HIGH NOON FOR ‘STAR WARS’ SERIES?
SOLO: A Star Wars Story begins with the Star Wars franchise’s signature tag line, “A long time ago, in a galaxy far, far away”. But it seems like only yesterday that the title character met his end in The Force Awakens, the first instalment in yet another trilogy that feels like it’s trying desperately to take another bite of the original apple – one that only looks shinier and juicier, by comparison, the more chomps are taken out it.
As far as Solo is concerned, this dutiful excavation of Han Solo’s early years performs all the necessary feats of fan service that viewers have come to expect from seemingly endless iterations of the series. The grouchy but somehow sexy curmudgeon that Harrison Ford created in the 1977 film and its sequels is shown here as a young man, living by his wits on Corellia, a planet where young people are routinely thrown into lives of Dickensian poverty and exploitation. What he wants to do more than anything else is fly, and as Solo opens, he’s stealing a precious fuel called coaxium, which he plans to sell on the black market to buy a ship of his own.
As rendered by the moodily attractive Alden Ehrenreich, who could have played a young Henry Hill in Goodfellas, this Solo bears only a glancing resemblance to the gruff, irreverent flyboy Ford portrayed so winningly.
Ehrenreich is a fine actor with a rakishly appealing persona, but the character’s inner darkness is only hinted at in the story as the betrayals and heartbreaks he endures come into focus.
For the most part, Solo is a conglomeration of set pieces we’ve seen before – from familiar chase scenes and a battle sequence reminiscent of World War I trench warfare, to a train heist followed by a decadent cocktail party thrown at an art-deco-inspired space yacht – with some tasty callbacks to Star Wars legend and lore thrown in to delight
Isla Fisher
wants her children to be “humble and kind”.
The Great Gatsby actress – who has Olive, 10, Elula, 7, and 3-year-old Montgomery with husband Sacha Baron Cohen – insists the values she wants to instil in them are no different to any other parent. lifelong aficionados.
Written by The Empire Strikes Back’s Lawrence Kasdan and his son, Jonathan, Solo has been conceived as a space western, with all the overcomplicated (but also childishly simple) heists and double-crosses the genre entails. But it never works up an authentic sense of excitement. – The Washington Post