When it was announced that there would be a movie featuring the young Han Solo in the Star Wars universe, I thought it would be interesting. So once the movie premiered yesterday in Indonesia, my wife and I were some of the early movie goers who had the advantage of seeing it on its first day. It was rather challenging to choose the best show time since mostly was around 6PM, which was our usual dinner time. Anyway, we decided to see the movie at 6.15PM in my favorite Dolby Atmos theater in Epicentrum. Well let us get on with the movie now.
Brief Story Line
Story was set when a young Han Solo (Alden Ehrenreich - Hail, Caesar!, Beautiful Creatures etc) left his childhood city in Correlia. His dream was to be the best pilot, gained enough money to buy a ship and have adventures with the love of his life Qi'ra (Emilia Clarke - Me Before You, Game of Thrones TV series etc). During his early adventures, Han became a member of a criminal gang led by Tobias Beckett (Woody Harrelson - Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri, The Messenger etc) with his team of Val (Thandie Newton - Westworld TV Series, Mission: Impossible 2 etc) and an alien named Rio (voiced by Jon Favreau - Identity Theft, and as Happy in MCU).
Han later on also met with his would be partner & first mate, the wookie Chewbacca (Joonas Suotamo). And during a "mission", Han would be acquainted with Lando Calrissian (Donald Glover - The Martian, Community TV series etc) with his first mate, a wise cracking female droid called L3 (Phoebe Waller-Bridge). The so called villain in this movie was a character named Dryden Vos (Paul Bettany - A Knight's Tale, The Da Vinci Code etc).
So how would the story unfold on Han Solo becoming the person he was in the original Star Wars trilogy? Find them all in this fun quite thrilling action space adventure movie.
End of Brief Story Line
Well what can I say about this movie? It was pretty much what you get when you are shown a young Han Solo as the main protagonist in the film. If you are a fan of Star Wars or at the very least have seen Star Wars: The Force Awakens, you would not be able to resist his likable character. Han Solo, who was played by Harrison Ford then, was very charming, adventurous, fun and he fit the character so well that we could not help but be interested in finding out his background story (which was only briefly told in the previous movies). So in a way, this movie's intention was to provide us exactly that.
Being a space adventure movie, this one truly did not disappoint. It was filled with so many breath taking action sequences. The early part of chasing moment already gave us a hint of what would come afterwards. I totally loved the scenes on the "train", and I was really in awe of that very very thrilling moment when Han Solo had to escape from what I think something like the black hole. However, the finale scene was not as great as the earlier action sequence, though it did give a sense of just.
The story itself was a little bit standard. There was not a lot of surprises. But the moments of when Han met Chewbacca for the first time, and when he met with Lando were nicely done. It would probably be an emotional moment for the die hard Star Wars fans. As for the cast, my wife liked Alden as the young Han Solo and she could sometimes picture young Harrison Ford (although she also complained about his physical attribute which did not really resemble Ford). But for me personally, I thought Donald Glover was really a lot similar to the old Lando (played by Billy Dee Williams). To my personal opinion, the chemistry between Han, Chewbacca and also Lando were absolutely great in here. But if I have to be honest, I think Paul Bettany's character as the villain here was not too convincing (or probably not evil enough). Though I liked the cool Tobias character (played brilliantly as usual by Woody Harrelson). Oh another character that my wife and I loved was the female android L3 which was really enjoyable to look at, plus the alien Rio. Meanwhile Emilia Clarke's character was quite unique but probably a bit easy to guessed.
Just as the usual Star Wars movie, the special effects was totally fantastic. The music score was great, and when the Star Wars theme was heard on the background, it was a wonderful feeling. The sound effects were awesome especially if you see this in a studio with Dolby Atmos like I did. There were also some references to the other Star Wars movies (which would be noticeable for the fans). I myself was only able to capture few of them. The duration of the movie for more than 2 hours was just perfect as it provided sufficient story and did not feel rushed especially towards the end. However, the pace of the movie felt a bit inconsistent as it felt too fast at the beginning and there were rather slow moments in the middle. And there was no middle or post end-credit scene. Oh this movie also had quite a lot of funny moments that would make us at least grinned.
So if I had to summarize, this movie was awesome in term of action and some of the cast gave brilliant performance, with memorable moments of the meet up of our favorite characters and also provided us with an idea of how Han Solo became who he was. It might not have been the best Star Wars, but compared to Rogue One, I liked this one better as it was more fun and cheerful as opposed to the darker (& sadder) of the latter. With a very hefty budget, this movie would need to make a lot of money to make profit which the producer probably thought they could make when they played in summer (but I personally think it was better in December like in the case of other Star Wars films playing in the past 3 years).
Anyway, If you are a casual fan of Star Wars like my wife and I, you would definitely enjoy this one. I cannot say it would be fantastic for die hard fans though, as my opinion may differ with them. But if you like a space adventure movie with lots of actions and a bit of love story, then this one would be perfect for you.
Happy watching!
Mike's movie moments rating: 4.5 out of 5 stars
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