This reflection on the themes of Solo: A Star Wars Story tries to avoid spoilers, but as always feel free to wait until you’ve seen the movie if you want to know nothing about it when watching.
“Fast ship? You’ve never heard of the Millennium Falcon?” “It’s the ship that made the Kessel Run in less than twelve parsecs.” With those lines, Han Solo and ultimately George Lucas stirred up a controversy still brewing 40 years later. Han’s boast sounds impressive, but when you find out a parsec is a unit of distance, not time, you wonder how it’s meant to prove the speediness of the legendary ship. Hands have been waved at explanations, but now with Solo we get as much of an in-galaxy justification as we can likely expect. A trivial point to be sure, but the deep dives into astrophysics inspired by that dialogue represent about as much science as Star Wars is interested in. To be sure, all of the films feature technology far beyond our current capabilities, but mostly they are part of the setting rather than the theme.
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