Han Solo Anthology Film - "Solo: A Star Wars Story"*

Passed them with flying colours, he did!

 

Really? Because lots of people have won Academy Awards for impersonating historical figures (Philip Seymour Hoffman, for a fairly-recent example). Not sure why the same wouldn't apply to an actor.

 

I felt the same way. Definitley on par with Rogue One and a lot better than The Last Jedi. I might even say it is nearly as good as The Force Awakens since I thought Rogue One was, and I think Solo is on par with Rogue One.

Spoiler

Han Shot First.

I thought Alden did a very good job portraying a young Han Solo and as the movie progressed, he seemed to fall into the role even more. But Donald Glover stole the scenes he was in. He nailed Lando and was damn near perfect.

I thought the story was fantastic as it answered many things:

Kessel Run in 12 parsecs (rounding down. LOL)
The dice.
How he and Chewbacca met.
Why Chewbacca is nicknamed Chewie
How he obtained the Millennium Falcon from Lando
And the ending sets up a possible story involving some "Gangster" on Tatooine.

I stayed away from spoilers and was surprised by the cameo at the end.

I thought Woody Harrelson's character was interesting but predictable. Though, Emilia Clarke's character surprised me, especially at the end. Paul Bettany's character I could've lived without learning about him. Don't know why. I don't know if it is him or the character itself. It does seem, though, every time Bettany plays a villain, he plays the same one in different clothes and setting. Not much range in his acting, I guess.

And we got to see Wicket in human form (LOL.) As usual, Warwick Davis had a role in a Star Wars movie.

 

Thanks for your short review, but “Why Chewbacca is nicknamed Chewie”? I never tough that this can be some mystery that have to be revealed…

 

Not much a mystery, but the reason why he is called Chewie by Han. Because Han was too lazy to call him by his real name. LOL

 

Most people with names consisting more than one or two syllable share Chewie's faith in this regard...

 

Why would that have been a disaster ? (No offense). But some of the greatest biographical films of the
last several decades have been with an actor/actress doing, in fact, a two hour "impersonation ".
Sissy Spacek - Coal Miner's Daughter
Will Smith - Ali
Chadwick Boseman as James Brown in "Get On Up"
And a simply remarkable performance by Jamie Foxx as Ray Charles in "Ray". Is it Jamie Foxx or
Ray Charles? The "impersonation" is spot on for 2 hours...

 

He's not playing Harrison Ford, He's playing Han Solo and those actors are never trying to aim to do a perfect impression of the historical figure they aim to capture their essence as a character. Alden's job was to play Han Solo in a way that felt right for where his character was at the time of the story which I think he managed to accomplish. If people were looking to be fooled into thinking that's Harrison Ford up there then they were never going to get that.

I think the title of this video is a bit stupid but I think it's an interesting comparison of the way they portrayed the character.

 

enjoyed the film a good deal. I actually am for the side movies or whatever we wanna call them really going out and being different so I was happy to just go enjoy a more simple diversion of a picture.

minor spoiler:

I do think Chewies characterization was somewhat glossed over. I had always understood chewie to owe han a life debt so he would never leave him but the movie doesn't really say that and instead says he is trying to make money to save his family/tribe. then later he saves some wookies on kessel though it is unclear if this is his family but seems like they kinda forgot to give chewie a reason to stay with han after this. suppose they could explore it more and maybe they felt audiences today would look at a life debt as a little to much like a owner slave kinda thing. minor distraction for me.

 

The movie has been playing for one day, could we maybe avoid spoilers for a bit longer?

 

Because....Han Solo is not a real life historical figure and neither is Harrison Ford. Han Solo is a ROLE. That's a huge difference. This isn't some docudrama. This is a movie about a fictional character in a story. Han Solo is NOT Harrison Ford, just a role Harrison Ford once played 40 years ago and once again briefly recently. Roles are meant to be passed to other actors who make it their own. Harrison would be the first to tell you that.

It would be like if when they recast Bond in the 70s they just hired a look a like to do a Sean Connery impresssion or every time they do a new Batman movie or Superman movie they hire a Christian Bale look a like or a Christopher Reeve look a like. Hell they sort of did that with Superman Returns and it just didn't work.

Now, if this was a movie about the making of Star Wars or a docudrama about the early years of Harrison Ford, then yes , get Anthony Ingruber to do his youtube impersonation of Harrison for two hours. That just doesn't work for this kind of movie.

By the way, just saw this movie and it was good. Not great or incredible, but good fun. Starts off clunky and a bit oddly paced, but about a quarter of the way in it comes together. Alden was absolutely fine as Han. I believed he was Han. There were even moments where he subtly injected Ford inflections and mannerisms into his Han without doing an outright impersonation. If this movie does well, i have no problem with a Han Solo trilogy with Alden's Han.

 

Actually, it's nothing like that. We're talking about a prequel, not a sequel, and one set back before the original and filmed decades later. Getting someone with a strong physical resemblance and who can also convincingly pull off the character seems like a pretty basic prerequisite.

 

Let me ask you a question for the sake of my own curiousity. Were you one of the " Anthony Ingruber or bust" supporters? Not trying to provoke anything...just curious.

 

One thing I find weird is many of the people railing against Alden being picked for Solo because he isn't a clone of Harrison Ford don't raise one bit of ire against Don Glover as Lando. Other than being African American ,without the wardrobe and make up, he looks as different from Billy Dee Williams as Alden does from Harrison. Perhaps even more so. I will give it to Glover that their voices are a bit closer, but it's still clear it isn't Billy Dee in the cape.

If the standard for Han is supposidly we have to find a near perfect double of Harrison Ford, shouldn't there also be a demand that we had found a near perfect double for Billy Dee Williams?

Of course the answer to both is no. It would be silly to make that to be the main criteria when casting one of these movies.
I mean, it isn't like Lucasfilm cast Danny Devito as Han or something similarly daft. If you went by that strict standard, then this movie wouldnt ever had been made. ( which I suspect is the REAL reason for all the over the top criticism of Alden ehrenreich being cast, I.E. the belief this movie's very existence is ruining childhoods,and Alden was the easiest target to complain and rail on about, but that's another thread topic.)

I mean, if you happen to find an actor that looks a bit like Harrison Ford and has decent acting chops and aren't just reciting old lines of past Star Wars movies and doing a literal impersonation, by all means hire guy. However, the main criteria should be who is the best in terms of an original performance. It should be based on talent....not because the genetics happen to make you look like someone else who once played that role.

 

Hell, Harrison Ford wasnt even Han Solo in The Force Awakens to me.

If youre going to see this movie...bring your imagination.

If not, stay home.

 

I didn't expect Solo to be unpredictable. But TFA was too much of a rehash of ANH.

 

Glover's Lando has a coolness factor much like the way Billy Dee Williams played him. Harrison had it too, though in a different way. Alden hasn't. He lacks that special something.

 

I'm not enough of a Star Wars fan at my age to be a "supporter" of anything. But that other guy did a much better Han Solo than the guy they hired.

 

As people who’ve seen the movie report that Alden is just fine, the people who haven’t keep talking about how bad he is...

 

He's okay. Not terrible. Not great. Just okay. Does the job. Could've been better, could've been worse.

 

Just to get a random sample I dropped his name into Twitter just now, and the tweets that came up were almost all positive (the worst I saw was “not really feeling him”), with several of them mentioning that Star Wars fans owe him an apology. Opinions will never be unanimous about Star Wars (or anything) but it doesn’t seem like he’s being received as a disaster in the part.

 

I agree with a lot of your points, but I felt like this was an example of "film by committee," where they had about two dozen bullet points to establish, and they cobbled together a story that shoved them all in.

It's not a terrible film (at all), and I think it's very well-made and the performances were all earnest and sincere, but it just felt very "by the numbers" and predictable. Not great, not terrible... at best, I give it a "C." I also felt two major deaths <character names omitted> seemed arbitrary and out of nowhere, just done for shock value. One major character that dies about 1/3 of the way in died so suddenly, I kept expecting for this character to pop back into the film... and I was a little disappointed that they didn't.

One technical flaw I'll point out: it's very hard to shoot an actor in a mask and convince the audience that they're a living, breathing creature. There were a couple of bad angles on Chewbacca where you could really see the rubber mouth and see the mechanics of it. This is the kind of thing that Lucas could do better than anybody, because of his great sense of timing and knowing how long to hold on a shot before the audience starts dissecting the images.

All in all, this felt like somebody's idea of an imitation of Star Wars, not a movie with a real heart and soul. I wanted to like it, but there ain't no "there" there.

 

Yes...based on doing an impersonation with dialogue that he probably spent hours perfecting a delivery to dazzle people on short youtube videos. Give you or I the same luxury and we could probably be good at an impression too.Give him a fresh script without anything to fall back on and see how he does. I'm sure he's a nice guy and all, but everyone who has been yelling about Anthony Ingruber not getting the role miss the point of even doing this movie, and it's one we all need to acknowledge if we are to be honest. That point is to begin the process of separating the character of Han Solo from the persona of Harrison Ford.

Look, I get the trepidation of even recasting the OT leads. However it's inevitable. The characters of Luke Skywalker, Princess Leia and Han Solo will live on long after we are all gone. They have a life beyond that of the actors that originally portrayed them. Eventually these characters will no longer be exclusively linked to Mark Hamill and Carrie Fisher and it's already happened with Harrison Ford.

Like it or not, someone will eventually want to make new movies featuring new adventures of the younger and in their prime incarnations of the original Star Wars heroes. Whether its Disney or whomever owns the rights to Star Wars in the future, someone will either want to reboot Star Wars and retell that original story, or more likely, tell untold stories set within the wide swaths of time between the previous movies. After all, there is about 4 years between A New Hope and Empire, and 30 plus years between Return of the Jedi and the Force Awakens. A large canvas to tell more stories with those characters. Does anyone honestly think someone in the future wont want to tell those tales in live action, whether in movies or in some other live action format? Of course they will.

Whether we who live now want to see that is irrelevant because we eventually aren't going to be here, and it's pointless to rant and rave and complain that they aren't picking people that look and sound exactly like Harrison, Carrie and Mark. Its an impossible standard, because you will never accomplish that feat unless you CGI the hell out of everything for the purpose of maintaining the likeness...and we saw how cringey it could be with Rogue one's very brief Leia cameo.

James Bond is a role handed to other people. Captain James T Kirk is a role handed to other people. Same with Superman. Same with Batman. Same with Spider-Man. Eventually there will be new actors to replace Robert Downey Jr and Chris Evans as Tony Stark and Steve Rogers. It's just how this works. In all of those cases the character is not cast based on how close of an impersonation he or she can do of the previous actor. They usually pick people who A) are vaguely the character type, and more importantly B) who can do the best job with the material they have.

As fans who hold the OT as sancrosanct as many of us do, It would be nice to pretend it can and should be different with Star Wars, that those movies and characters and that world could be encased in amber, forever preserved as it was when we were children,but that ship sailed long ago. Heck it was Lucas himself who greenlighted this movie BEFORE he sold Lucasfilm to Disney. To hold Star Wars to a different standard is foolish. It is what it is.

 

A fantastic, lengthy interview with the Kasdans about the film...

A Portrait of the Scoundrel as a Young Man: Writers Lawrence and Jonathan Kasdan on Solo: A Star Wars Story | StarWars.com

 

I'll be skipping this one in the cinema and I'll watch it later on a library DVD (Along with "Deadpool 2").
However I will go to see "Ant-Man & The Wasp".