SOLO: A Star Wars Story
You’ll get a good feeling about this adventure with Alden Ehrenreich as a young HAN SOLO
SCI-FI ADVENTURE Friday, Sky Premiere HD, 12noon & 8pm
THIS ENJOYABLY ZIPPY sci-fi adventure, the second Star Wars spin-off film following 2016’s Rogue One, fills in the story of what swaggering space pirate Han Solo got up to in his earlier days, taking us back to a time a decade or so before he first threw in his lot with Luke Skywalker and Princess Leia.
Alden Ehrenreich plays the younger version of Harrison Ford’s iconic character and we encounter him as a rascally orphan living by his wits on his scummy home planet Corellia. He is desperate to escape with his sweetheart Qi’ra (Emilia Clarke) but events transpire to separate them.
The story sends Han hither and yon, and back again, throwing him into the path of some familiar characters from the original trilogy and several new ones, including Woody Harrelson’s wry bandit Tobias Beckett and his crew, whom he joins for a daring raid on a train carrying the ultra-valuable starship fuel coaxium.
He also runs into Paul Bettany’s ruthless intergalactic gangster Dryden Vos and a militant droid called L3-37 (a motion-capture performance by Fleabag and Killing Eve creator Phoebe Waller-bridge), who is urging her fellow robots to shake off their cybernetic chains.
For all the sci-fi trappings, however, the movie has the feel of a Western, which is apt enough given Han’s image as the coolest gunslinger in the galaxy. All told, it hangs together very well, despite the fact that Ron Howard took up the helm mid-way through production after first-choice directors Phil Lord and Chris Miller of Lego Movie fame were fired over creative differences. 2018, 12, 135min