By The Numbers, by Reed Lackey

Star Wars as a franchise seems to have a complicated relationship with telling the beginnings of stories. The highly divisive and frequently maligned prequels to the original trilogy remain the low bar by which all other entries in the franchise are measured. It’s even riskier, then, for the franchise to begin to tell even more “stories-before-the-stories” with their recent entry Rogue One, and the latest installment: Solo.

Directed by Ron Howard, who took over duties after at least two failed attempts to bring cohesion to the story, Solo: A Star Wars Story attempts to bring the legendary character of Han Solo into the center of his own cinematic adventure while connecting some of the long-existing dots about characters like Chewbacca and Lando Calrissian (not to mention the Millennium Falcon) and how they first came to be a part of this legacy. For the most part, the film succeeds at doing that very thing.

What the film gets very right is in pushing the necessary buttons to answer long-standing questions (a few of which fans may not have even known they wanted answers to). Each sequence feels deliberately designed to bring our rugged hero into contact with either a crucial character, a crucial item, or a crucial event reference to finally make concrete details that had previously only been speculation. The film also has some legitimately fun and visually astounding action sequences.

Unfortunately, a majority of these necessary and noteworthy attributes feel a bit too inevitable, undercutting what should be a surprising and fascinating sequence of thrilling encounters. Too many of the film’s beats rely upon the baked-in nostalgia fans of the franchise will feel for the people and props that flavor the story. Instead of building a narrative which substantiated a high level of audience investment, Solo accepts that the audience will already be invested and doesn’t try to hard to cause the connections and revelations to feel organic. Subtlety gets shoved in the cargo bay and everything gets painted with a very large brush.

Speaking of broad, nearly every performer in Solo seems to be playing their role for the back of the house. If someone passes an object between hands, there’s a specific cutaway to a pertinent character doing a wide glance down at those hands. If two characters are conspiring together, they lean in close to one another but somehow don’t feel the need to modulate their voice or facial expressions. Best of all is when a character needs to express distress or aggression because they typically choose to play either devastation or borderline brain aneurism. The attitude of every character is exactly where it should be, but the range is as wide as the back of a Star Destroyer.

Particularly guilty of that latest critique is the star himself – Alden Ehrenreich – taking on one of the most iconic roles in cinema history. It’s no small feat to step into the shoes of any beloved screen icon, let alone a character who has been an anchor in a decades-long cultural landmark that has exclusively been played by one of Hollywood’s legends. Given the burden of the task ahead of him, Ehrenreich isn’t half bad. He’s frequently quite good and strikes the proper attitude almost precisely. He suffers from being way more smiley than the original Han ever was and – like with all the actors in this film – often projects far too broadly his intentions or emotions. But getting the attitude right is more than half the battle to embodying the spirit of the character and Ehrenreich does that effectively.

The lone standout in a sea of made-for-live-stage performances is Donald Glover as the notorious trickster and master-of-cool, Lando Calrissian. Glover not only understands the attitude which made Lando a compelling character, but he maintains control of comic timing, subtext, and fluid emotional range better than anyone else in the cast (and yes, that includes the ever-capable Woody Harrelson and Paul Bettany).

But despite the inevitable plot progressions and the overly exuberant performances, the film is surprisingly fun. There is a gleeful recklessness to the proceedings that aligns perfectly with the titular character’s demeanor – and stands in stark contrast with the grander and more pivotal tone of the primary “episodes”. In style and tone, Solo is almost exactly as it should be: a fast, occasionally funny, raucous adventure which fills in a lot of gaps in the Star Wars meta-narrative and pushes a plethora of nostalgia buttons for longtime fans. Sure, it may be a little paint-by-numbers, but that doesn’t mean the picture isn’t still worth a nice, long look.