Han Solo (Alden Ehrenreich) has little room to grow or change.
How did Han Solo meet Chewbacca? How did he meet Lando Calrissian? How did he become captain of the Millennium Falcon? How did he get his blaster? Just what is the Kessel Run, anyway, and how did Han fly it in the apparently unheard-of time of “12 parsecs”?
Solo: A Star Wars Story informs us that, astonishingly, all of Han’s backstory that we’ve heard mentioned across the Star Wars movies occurred in the span of a few days! And it involves a lot of enormous coincidence and everybody knowing everybody else, even in this big wide galaxy. Why, it’s almost as if the Force were strong with Han. Except we already knew that there’s no mystical energy field that controls his destiny.
The Force is about the only Star Wars trope that isn’t checked off in the box-ticking exercise that is this Star Wars-flavored juice* drink of a movie. (*Contains 10 percent juice.) We get lots of interesting planets, funny droids, giant space monsters menacing passing starships and a visit to an exotic bar where creatures make alien music and humans drink weird booze. There are shootouts with Imperial stormtroopers, daring last-minute escapes and the Millennium Falcon being tracked by a mysterious masked figure even though its captain thinks he’s too hot-shit for that to happen. And that’s all cool. That’s great. But it’s only backdrop.
It’s the story — the actual, you know, meat of the thing — that fails to give us any real reason to show up. The muddled heist plot about Woody Harrelson leading a gang out to steal some incredibly valuable and powerful starship “hyperfuel” gives zero opportunity for us to learn anything about his latest recruit, Han (Alden Ehrenreich), that we didn’t already know. The stakes are so low for Han: We know he can’t die; we know he can’t divert too much from his scoundrel-with-a-heart-of-gold persona. Ehrenreich is barely younger than Harrison Ford was when they shot the first Star Wars movie — he’s already an adult, and clearly not too far from his meeting with Luke Skywalker and Ben Kenobi on Tatooine — so there’s no temporal room for him to change or grow. He’s a character on a treadmill.
And maybe even that wouldn’t matter if we were just killing time with the Han Solo we know. But Ehrenreich isn’t only a little short for Han Solo; he lacks Ford’s charisma, his ineffable oddball way of being funny and serious at the same time. Ehrenreich is cute but he’s bland. Ford blazed with precarious danger; Ehrenreich’s Han is, well, cuddly. That’s not right.
