A wild rip through space, “Solo: A Star Wars Story” moves at full throttle with a reckless flavor that matches its protagonists’ personality.
It’s a good solid bit of fun, an adventure flick peppered with tentacle monsters and reptilian creatures, opportunist femme fatales and dodgy bar scenes — set to the tune of Chewbacca’s telltale roars and Solo’s renegade spontaneity.
Thursday’s advanced showing at Kukui Grove Cinema brought out a full house, with seats filled through the theater’s front-most row. The costumes that generally accompany a premier, however, were nowhere to be seen.
Cheers sounded with the opening scene of the movie after a string of previews for movies like “Skyscraper” with Dwayne Johnson (he’s filming Jungle Cruise out here, If you haven’t heard), “Ant Man and the Wasp” and “Jurassic World Fallen Kingdom” (parts of that were filmed here, too).
Those previews could have all been for the same movie with their matching cinematography and musical scores, but when “Solo” began, there was no mistaking it for anything but a Star Wars story.
Set when the seed of the Rebellion was just starting to sprout, Solo starts out as a lovesick teenager escaping from a street gang on the planet Corellia and enrolling in the Imperial Flight Academy.
Three years later, the flyboy’s dreams have been muddied and he’s serving as an infantryman on the planet Mimban. In the midst of war’s chaos, he meets a gang of smugglers and thieves that propel him out of the infantry.
It’s during that time he meets up with Chewbacca, the 196-year old Wookiee, the two of them finding common ground in a mutual need to survive and the Wookiee language Shyriiwook.
The pair cement together while escaping Mimban with the crew of smugglers and thieves, and are swept up in a mission to steal a shipment of the hyperfuel coaxium for the cutthroat criminal syndicate Crimson Dawn.
Pirates throw a wrench in the plan and trigger reunions for Solo as he and his smuggler crew work to pay their debt to Crimson Dawn and cut themselves free from the syndicate’s influence.
It’s during that time Solo falls in love with the Millennium Falcon —though his obsession with the ship may have more to do with an ego battle with Lando Calrissian than anything.
Calrissian’s debut on screen is characteristically set in a game of cards, where the shark is reveling in his reputation of taking everything at the table — including ships.
Calrissian and his Millenium Falcon end up taking Solo and his entourage to the planet Kessel, where their goal is to steal unprocessed coaxium from the mines and use it to pay the Crimson Dawn.
Alden Ehrenreich embodies a young Han Solo with an idealistic and carefree spirit, filling in the mystery of Harrison Ford’s grown-up and world-hardened Solo.
Woody Harrelson brings his rough-around-the-edges flavor to the smuggler Tobias Beckett, who mentors young Solo as he moves through the criminal underbelly of the galaxy.
Though the movie is unsurprising with more of a focus on checking the boxes of Solo’s story rather than to tell something riveting and fresh, you still leave the theater buzzing from blaster battles and cheering on these age-old heroes.
The Sith Lord Darth Maul makes an appearance and the cast hints at a meeting with Jabba the Hutt on Tatooine throughout the last half of the movie, making it a stellar scavenger hunt for fans of the franchise.
Kukui Grove Cinema is showing Solo: A Star Wars Story Saturday through Monday at 12:30 p.m., 2:20 p.m., 4:10 p.m., 5:30 p.m., 7:20 p.m., and 8:40 p.m. with showings Tuesday through Thursday at 3 p.m., 4:30 p.m. 6:30 p.m. and 8 p.m.
