So last night me and a friend went to see the new Star Wars Anthology film from Director Ron Howard and with main cast actors Alden Ehrenreich, Woody Harrelson, Emilia Clarke, Donald Glover and Paul Bettany. This new Science Fiction (or Fantasy if you lean that way) film is the latest in Disney’s plethora of Star Wars films they are churning out since buying Lucasfilm. Like Rogue One (R1)this one was given a 12A rating although seemed less gritty than R1.
Warning, potential spoilers ahead…… This film is based on the young life of Han Solo and how he became the rebel we know and love, how he met some of the iconic figures of the original trilogy, Including the blossoming bromance between Han and Chewy. You also get to see an amazing looking newer Millennium Falcon and how Han comes to love the infamous ship.
Alden Ehrenreich does a brilliant job of portraying the cheeky, lovable rogue Han Solo. showing his origins as a slum rat and how he planned to get out with his love Qi’ra, of course nothing goes to plan and he vows to go back for her. A few years later he’s been kicked out of the imperial fleet for now following orders and is well on his way to becoming the Han we know. He hooks up with another thief (Harrelson) who works for a 
notorious crime boss Dryden (Bettany) and adventure ensures. Crossing paths with Lando (Glover) and showing how that relationships started. When he comes across Qi’ra again she isn’t the downtrodden anymore and is the right hand of Dryden and although there is still something between them she is still not free.
Obviously the main part of the movie was to show the intro of Han and Chewy and how they came to get the Falcon, it is a predictable Star Wars film but for me that didn’t pose a problem. It was a great adventure in an established universe with characters we already know and love. It is always going to be compared with R1 and to be fair the former is a better film but I think that is more due to the gritty/dark story that particular film told. Solo holds its own as a brilliant origin story to one of the most famous Star Wars characters.
I also thought it was good that they showed the most famous boast of the Falcon, the Kessel run which was made in in 12 Parsecs. This was always a bug bear for me as when it’s said in the film you assume they are talking about speed and at the same time you know Parsecs is a distance measurement, so it never made sense. Maybe it was explained elsewhere in comics or animated series but I have’t seen them. So it was nice in this film to see how this came about. It makes more sense to me now.
Ron Howard did a great job with this film and I would definitely recommend seeing it. I saw it last night (Thursday) and will be back on Sunday to watch it with some other friends, this time in 4DX for the forst time, so I will see how that goes 🙂
