Harrison Ford was once asked in a 1977 interview to describe the most recent movie he’d been working on. He sat back and smirked, “You know it’s kind of a space western.” Combining the thematic elements of action, adventure, danger, and morality, Star Wars: A New Hope was a perfect marriage of two distinct genres and Ford was spot on in his assessment. Using that rubric, Ron Howard has crafted a “space western” in Solo: A Star Wars Story that faithfully does credit to the beloved and iconic cadre of characters fans.
Solo follows a young Han from the gritty streets of Corellia to the open void of space as he fights to rescue his love, get his own ship, and succeed in pulling off the job of a lifetime. Han is an icon of not only Star Wars, but all of science fiction. His exploits with Chewie in the Millennium Falcon are seemingly woven into the tapestry of Americana like the Star Wars films themselves, and they have become figures of mid century mythology. There’s a lot of pressure riding on Solo to faithfully capture the magic of the original Star Wars trilogy, and it delivers with gusto, but there are aspects of the film that don’t make sense.
WARNING: Major spoilers for Solo: A Star Wars Story ahead!
15 THE ENTIRE ESCAPE FROM CORELLIA
Han Solo moonlights as Oliver Twist in the dank, dingy alleyways of Corellia, seen here as a sort of steampunk dystopian London in space. Runaway and street rat children are used to do all manner of cons for a vile Lady Proxima, in exchange for some accommodations in her nasty warehouses and probably a crust of bread. It’s not the sort of life he imagines for himself and his girlfriend Qi’ra, so they make their escape.
They manage to make it all the way to the transport terminal where, once they pass through intergalactic TSA, they can board a ship and get off-world.
They’re chased by Lady Proxima’s henchmen, along with some hideous bloodhounds. Not only are the hounds not able to track them through the terminal (when they’re trained to only detect their target’s scent), but once a tragic intervention lands Han through the checkpoint and Qi’ra on the other side of it, neither the Stormtroopers on patrol nor Lady Proxima’s henchmen make any attempt to go after him. He’s pressed against the gate shouting to Qi’ra as she’s dragged away, and they decide whelp, he’s through the gate, nothing more we can do there. Han Solo is allowed to escape because there’d be no more to the movie if he didn’t.
14 THE EMPIRE HAS AN INFANTRY
Long has the notion been held that Han Solo joined the Empire to see the world, aka get the hell off Corellia. His brief stint in the Imperial Navy (where he wanted to become a pilot) was what contributed to his knowledge of Imperial military procedures when he was a smuggler. In Solo, it’s established that he was briefly in the Imperial Academy but “washed out” so the Empire saw fit to transfer him to the infantry.
Cue a barrage of WWII-inspired imagery replete with trenches, the haze of sulfur and blasterfire, while AT-ATs move like Panzers over a dirt landscape pummeled with shells. When we see Han, he’s wearing something that resembles what’s left when the facemask portion of a Stormtrooper’s helmet is removed. Since the only infantry the Empire has ever had has been Stormtroopers, it’s obvious this was done so that the audience could see his face and read his facial expressions when dramatic moments occur -- otherwise, he would be just another soldier in a sea of white. The entire reason that the Empire used Stormtroopers was to erase individuality from its ranks in favor of allegiance to one common cause. A Stormtrooper’s aesthetic is impersonal and sterile by design, and there’s no reason to have their faces exposed unless they’re already protected inside an armored transport vehicle.
13 HE CAN SPEAK WOOKIEE
In a scene both oddly poignant and harrowing, Han finds himself in a pit with a horrible monster that turns out to be none other than Chewbacca. He’s been punished for being an Imperial deserter by getting thrown to the Wookiee, who hasn’t been fed in some time. Chewie finally gets to display the awesome Wookiee strength we’ve heard so much about, throwing Han around like a rag doll. When he’s finally about to submerge Han’s face into the mud, Han’s quick thinking ensures his life is spared.
In order to prevent his own demise, he decides to find commonality with his assailant.
He suddenly warbles out some guttural noises that sound an awful lot like Shyriiwook, the native language of Chewie’s homeworld of Kashyyyk. They spend a few moments conversing, in which Han and Chewie concoct a way to work together that will free them both from the Empire’s clutches. This would be fine and all if it hadn’t been established in Star Wars canon that humans lack the vocal cords necessary to speak Wookiee. And if Han has been able to speak it this whole time, why hasn’t he conversed with Chewie in his native tongue to conceal what he was trying to say? It would be the most convenient way to ensure eavesdroppers had no idea what they were talking about.
12 HAN DOESN’T FIRE ON ENFYS NEST
Like the classic train robberies of the Old West, Beckett and his gang of space pirates are hired to steal the load of coaxium canisters as they make their way by rail around a series of mountains reminiscent of Disney’s Matterhorn ride. After a brief stint on a ridge scoping out the track, they decide their best bet will be for one of them to set charges at one end of the track, ensuring the train won’t make it to the other side, while the rest of them will secure cables to the one car holding the coaxium and, after unlinking it from the rest of the cars, air-lift it out.
Beckett, Han, and Chewie set out to be the crew responsible for separating the coaxium car from the rest of the train. A rival gang of marauders lead by Enfys Nest interrupts them, fatally wounding the pilot of their getaway ship. This means Han has to fly the ship, but at this point all that entails is keeping it upright, with cables still attached to the coaxium car (which hasn’t been completely separated). Meanwhile, Beckett is in a traintop fight with the leader of the marauders, Chewie is getting fired on by the rest of them, and Han can’t use any of the guns onboard to help his friends? All he has to focus on is steering the ship in a straight line at this point.
11 HAN ISN’T MUCH OF A SCOUNDREL
When first we encounter young Solo, he’s boosting a landspeeder. He’s engaging in petty theft so he can use it as a getaway vehicle for him and his girlfriend, Qi’ra. He wants them to have a life away from Corellia, the cesspit planet controlled by warring crime syndicates. When he enlists in the Imperial Navy, he does it to become an ace pilot, so he can come back and save Qi’ra after they get separated. When he joins Beckett’s crew of space pirates, it’s to go back and save Qi’ra. When the job he does with Beckett blows up in their faces, he vows to make it right so that with his share, he and Qi’ra can finally be together.
Even when Han Solo is playing Sabacc to win the Millennium Falcon, it’s not for selfish reasons -- it’s for the good of the crew he’s made his family.
Yes, with the ship he can complete the job he’ll need to do to ensure he has the credits to live happily, but he’ll be helping provide financial stability for Beckett, Chewie, Lando, and Qi’ra. His personality may be somewhat sarcastic and reminiscent of the Han Solo we know and love, but nothing he ever does is selfish or self-serving in the least.
10 VOS SENDING HIS SECOND-IN-COMMAND
If you’re a high-profile crime lord that doesn’t want a rival syndicate to know you’re planning on stealing any of their resources, maybe you don’t send your second-in-command along with the riff-raff you hired for the job precisely because they have no ties to you. When Han Solo makes the suggestion that he and Beckett steal unrefined coaxium from the Spice Mines of Kessel, he does so with the selling point that they are unknown to the rival Pike syndicate, and thus couldn’t be traced to Vos and his syndicate, Crimson Dawn.
Vos warms to Han’s idea, seeing an opportunity to recoup the losses he had on the previous heist he assigned to Beckett. He likes the fact that a young pilot and a known smuggler wouldn’t be recognized as being in his employ, and thus not ruffle the feathers of a fellow crime syndicate that he is supposed to be in a symbiotic relationship with. But he goes and messes it up by assigning his lieutenant to the crew, to “keep an eye on things”. As though sending your second-in-command, the person you “trust most”, along with the anonymous crew of space pirates won’t automatically identify your hand in the job.
9 NOT MOVING THE COAXIUM ALL AT ONCE
As with any heist, tension mounts the longer it takes the job to be done. Once Han and Chewie land at the Spice Mines of Kessel, they have to create a diversion to infiltrate it and, once inside, steal the unrefined coaxium from its underground vaults. Han and Chewie are the ones responsible for getting the coaxium safely aboard the Falcon, while Qi’ra, Beckett, and L3 are responsible for creating the diversion that will help them do it. At one point Han and Chewie get separated, and it’s up to Han to retrieve and load all twelve coaxium canisters onto a cart by himself.
Every second is precious as Han struggles to make his way out of the interior of the mines.
The cart is heavy for one human, despite the fact that Star Wars has always used repulsor-lift technology on carts so that things like ‘“heavy loads” don’t exist. Why would anything have wheels? By the time he gets it to the Falcon, it’s certainly much to heavy to get up the gangplank despite having the help of Chewie and his Wookiee pals. This means each cannister is dramatically hauled in one at a time into the Falcon’s cargo hold, ensuring there’s enough time for tragedy to strike along the way.
8 THE EMPIRE SENDING STAR DESTROYERS INTO THE MAELSTROM
All seems to be going according to plan for Han and the gang as he speedily pilots the Falcon through the Maelstrom and away from Kessel. The temperamental coaxium cargo is safely aboard, and all they have to do is get it out of the Maelstrom before the coaxium becomes unstable. Unfortunately, their path becomes blocked by a fleet of Star Destroyers lurking just ahead. These Star Destroyers sprew out a swarm of TIE fighters and Han has to make the snap decision to take a shortcut.
While the plot point was necessary to inspire Han to “make the Kessel run in 12 parsecs” instead of the usual 20 it would have taken had he stayed his course, what the hell was the Imperial Fleet doing in the Maelstrom? In The Empire Strikes Back Darth Vader orders a cluster of Star Destroyers into an asteroid field, but that field didn’t have zero visibility, giant tentacle monsters, and black holes lurking in its depths. Yes, coaxium is a precious commodity, but would the Imperial Fleet have been able to get to that position in the time it took the Falcon to leave Kessel, and would they risk so many ships being destroyed in the Maelstrom when they could have just waited for the Falcon to emerge from it and then lock them in a tractor beam?
7 THERE’S ZERO MENTION OF JEDI
Han Solo has never been a big believer in the Force. When he first encountered Jedi Master Obi-Wan Kenobi in A New Hope, he didn’t believe that there was one unifying energy field binding the universe together. He didn’t seem to believe in Jedi, for that matter, despite being a child during the events of the Clone Wars.
His own first mate, Chewbacca, fought in the Grand Army of the Republic alongside Jedi Master Yoda.
The Solo timeline positions the movie anywhere from five to seven years after Revenge of the Sith, when Darth Sidious (soon to be Emperor Palpatine) executed Order 66 which resulted in the genocide of the Jedi Order. It would have made intergalactic news, especially on Corellia, a ship-building planet closer to the Inner Rim than the Outer Rim. Jedi would have probably been seen frequently on its streets. Despite the fact that Jedi ambassadors for the newly demolished Republic would have been in recent memory, there is no mention of them anywhere in the movie, and no sign of the Force. This would have been fine if it had concerned Luke Skywalker, who didn’t seem to know much about the Jedi living on Tatooine or Rey, who didn’t know much about them living on Jakku, but those were worlds that were far removed from Jedi interaction.
6 HOW HAN GETS HIS LAST NAME
Over the years, various mediums have theorized Han Solo’s familial origins. Various book series and comics have delved into his family tree and lineage, especially since he ended up marrying a Princess of Alderaan. Much of it posits Han as an orphan living on the streets of Corellia, with the possibility of being secretly related to one of the prominent aristocratic houses (such as the House of Solo). The film Solo establishes that he indeed knew his parents, and that his father was a shipbuilder that used to build ships the exact same model as the Millennium Falcon -- solid middle class working stock.
Since establishing that Han indeed knows who his parents are, there’s a curious scene where he’s prompted for his identity by an Imperial recruiting officer and he doesn’t provide a surname. The Imperial officer asks, “Who are your people?” to which he replies, “I have none. I’m alone.” This inspires the cheeky officer to come up with the name “Solo”, and bestow it on his new military identification when he enlists in the Imperial Academy. It resulted in the most underwhelming origin of the Solo name, and far less exciting of a reveal than anything that had been come up with so far.
5 ESCAPING THE MAELSTROM DIDN’T DESTROY THE FALCON
Just when you think that Han and his compatriots have the Kessel run nailed, out of the tumultuous depths comes a tentacled leviathan the size of a Star Destroyer, with hundreds of eyeballs dotting its massive body and a gaping maw that would embarrass the Sarlacc. It threatens to engulf the ship in its massive jaws, but it and the Falcon have a bigger problem: the Maelstrom. What looks like a giant spinning black hole of lava and lightning and death sits in the center of the Maelstrom pulling everything toward its gravitational center.
While the Maelstrom sucks the monster into it, it also wants the Falcon, and there’s not enough fuel for it to break out of the pull and make the jump to lightspeed.
Beckett has to drop some coaxium into the fusion reactor onboard to give it the bump of energy it needs. While this is happening, not only is the hull of the Falcon not getting ripped to shreds, but when the coaxium does eventually get introduced to the fusion reactor, it kills the engines, sending them hurtling backwards before they ever go forwards. They have to now accelerate literally out of the center of the Mael (which they do), the G-forces of which (which are fighting against the gravitational strain) somehow don’t make the crew the size of Yoda’s pinky in the process. Perhaps the USS Enterprise loaned them its inertial dampener.
4 DARTH MAUL’S CAMEO
In the last ten minutes of the film, there’s a cameo by a character that has been dead to Star Wars film audiences for over 20 years -- Darth Maul. While it’s incredibly awesome to see his character alive when we last saw his body hurtling down a reactor shaft in two pieces, his presence confuses the Sith continuity. Yes, Maul has appeared in the animated Star Wars series Rebels, proving to have survived the duel with Qui-Gon Jinn and Obi-Wan Kenobi in The Phantom Menace by sheer will and hatred alone. However, his appearance in Solo makes little sense considering there are, at the time, two active Sith.
The Phantom Menace cemented the Rule of Two, explaining that there are only ever two Sith in existence at any given time -- a master and an apprentice. Solo takes place five to seven years after the events of Revenge of the Sith, which means Emperor Palpatine and Darth Vader are already ruling the galaxy as the only two reigning Sith. Maul’s presence complicate matters, as it isn’t clear if he still has the title of “Darth” and considers himself a Sith or not. It also means that Palpatine and Vader don’t yet know of his presence, an issue which presents its own problems.
3 BECKETT LEAVING VOS ALIVE
Throughout the film, space pirate Beckett has had a love hate relationship with crime syndicate Crimson Dawn and its nefarious leader Dryden Vos. He does jobs for Vos in order to amass enough money to break out of the smuggler lifestyle, knowing full well that the penalty for crossing Vos is death. He even makes it a point to explain to Han early on that you can’t run from Vos or Crimson Dawn, as you’ll be hunted down with a price on your head for the rest of your life.
When Beckett double crosses Vos towards the end of the film, he does the complete opposite of the advice he gave Han.
More to the point, he’s the only one in the room with a weapon after he’s taken out Vos’s guards. Why then, does he decide to take the coaxium and leave when he has a clear shot at taking out the man that will most certainly be sending bounty hunters after him in the next scene? He has a blaster to the man’s head and he just lets him live, knowing the retribution will be swift and very painful. Furthermore, he takes Chewie hostage, armed only with a blaster, when the Wookiee already has a body count more impressive than any other character so far in the film.
2 HAN PASSING UP JOINING THE REBELLION
The climax of the movie reveals that all of the coaxium that Han and his gang boosted from Kessel can be used to help fund a Rebellion against the tyranny of the Empire. Han had a chance to take the coaxium for himself to sell, ensuring that him and Chewie had enough credits to get their own ship at last, but instead he listened to a rousing speech by Enfys Nest and had a change of heart.
Han is given the chance to join the Rebellion, and it’s at this point that Han’s character development throughout the film doesn’t make sense. The film is less demonstrative of the trajectory young Han Solo has in becoming the cynical smuggler in A New Hope, and more how his hero’s journey has made him realize money isn’t everything. He’s already risked his life time and time again for his true love and his friends. The only reason he was forced into becoming an outlaw was so he could make enough money to get a ship after he couldn’t hack it in the Imperial Navy. There is literally no plot device forcing him to commit to the smuggling lifestyle anymore by the time the events of the film are over, so what’s stopping him from joining the Rebellion when he’s joined up with just about every other faction he could throughout the film?
1 THAT IT WAS MADE AT ALL
Despite Han Solo being arguably one of the most popular characters in Star Wars, the period of time when a young Han Solo was doing Solo things isn’t something fans wanted. Yes, the gap of years between Revenge of the Sith and A New Hope is ripe for storytelling (19 years of it!), but no one was particularly worried about what Han was up to because there were plenty of other characters' backstories to explore. Sure, he was making the Kessel Run, winning the Millennium Falcon from his old buddy Lando and was certainly gaining himself a first mate Wookiee, but like your grizzled grandpa’s old stories of yesterday, some of the biggest whoppers are probably left not investigated. Why?
Because often the tall tales are far more interesting than what actually happened.
Part of the fun of Han Solo was wondering whether or not he was full of bantha poodoo. Was he exaggerating to inflate his own ego, or was he really the great hero of his own story? Besides that, to many fans, Harrison Ford is Han Solo, and there will never be anyone able to replace him. The saucy delivery of his lines was a wink to the audience while he swaggered around a campy sci-fi movie set, and he brought realism to a fantasy landscape, instead of taking it seriously.