At long last, Disney and Lucasfilm have released the firstSolo: A Star Wars Storytrailer for the highly anticipated spinoff. The film starsAlden Ehrenreichas a younger iteration of the titularStar Warscharacter made iconic byHarrison Ford, and charts his early adventures as he first crosses paths with Chewbacca and Lando Calrissian (Donald Glover) and the Millennium Falcon first comes to be in his possession.
The film very publicly went through production troubles as directorsPhil LordandChris Miller(The LEGO Movie) left over creative differences with three weeks left of filming to go. Lucasfilm subsequently tappedRon Howardto take over as director, working from the screenplay originated byLawrence KasdanandJon Kasdan.Solomarks Lucasfilm’s second effort at what were originally conceived as “anthology”-type stories—spinoffs that don’t take place in the episodic chronology, but tell other stories set within theStar Warsuniverse. The first wasRogue One: A Star Wars Story, which was a ground-level tale of the team that stole the plans for the Death Star in the events leading up toA New Hope.Solo’s chronology predates that film but, obviously, takes place after the events of the prequels.
The trailer is…not good. It just seems to lack a personality, and watching Ehrenreich try to channel a young Harrison Ford feels like a fool’s errand. I don’t want to judge his entire performance from a brief trailer, so I won’t, but it wasn’t exactly encouraging. But the surrounding film seems like it lacks direction and a reason for existence. I wasn’t really curious about what Han Solo was like as a young man, and this trailer doesn’t make it seem like a story worth telling. Hopefully this is just a bad trailer and not a look at a bad movie.
Watch theSolo: A Star Wars Storytrailer below. The film also starsWoody Harrelson,Emilia Clarke,Phoebe Waller-Bridge,Joonas Suotamo,Thandie Newton, andPaul Bettany.Solohits theaters on May 25th.
Here’s the official synopsis forSolo: A Star Wars Story:
Board the Millennium Falcon and journey to a galaxy far, far away in “Solo: A Star Wars Story,” an all-new adventure with the most beloved scoundrel in the galaxy. Through a seres of daring escapades deep within a dark and dangerous criminal underworld, Han Solo meets his mighty future copilot Chewbacca and encounters the notorious gambler Lando Calrissian, in a journey that will set the course of one of theStar Warssaga’s most unlikely heroes.
