Author: David Edelstein / Source: Vulture
The Han Solo “origin” feature, Solo: A Star Wars Story, is smoothly directed by the reliable Hollywood hand Ron Howard and smoothly written by Lawrence Kasdan (who co-wrote, among many other things, the best of all the Star Wars movies, The Empire Strikes Back) and his son, Jonathan.
Whatever the upheavals behind the scenes, what’s onscreen is just that — smooth. The movie is a good old-fashioned linear piece of storytelling, different in kind from the disjointed, multi-narrative spectacles of which Disney has made a specialty.We follow the young Han (Alden Ehrenreich) as he escapes from a fascist planet, reluctantly leaving behind his love, Qi’ra (Emilia Clarke); enlists with the army of the burgeoning Empire as a means of making money to retrieve Qi’ra; and falls in with a group of interplanetary thieves headed by Beckett (Woody Harrelson) and his gal pal, Val (Thandie Newton). The big, hairy wookie Chewbacca (Joonas Suotamo) begins as Han’s antagonist, but comes aboard under dramatic circumstances. Later, to obtain a ship, the rejiggered team goes in search of the slick young gambler, Lando Calrissian, played by Donald Glover — who is having a big anti-fascist moment himself. The murderous villain isn’t a Darth Whatever but an elegant gangster named Dryden Vos, played by Paul Bettany in well-tailored monochromatic suits and with a face that looks to have been raked by talons — or a woman’s fingernails?
He’d deserve it.The creature designs are wittier than anything since the first Star Wars films, from the giant water-worm (I don’t know the exact species) with the voice of a Knight Who Says “Ni!” to the nightclub-singing duo of a fish and a black woman with some sort of giant, ringlike appurtenance where her mouth should be. One player at Lando’s card table has branches sticking out of his head with multiple eyes — which Han commands he keep on his own cards. Another has a mouth like a wood chipper that shreds the cards when he loses. It’s very funny. There’s a superb new robot creation — a bowlegged female named L3 (voiced by Phoebe Waller-Bridge) with a navigational genius and complicated relationship with Lando. She loves him but convinces herself it will never work,…
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