W Why is an old man good, if not to shape a young man and show him the world? “Solo: A Star Wars Story” is all about it, more or less, although of course the film also answers questions that nobody has asked anymore – questions about Han Solo, the character, who first and foremost in the “Star Wars’ introduced actor Harrison Ford to a level of world fame that Mark Hamill can only dream of, though as Luke Skywalker he is at the heart of the Freudian family story that George Lucas began to tell in 1977. “Solo”, the tenth episode of the “Star Wars” cinema saga, is now in German cinema , Going through the list of those involved in the production, “Solo” does not seem directly like a creation by director Ron Howard or the producer wars led by Kathleen Kennedy to replace George Lucas. Rather, one must take note of the writing team, sixty-nine-year-old Larry Kasdan and his son Jonathan, now thirty-nine years old, who ask for an interview at the Carlton Hotel on the Croisette, a remnant of the fading splendor of Cannes as it once was.
The story they have written focuses on Han Solo in a period of between eighteen and twenty-one years, at an age when most young men seek a more ordinary job as a “galactic pirate,” a job that does, however, his Commercial value and his audience has. This young Han Solo is played by Alden Ehrenreich, a guy from Los Angeles who stumbled upon Steven Spielberg in a Bat Mitzvah video and then passed it on to American directors, including Francis Coppola for “Tetro”, Richard LaGravanese for ” Beautiful Creatures “, Woody Allen for” Blue Jasmine “and the Coens for” Hail Caesar! “. Ehrenreich is a slender type and has more dreamy eyes than the approximately thirty-year-old solo, in whose role Ford stole the series from his rivals, and at 1.75 meters tall compared to Ford’s 1.85 meters, camera boss Brad Young has to prefer close-ups of Ehrenreich.
Ehrenreich’s solo is boyishly in love with Qi’ra, played by Emilia Clarke, whom all “Game of Thrones” fans know as Daenerys Tagaryen. When the two break away at border control before escaping the nasty planet where they are trapped, Solo begins an odyssey that ends in the Kasdans scripting with the discovery of Qi’ra. As a temporary soldier of the evil empire, he finally meets in Tobias Beckett a mentor who is also an unreliable father figure, played by Woody Harrelson, who continues his parade of more or less lovable villains in his fifties. Of course, the constellation Son and Mentor has constructed the Kasdans as a story of their own relationship – what else?