Solo: A Star Wars Story

Ron Howard has the credit alone, but most of what reaches the screen is repair work. Phil Lord and Christopher Miller left in June 2017, about three quarters through principal photography. The quarrel was tonal: the pair believed they were making a comedy, while Lucasfilm wanted only a comic touch and felt improvisation was pulling the film off the Kasdans’ script. Howard finished the remaining three and a half weeks, then shot five weeks of reshoots, and roughly seventy percent of the final picture comes from that second pass. Knowing this changes what you are watching: the flatness of the tone is a seam rather than a style. An acting coach was brought in for Alden Ehrenreich, part of the same strain. Bradford Young photographed the film deliberately dark, and the decision broke in cinemas: where projector brightness ran slightly low, shadow detail disappeared. At home, turning the lights off genuinely matters. Structurally this is two heists and a debt, with no appetite for surprise. The last scene reveals Maul as the power behind Qi’ra, so the film closes on a promise. In 2022 Howard confirmed no sequel was planned. For a viewer who sits down for the Kessel run and Donald Glover’s Lando and accepts a salvaged film. Not for one expecting that final reveal to lead anywhere.