Han Solo leads Lucasfilm's second standalone Star Wars film, passing Harrison Ford's role down to Alden Ehrenreich (Hail, Caesar!). The film follows Han and Chewbacca before they joined the Rebellion. Donald Glover (Atlanta) plays young Lando Calrissian.
Phil Lord and Christopher Miller, directors of The LEGO Movie, originally helmed the film. However, partway through shooting, the pair was taken off the film due to creative differences. The project was then given to Oscar-winning director Ron Howard.
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69%483 reviews
Growing up watching Star Wars movies, I don't remember ever wondering how Han and Chewbacca met. Nothing in this origin story of one of my favourite cinematic bromances enhances it or gives it a more powerful meaning. There is a lot of obedient connecting of dots going on in Solo: A Star Wars Story when those dots just do not need to be connected.
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With Solo: A Star Wars Story, director Ron Howard has ditched the heavy-handed, space soap opera approach of recent installments for an old fashioned Saturday matinee spectacle. For filmmakers such as The Last Jedi's Rian Johnson, who was four years old when Star Wars: A New Hope opened in cinemas in 1977, tapping into nostalgia is chic and zeitgeisty: part of the contemporary sensibility. Given Howard actually made movies the younger gen filmmakers get nostalgic for (including Cocoon, Willow and Night Shift) it is perhaps unsurprising that his venture into the galaxy far, far away feels more genuine in spirit, and less like an exercise machine-tooled to evoke memories and pre-existing sentiment.
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You can feel the two versions of Solo: A Star Wars Story tugging at each other throughout.
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Though burdened with a slow start and enough thirsty fan-service to power Comic-Con's Hall H for a decade, it has a kicky, kinetic heist movie at its heart, and its action sequences are machine-tooled spectacles of the first order.
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Far better than we had any right to expect. Thrilling set-pieces, spine-tingling iconography and a Han/Chewie bromance to savour.
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It doesn't take itself too seriously, but it also holds whatever irreverent, anarchic impulses it might possess in careful check.
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Delivers exactly what it promises. It is a very competent and, at times, riotously enjoyable film.
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Howard and the Kasdans play the series game without ever raising the stakes, defaulting to dull and dutiful when they might have blasted off into creative anarchy.
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Despite the intermittent lags, the production proves to be more than a salvage operation thanks mainly to those engagingly choreographed performances, led by an irresistibly charismatic title turn from Alden Ehrenreich.
Full reviewSolo: A Star Wars Story is available to stream in New Zealand now on Google Play and Apple TV and Disney+.
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