By Ryan Simmons (Twitter: RyanSimmonsVO)

‘Solo’ keeps Star Wars fun and exciting, for now

May 24, 2018 | 11:09 PM

Star Wars Stories are a bit of a catch-22 for me.

I love sci-fi and would love to see more original tales in the genre on the big screen. If you told me there was a great sci-fi movie about space pirates and intergalactic gangsters that would be enough to get me on board. I’m not naive enough to think, tough, that a movie like that could sell enough tickets to gross half a billion dollars or more without a brand name like Star Wars on it.

So that’s where we find ourselves when it comes to Solo: A Star Wars Story. It’s a fast paced, action packed pirate movie in space. It’s exciting, and fun and just an all-around cool sci-fi movie.

So that’s the upside of the catch-22; if they play under the Star Wars banner and cash in on the occasional bit of Star Wars nostalgia, we could be looking at an era with a ton of new sci-fi stories on the big screen, like Solo (pirates in space!) and Rogue One (spies in space!).

The downside of that catch-22, though, is the inevitable day that the Star Wars nostalgia well runs dry. The formula still works for Solo, don’t get me wrong. Seeing Han and Chewie meet, seeing them pilot the Millennium Falcon together for the first time as the original theme music swells, seeing the massively cool fan favourite cameo near the end of the movie… these moments still have enough pop to give Solo a little extra boost that non-Star Wars films just can’t enjoy. But as they keep pumping these out, it’s going to be a case of diminishing returns.

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If you’re invested in the Star Wars Universe and you like these characters, there’s still enough here to keep you excited I think. Alden Ehrenreich and Donald Glover both do incredibly admirable jobs stepping into the skins of their very iconic characters. Their performances come off as real characters rather than just actors doing an imitation. It’s tough to step into those big shoes and give the character more life, but I think they both pulled it off. The story is fine, the action is plenty and they don’t go to the nostalgia well often enough for it to become nauseating.

So while the Star Wars Story formula is still working for Solo, and it’s still getting more sci-fi genre films made that otherwise wouldn’t without the help of the Star Wars brand, it will remain to be seen how long said formula can hold up.

With two more films planned in the Solo franchise, Episodes 9 through 12 confirmed, a TV show in the works, a recently confirmed Boba Fett movie and a rumoured Obi-Wan Kenobi trilogy in the works, I think we’ll all be forced to find out just how deep that Star Wars nostalgia well really is. It’s become clear Disney isn’t going to slow down until we hit bottom, but luckily we still feel a long way off with Solo.