I said back in February when I saw the first trailer that Solo: A Star Wars Story had train wreck written all over it. Sadly, I underestimated the magnitude of the disaster. This thing got nothing right.
To start with, the casting was a fiasco. Alden Ehrenreich brought none of Harrison Ford’s overconfident yet charming swagger to his portrayal of young Han Solo. Han, in this film, was nothing but an annoying kid. Then there was Emilia Clarke as Qi’ra, Han’s love interest. We all know she can’t act, so no surprise there, but she had a painfully large amount of screen time. Han’s love for Qi’ra was supposedly his driving motivation for much of the film, but you wouldn’t have known it if they hadn’t explicitly stated it every so often because Ehrenreich and Clarke had zero chemistry. The emotional bond and sexual tension between Lando Calrissian (Donald Glover) and his social justice spewing droid (Phoebe Waller-Bridge) was considerably more convincing. Beyond his profound love for his sex bot, however, Lando was little more than a smarmy douche. If Billy Dee Williams’ Lando is Frank Sinatra in a fedora, Glover’s Lando is a sad copycat in a trilby. The rest of the supporting cast were boring, clichéd, and largely forgettable. Continue reading
