This review is going to be filled to the brim with spoilers! So don’t read on if you don’t want those yet. Of course, any sci fan fan worth his or her salt should know you don’t go surfing random blogs about a movie you like until after you’ve seen it.
Just from watching the trailers, you know a few things. We witness the famous meeting of Han Solo and Lando Calrissian. We encounter the Millennium Falcon before Han turns her into the most famous hunk of junk in the galaxy. There’s another funny droid. All of those things work, and they work well. You’ll enjoy them.
The spoilers are incoming! Fairly warned, be thee, says I.
The thing about Solo is, for most of it’s length it’s a standard heist movie. It’s fun, there’s lost of action, it’s funny — it’s a good heist movie. But what it’s missing is the epic stakes of a Star Wars movie. It doesn’t feel like anything really hangs in the balance. Some small time crooks get rich if they succeed and will surely be painfully killed by mob bosses if they fail, but other than that, the fate of the galaxy definitely doesn’t hang in the balance.
Then, they up the stakes a little bit. The only way to cash in on the macguffin they’ve stolen is with the help of a group of people who have been horribly brutalized by the very mob bosses they’re trying to sell their macguffin too. That ups the stakes a little bit — it makes Han want to do the right thing rather than just take the money and run. But in the course of trying to do the right thing, we, the audience see the big reveal. Han never does, but we do.
Here it comes. The biggest spoiler of them all. If you haven’t seen the movie yet, you can still turn back.
Qi’ra, Han’s love interest, has been working for Darth Maul all along.
Yes, you read that right. Darth Maul. Now, if you’re enough of a Star Wars fan to have sifted through pages and pages of google results until you found this blog, it seems very likely that you’ve watched The Clone Wars and Rebels, and so you know that Darth Maul somehow survived not only being cut in half by Obi Wan Kenobi but also falling down a bottomless pit. He made himself robot legs and nursed himself back to health over years.
Personally, I’m of the opinion that this was a narrative mistake. I’ll write a post in the future as to why I think so. But for now, it’s cannon in the new Star Wars Universe, so suck it up and deal. Qi’ra is an agent of Maul.
Is she force sensitive? We don’t know. She does practice Teräs Käsi (Which — old school swg player here — was AWESOME to hear!) and she does fight with melee weapons, so maybe. But the quick little glimpse of Darth Maul summoning her to a meeting at once elevated the stakes from just small time criminals trying to get rich up into the galactic war that we all care so much about if we care about Star Wars.
Like Maul’s continued existence or not, the reveal was a powerful moment in the film. After seeing it, it took me until the credits rolled to remember I’m not a Maul fan.
I was already having a great time before I saw that. That scene took it to another level. Solo is a really cool film.