is the reason the film feels stitched. A movie that changes directors mid-shoot can still work, but Solo carries the marks. The tone shifts. The comedy and the crime-drama grit sit next to each other without ever blending.
The Casting Search That Took 3,000 Actors
The search for Han was its own saga. In January 2016, a list of actors in consideration was revealed, including Emory Cohen, Scott Eastwood, Ansel Elgort, Dave Franco, Blake Jenner, Logan Lerman, Jack Reynor and Miles Teller. By March 2016, Taron Egerton, Ehrenreich and Reynor were on a shortlist. In May 2016, Ehrenreich was reported as cast, confirmed at Star Wars Celebration Europe III two months later.
Miller called it one of “the hardest casting challenges of all time,” adding that they “saw over 3,000 people for the part.” Others who auditioned included:
- Charlie Cox
- Tom Felton
- Colton Haynes
- Luke Hemsworth
- Anthony Ingruber
- Cameron Monaghan
- Rami Malek
- Jack O’Connell
- Glen Powell
- Chandler Riggs
- Nick Robinson
- Aaron Taylor-Johnson
- Ed Westwick
That is a lot of actors for a role that was always going to be compared to Ford. The film never solves that. It casts well and then asks the audience to forget the original.
What Solo Gets Right
The film received mostly positive reviews from critics, who praised the cast, particularly Ehrenreich and Glover, along with the visuals, score and action sequences. That praise is not wrong. The Kessel sequence moves. The train heist on Vandor-1 has real weight. The production design is rich. The score does its job.
But competent is not the same as worth making. Solo is a film built from answers. It explains the Falcon, the friendship, the name. None of it deepens the original trilogy. Most of it flattens it. The mystery of Han Solo was part of his appeal. This film trades that mystery for a checklist.
The Verdict on Solo
Solo: A Star Wars Story is a competent film and a cautionary one. It has a good cast, a few strong sequences and a budget near $300 million that never quite shows up on screen as wonder. It has Glover, and Glover is worth the ticket. It has Waller-Bridge, and she is worth the ticket too. It has Ehrenreich doing honest work in an impossible role.
What it does not have is a reason to exist beyond the franchise’s appetite for its own past. The film is not a disaster. It is a shrug, and a shrug from Star Wars costs more than most films’ best efforts. The anthology experiment produced Rogue One and then this. One of those was a story worth telling. The other was a backstory nobody needed, told well enough to pass.
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