ENTERTAINMENT NEWS - Solo: A Star Wars story shouldn’t be as good as it is. By all accounts, Solo: A Star Wars story should be rubbish. It should fall flat with fans. But it doesn’t.
It’s a film with a troubled development; original directors Phil Lord and Chris Miller were booted off the project late in production to be replaced by Ron Howard, who apparently ordered a lot of reshoots.
It’s also a film that has rubbed a lot of fans up the wrong way since it was announced; many have pondered whether Han Solo, unquestionably one of the most popular characters in the Star Wars universe even needed an origin story, and the idea of anyone other than Harrison Ford playing the roguish space smuggler struck still more as bordering on sacrilegious.
And yet, against these odds, Solo: A Star Wars Story has turned out to be fantastic. It’s certainly good enough to warrant another film exploring the history of its titular character further and, at the very least, it should prompt executives over at the Fox Network to seriously consider rebooting Firefly.
Joss Whedon’s space western, incidentally, is a decent starting point for Solo; unlike the tentpole Star Wars films (The Force Awakens, The Last Jedi), Solo is bereft of honourable characters and high-stakes in which the fate of the galaxy hangs in the balance. No, this is a story in which the moral yardstick is a self-admitted rascal and, while he has a moral streak of sorts, its shade is quite definitely grey.
The film’s story begins on Corellia, a planet-sized slum in which children are pressed into slavery by gangsters in return for food and shelter. The audience is spared any footage of Han as a kid – Lucasfilm has clearly learnt a valuable lesson from The Phantom Menace – and they catch up with him as a 20-something urchin whose only desire is to get the money together to buy a ship and get off the planet with his lover Qi’ra.
