Fresh Millennium Falcon Footage Highlights New Solo: A Star Wars Story TV Spot
Back in February we found out that Ron Howard’s Solo: A Star Wars Story would reveal a radically different Millennium Falcon. When we got our first peek at the Falcon in Solo teasers earlier this year, it looked sleeker than the “hunk of junk” we’d loved since 1977’s A New Hope. Our eyes weren’t deceiving us. Howard told Entertainment Weekly that there was a reason the most famous ship in the galaxy didn’t look quite the same, but wouldn’t reveal more than that. In this new Solo TV spot, “Team,” the Millennium Falcon is front-and-center, and we think we have an idea why the ship’s looking so good—it hasn’t been beaten to bloody hell yet by Han and Chewie.
One of the first things we see here are the Falcon’s thrust vector plates (the very cool engine array that forms a semi-circle at the back of the ship) opening as the engines roar to life. Like Solo spots before it, “Team” is all propulsive energy, befitting the vigor of a young Han (Alden Ehrenreich), Lando Calrissian (Donald Glover) and relatively young Chewbacca (Joonas Suotamo), a chipper 190-year old Wookie. Han’s desire for smuggling was always tied to his love of flying—he claims at the outset of this spot that he’s going to be a pilot, “the best in the galaxy.” This desire was always a foundational element of Han’s personality: the man loves to fly as much as he hates to take orders. We learned in this featurette that the world depicted in Solo is perhaps even more oppressive than what we were introduced to in A New Hope or, 38-years later, in The Force Awakens. In Solo, Han is living under the boot of the Empire, which has control of the galaxy without, as of yet, a truly worthy adversary of “rebel scum” to combat them. Han’s descent into the underworld, aided by Tobias Beckett (Woody Harrelson), side-by-side with his new pal Chewie, and with a major assist from Lando, is in part due to his love of flying and in part due to his hatred of his galactic overlords.
The spot gives us a glance at Han’s new team. Along with Chewie, Lando and Beckett, they also include Qi’Ra (Emilia Clarke), the droid L3-73 (Phoebe Waller-Bridge), and the alien Rio Durant (Jon Favreau). With this able crew, Han will be mixing it up with some serious lowlifes, including Dryden Vos (Paul Bettany), as he begins his storied career as a smuggler. We all know this path leads Han in all sorts of unlikely directions—from scoundrel to hero, from cynic to a man in love with a princess—which is what will make seeing how Han got started in the world so interesting.
Space battles aboard the Millennium Falcon, blaster fights atop a space train, and the forging of lifelong friendships and frenemies (here’s looking at you, Lando), this new spot gives you a bit of everything.
Solo: A Star Wars Story opens on May 25.
Featured image: The Millennium Falcon in SOLO: A STAR WARS STORY. Courtesy Lucasfilm.
