At long last, Disney and Lucasfilm have released the first Solo: A Star Wars Story trailer for the highly anticipated spinoff. The film stars Alden Ehrenreich as a younger iteration of the titular Star Wars character made iconic by Harrison Ford, and charts his early adventures as he first crosses paths with Chewbacca and Lando Calrissian (Donald Glover) and the Millennium Falcon first comes to be in his possession.
The film very publicly went through production troubles as directors Phil Lord and Chris Miller (The LEGO Movie) left over creative differences with three weeks left of filming to go. Lucasfilm subsequently tapped Ron Howard to take over as director, working from the screenplay originated by Lawrence Kasdan and Jon Kasdan. Solo marks Lucasfilm's second effort at what were originally conceived as "anthology"-type stories—spinoffs that don't take place in the episodic chronology, but tell other stories set within the Star Wars universe. The first was Rogue One: A Star Wars Story, which was a ground-level tale of the team that stole the plans for the Death Star in the events leading up to A New Hope. Solo's chronology predates that film but, obviously, takes place after the events of the prequels.
The trailer is...not good. It just seems to lack a personality, and watching Ehrenreich try to channel a young Harrison Ford feels like a fool's errand. I don't want to judge his entire performance from a brief trailer, so I won't, but it wasn't exactly encouraging. But the surrounding film seems like it lacks direction and a reason for existence. I wasn't really curious about what Han Solo was like as a young man, and this trailer doesn't make it seem like a story worth telling. Hopefully this is just a bad trailer and not a look at a bad movie.
Watch the Solo: A Star Wars Story trailer below. The film also stars Woody Harrelson, Emilia Clarke, Phoebe Waller-Bridge, Joonas Suotamo, Thandie Newton, and Paul Bettany. Solo hits theaters on May 25th.
Here's the official synopsis for Solo: A Star Wars Story:
Board the Millennium Falcon and journey to a galaxy far, far away in “Solo: A Star Wars Story,” an all-new adventure with the most beloved scoundrel in the galaxy. Through a seres of daring escapades deep within a dark and dangerous criminal underworld, Han Solo meets his mighty future copilot Chewbacca and encounters the notorious gambler Lando Calrissian, in a journey that will set the course of one of the Star Wars saga’s most unlikely heroes.
