The latest look at Solo: A Star Wars Story proves it'll at least look grimy as hell
It’s less than a month until we find out if Solo: A Star Wars Story will come soaring out of its troubled production like an expertly piloted spaceship through an asteroid belt, or if it smashed into one of those asteroids and is terrible. The new behind-the-scenes feature above is pretty by the numbers, with Ron Howard claiming it will be “different from anything else that we’ve seen in any previous Star Wars movie,” thanks in part to its setting on an Empire-controlled planet, which, okay. Who knows whether that really pulls off anything much more daring than the other entries, but Howard’s right, at least, in the fact that the movie looks different. The LucasArts production-design hivemind is firing on all cylinders here, with shots of Star Destroyers looming high above grimy cyberpunk streets and shaky POV footage of an AT-ST tearing shit up in a warzone. Some of the wide shots look closer to Blade Runner 2049 than anything in the greater Star Wars universe.
There was a similar sort of buzz around previous “anthology film” Rogue One, with director Gareth Edwards claiming it’d be a “war movie” that explored shades of gray within the typically binary galaxy. There were flecks of that in the finished movie, but most of it was apparently left on the cutting-room floor along with a few dozen different endings. We’ll see how Solo fared when it comes out May 25.