After a 30-second Super Bowl teaser that was mostly an excuse to fawn over Lando Calrissian’s awesome coat, the full trailer for Solo: A Star Wars Story was unveiled on Monday morning, giving us our first real look at the young Corellian smuggler.
The fact we’re looking at anything is a promising start. Solo, despite being less than five months away, has been kept totally in the dark by Lucasfilm. The optimistic view was that this was a strategic delay so that the film’s buzz wouldn’t distract from The Last Jedi, giving both movies some time to breathe. But the pessimistic side was that Solo was a disaster in the making: Original directors Phil Lord and Christopher Miller were fired and replaced in the middle of production by Ron Howard, and there were reportedly issues with Alden Ehrenreich’s take on Han Solo, to the point that an acting coach was brought in.
A 90-second teaser won’t fully alleviate those concerns, but there are some positives here. Solo appears to have a gritty visual flair—Star Destroyers and the Millennium Falcon obscured by smog across gray expanses—and some A-plus costume work for Donald Glover’s Lando (the coat!) and Emilia Clarke’s Qi’Ra. (Truly, Clarke is a queen in both Westeros and a galaxy far, far away.)
Still, the biggest question mark is Ehrenreich’s Han Solo, and this wasn’t quite reassuring. All I’m gonna say is: Succeeding a young Harrison Ford is a ridiculously tricky task, and this awkward smirk doesn’t inspire much confidence.
Han Solo’s supposed to be an effortlessly cool, mean-mugging guy. Following in Ford’s footsteps as a younger version of one of sci-fi’s greatest characters? Would that it were so simple.
