Video review: "Solo: A Star Wars Story"

“Solo: A Star Wars Story” was the first bona fide flop for the storied sci-fi franchise. I’m not sure why. Although it certainly deserves a ranking toward the bottom of the Star Wars canon, it’s still a fun, action-filled entry with plenty of entertainment value.

My 7-year-old declared it the best Star Wars flick of all. That’s overstating the case, though I would put it at least above “Rogue One” and “The Last Jedi.”

Alden Ehrenreich takes over the role of intergalactic smuggler/smirker Han Solo from Harrison Ford, and it’s a pretty seamless handoff. Aside from being a head shorter, Ehrenreich’s Han has all the scruffy charisma we’re used to. This story looks at his formative years prior to meeting Luke, Leia and the gang.

Raised on the crime-ridden planet of Corellia, Han manages to escape the den of thieves where he was raised, though his lady love, Qui’ra (Emilia Clarke), is captured. He vows to become a great pilot, snag his own ship and return to rescue her.

Flash forward a few years, and things didn’t turn out that way. After washing out as a pilot in the Imperial academy and deserting as a foot soldier, he stumbles into Qi’ra to find out she isn’t in need of any rescuing at all. She’s become the right hand woman for Dryden Vos (Paul Bettany), a high-up in the criminal syndicate Crimson Dawn.

Han has fallen in with a group of bandits led by Tobias Beckett (Woody Harrelson), who takes him under his wing, shows him how to spin a laser blaster and a few things about double-crosses, too. Their assignment -- failure means death -- is to boost some raw hyperspace fuel from inside the Kessel nebula.

It’s volatile stuff, so if they don’t get it out fast enough, the whole plan goes explodey-splodey.

We also get to witness Han’s meeting up with Chewbacca, and his first encounter with self-pleased rogue Lando Calrissian, captain of the Millennium Falcon. He’s played with dizzying charm by Donald Glover, and if the Star Wars honchos don’t give him his own movie, they’re dumber than nerf herders.

Another fun addition is Lando’s navigation droid L3 (voice/motion by Phoebe Waller-Bridge), who is a distinct break from the polite/subservient model of C3PO and his ilk. Sassy and rebellious, she advocates for robots overthrowing their “organic overlords” and even hints at a possible romantic relationship with Lando.

I’m hoping more people will discover “Solo” on home video. It’s a worthy addition to the Star Wars library, fleshing out the backstory of (arguably) its most popular character and giving us some thrills along the way.

Bonus features are very good. They include eight deleted or extended scenes, including one showing Han as an Imperial cadet; a roundtable with director Ron Howard and his cast; interviews with veteran Star Wars scribe Lawrence Kasdan and his co-writer, son Jonathan; and much more.

One especially neat bonus feature: “The Millennium Falcon: From Page to Park,” depicting the history of the famous spacecraft and its upcoming translation into a theme park ride.

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Review: "Solo: A Star Wars Story"

“Solo: A Star Wars Story” is in a lot of ways daring, and in other ways plays it very safe.

It’s the first film in the franchise to cast another actor as one of the principal characters from the first trilogy, and attempt to sketch out a backstory for that universe’s most deliberately vague period: what smuggler/rogue/occasional nerf herder Han Solo was doing in the years before he bumped into Luke and Leia.

By all accounts Harrison Ford -- who seems to be lobbying to kill off all his iconic characters with the exception of Indiana Jones -- is happy to pass along Han’s mantle to Alden Ehrenreich. My guess is most audience members will be fine with it, too. Ehrenreich is cocky, twinkly and likeable.

(Wait until they cast someone besides Carrie Fisher as Leia, and we’ll see how people feel. Btw, I don't count Darth Vader because other actors played Annakin before his fall.)

The result is a film that’s fun and frivolous. There aren’t really a lot of stakes, since we know Han is going to survive, meet up with furry friend Chewbacca (Joonas Suotamo) and acquire the Millennium Falcon in a game of cards with fellow scoundrel Lando Calrissian (a charismatic Donald Glover).

Pretty much any other character who shows up, we can make some good guesses about their fate.

There are two main new ones. Emilia Clarke plays Qi’ra, who grew up with Han on Correllia, a junk planet where runaway kids work for a local crime boss. They are separated while attempting their escape, and Han vows to become a pilot, buy (or otherwise acquire) his own ship and return for her. Instead, he winds up in the trenches as a grunt soldier for the Empire, after being kicked out of their version of pilot school.

The two do eventually meet up again, though circumstances are very much changed. Despite the old passion still burning, they play a cat-and-mouse game with their faith in each other.

The other main addition is Woody Harrelson as Tobias Beckett, an old scallywag who takes Han under his wing. He teaches him how to shoot a blaster with finesse, pull off daring heists and, above all, to trust no one.

Paul Bettany turns up as Dryden Vos, the scarred, sneering boss for the criminal syndicate, Crimson Dawn. The long and short of it: after failing to steal a batch of hyperspace fuel from the Empire, Beckett and Han are tasked with pilfering a load of its unstable raw component from a mining world deep within the dangerous Kessel nebula.

If that name sounds familiar, especially in context with the avowed speed of a certain spaceship, you won’t come away disappointed. 

Phoebe Waller-Bridge provides the voice and motion of L3, Lando’s sassy droid/copilot. It’s a very different take on the subservient role robots usually take in the Star Wars universe, with L3 making puns about her supposed “organic overlord,” and encouraging other droids to rise up against their masters.

Director Ron Howard isn’t known as a master of action scenes, and I often found the fights hard to follow. The film also seemed very murky to me, as if they shot it without a lot of foreground lighting, though that may just have been the theater where I saw it.

But Howard, who took over the film from a pair of co-directors several months into production, finds a nice balance between comedy, character development and laser blasts. The screenplay is by Star Wars veteran Lawrence Kasdan -- hey, how come no one’s ever thought to let him direct one of these? -- and his son, Jonathan.

I feel about “Solo: A Star Wars Story” about the same as I did “Rogue One,” “The Force Awakens” and “The Last Jedi.” They’re fun rides, and I like dancing around in this universe as much as anyone. But they don’t hold a candle to the original trilogy, which no one would debate, and aren’t even as good as the second trilogy -- a statement I know will inflame my fellow geeks everywhere.

It’s a peppy rehash, but a rehash it remains.

Eight for '18: Year in film preview

I'm changing things up this year by presenting a truncated year in film preview, rather than the comprehensive one I usually do. I'm doing this for a couple of reasons:

• I'm busy as sh*t.
• There are literally six million 2018 movie previews out there, and I'd rather do my own thing than join the content farm lemmings.

So I present "Eight for '18" -- the eight films I'm most anticipating this year. Please note, these are the flicks I am looking forward to, not necessarily what would come up under a "most anticipated" poll. So don't be shocked because you don't see "Avengers: Infinity War" or some of the other big titles out there.

(Also, please note I left "Black Panther" off because it's coming out in just a couple of weeks, and I wanted to give readers more of a look further down the road. Suffice it to say I'm also stoked about that one. The early word on it has been nigh-orgiastic fervor, which is exciting but also... disturbing.)

In chronological order:

Isle of Dogs

March 23

I've been very up and down on the films of Wes Anderson -- you would literally have to threaten me with the removal of a key body part to get me to watch "The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou" again -- but I absolutely adored his foray into stop-motion animation, "Fantastic Mr. Fox." He's back with this Japanese-inspired tale of a boy searching for his dog in the secret land of exiled canines that includes voices by W.A. regular Bill Murray, Tilda Swinton, Edward Norton as well as Scarlett Johansson and Bryan Cranston.

Pacific Rim Uprising

March 23

What?? Two of my favorite picks debuting on the same day?!? Hopefully they won't cancel each other out at the box office. Guillermo del Toro isn't at the helm, which is concerning. But John Boyega -- using his actual British accent! -- stars as the son of Stacker Pentecost, who teams up with Mako Mori to lead a new generation of pilots of skyscraper-sized robots to take on a new threat of Kaiju monsters.

Ready Player One

March 30

Steven Spielberg tackles the dense, page-turning sci-fi novel about a dystopian future in which everyone is connected (and imprisoned) by technology, existing mostly in a Matrix-like video game universe called the Oasis. It's like World of Warcraft, but, f'reals. It's sure to be visually stunning, as well as an amusement ride of '80s pop culture references for tickle Gen X erogenous zones. I'll just be curious to see how they locked down the intellectual property rights to all the stuff in the book. If I don't get to see Ultraman blasting spaceships out of the sky...

Solo: A Star Wars Story

May 25

The production on this Star Wars prequel looking at the pre-Rebellion life of Han Solo got off to a famously rough start, with the original directors departing the project in favor of Ron Howard. Can Alden Ehrenreich pull off a Harrison Ford impression? He was the best thing about the underwhelming "Hail, Caesar!" as a dimwitted cowboy star, so fingers crossed. Also excited about Donald Glover a s a young Lando Calrissian. I personally am holding out for the big-screen adaptation of "Lando Calrissian and the StarCave of ThonBoka."

The Incredibles 

June 15

It's interesting that for yours Pixar Animation held off on making any sequels outside the "Toy Story" universe, even though one -- the story of an entire family of super-heroes -- seemed most primed for sequelization. Writer/director Brad Bird is back in the hot seat, and the story is very hush-hush, other than Elastigirl (Holly Hunter) is off saving the world while Mr. Incredible (Craig T. Nelson) is left to babysit pint-sized firecracker Jack-Jack. No word on who the new villain(s) is/are, but I'd guess either Bob Odenkirk or Jonathan Banks will provide the cackle.

Venom

Oct. 5

Isn't about time we got an entire film devoted to a super-villain instead of just another do-gooder? Venom made an appearance in the (awful) "Spider-Man 3," a strange alien symbiote that bonded with the web-slinger before turning evil. Again, the plot is very secret, but reportedly new Spidey Tom Holland turns up. Most exciting: Tom Hardy hisself plays Eddie Brock, the scummy dude who gets turned into Venom.

First Man

Oct. 12

One of America's quietest heroes, astronaut pioneer Neil Armstrong, gets his own biopic starring Ryan Gosling. Not much information available beyond that -- or even a production still -- but here's all I need to know: it's directed by Damien Chazelle ("Whiplash," "La La Land.")

X-Men: Dark Phoenix

Nov. 2

Years ago I interviewed original Jean Grey actress Famke Janssen, and she expressed her regret that they were pulling the plug on the first generation of X-Men movies before they got to explore what many consider one of the greatest story arcs in comics history, the Dark Phoenix saga. Now the franchise is finally going in that direction with Sophie Turner in the lead role, as the psychic/telepath is transformed into the most malevolent force in the universe. Jennifer Lawrence, Michael Fassbender, Nicholas Hoult and James McAvoy reprise their roles, with Jessica Chastain taking on a mystery part known only as "Smith."