Critics reviews

If you’re going to make a film that is essentially a narrative colouring-in exercise, you might as well make it zippy and fun – and that’s precisely what director Ron Howard delivers.

There’s a great deal of “Star Wars”-related information available in “Solo: A Star Wars Story,” but it’s sent in a very-low-bandwidth way that takes two hours and fifteen minutes to transmit. It’s like watching a live-action dramatization of a download progress bar, with actors carrying bits of information from one side of the screen to the other. In this way, too, the movie is a forced march in which the “Star Wars” cinematic empire strikes back.

The hard truth about this just-OK Star Wars universe plug-in is that Howard simply may not be the best director of special-effects-heavy space operas. But that’s a dubious badge of distinction anyway. He has better luck with actors, and just about everyone does good work here.

It gets off to a slow, muddy, grimly predictable start—but Solo is ultimately, thankfully, one of the good ones. It ought to be: as a movie taking on one of the most likable, movie-star handsome, archetypically familiar characters in the entire galaxy, this would seem a tough property to mess up.

As unnecessary prequels go, "Solo: A Star Wars Story" isn't bad. It's not great, either, though—and despite spirited performances, knockabout humor, and a few surprising or rousing bits, there's something a bit too programmed about the whole thing.

Representation indeed leaves an impact, but boycotting Disney would leave a bigger one. It’s hard to say what really results from these corporate winks at global inequality, but they will doubtlessly date the new Star Wars films more conspicuously than any hairdo or hemline from Lucas’s original trilogy.