Solo movie poster. Copyright Disney.
Yesterday I finally got around to watching Solo: A Star Wars story. It is the first major Star Wars film I have not seen in movie theaters. I was too young for the original trilogy but I watched all three prequels and all three of the Disney films before Solo in theaters. I even watched the Special Editions in theaters. The only Star Wars movie that I haven't seen in the theaters that was the Clone Wars pilot movie which hardly even counts.
I wrote before why I skipped Solo. The short version was that I was already to go but was so frustrated with the culture war and the low quality of The Last Jedi that I stayed home instead. I was burnt out on Star Wars and wasn't expecting much from the film. It was getting middling reviews and the various controversies around the film and the Last Jedi had sucked the air out of the room.
I don't think I was alone in feeling that way as Solo was the first and biggest flop of the Star Wars franchise. Regardless of the quality of the prequels and the sequels, people have always came out in droves to support the Star Wars franchise. That didn't happen in Solo and I think it was largely due to the poor reception of The Last Jedi, various political controversies and general fatigue induced by releasing so many movies at once.
Now that the dust has settled and I finally saw the movie, what do I think of it? Not much really. Unlike The Last Jedi which invoked strong feelings by everyone who saw it, I just kind of felt nothing. Indeed, it felt a lot like The Force Awakens. An average movie that didn't really stick with me. As a standalone film it's fine but after the complete shitstorm that was The Last Jedi it had pretty much no chance of standing out.
It didn't have the charm and simplicity of the original trilogy. It didn't have the combination of awesome special effects and world-building combined with a weak story and bad dialog of the prequals. And it didn't have the massive controversy and impact of The Last Jedi. Even Rogue One, the other Disney spinoff film had an awesome space battle and Darth Vader going nuts during the ending. Solo? It just kind of is.
SPOILERS BEGIN NOW!
Solo is essentially a mishmash of genera's. It's kind of a space western mixed in with a crime film all set in a sci-fi universe. It never really sticks to any of these things well. It could have gone more Western, like a modern Firefly or it could have gone more mobster, but it really didn't. It was nice that they tried to do something different but it didn't really make a whole lot of sense. Out of all the Star Wars films, this one feels the least like Star Wars
It almost feels like the fourth Star Trek movie, which is beloved by most but always seemed so out of place to me. You still have the same old Star Trek characters but instead of cool space adventures in the far future, they decide to hang out with whales in the present day. Solo is kind of the same way with all the familiar Star Wars characters all getting together to... rob a train? Really? I mean the execution was ok, but the concept is just weird to me.
The plot is fairly predictable. You always knew that Han and Chewbacca were going to meet. Lando was going to be there and he and Han would have a complicated relationship. The love interest was never going to end up with Han and his mentors would betray him. I didn't even need to watch the movie or even read a plot synopsis to understand what was going to happen in this movie. If The Last Jedi took way too many chances with the plot, I think Solo may have gone too far in the other direction.
I do have to say that I was surprised at how many people died in this movie. Pretty much the only characters that didn't die are the ones that stick around for the original trilogy. I kind of expected that since Rogue One did the same thing, but in that case it was justified by the story. Not so much in Solo. It kind of felt like a whole lot of interesting characters like Val and Rico end up getting killed off way too soon. The only new main character that wasn't killed off was Qi-ra, which kind of rules out ever seeing any of the better new ones again.
The stakes were also pretty low in this film. In every other Star Wars flick, there is some kind of huge war, new weapon or dangerous conspiracy going on. In Solo there is nothing but a heist of some spaceship fuel, which is valuable, but not not interesting in anyway. We don't really learn anything in Solo that wasn't already established in other Star Wars movies.
I think the fanservice was a bit out of control, to the point where they were getting pretty obscure with their references. Most casual fans of the series aren't going to have a clue what the Pyke Syndicate is or why Darth Maul is even alive. If you had missed the Clone Wars and Rebels cartoons you would have been completely lost. And even with having watched the Clone Wars I was still kind of lost as to why Maul would be in charge of a huge criminal organization. He had done that in the cartoon but then the Emperor came and curb stomped him and broke the whole thing up. So how did he end up reestablishing himself?
Darth Maul also seems to have come out of nowhere. They seem to be trying to use him to set up a sequel but that seems fairly unlikely now that the movie bombed so hard. And as far as I am aware I think Maul ended up dying in the Rebels cartoon so I don't even know what they could use the character as. Just like in the Phantom Menace he has been built up as a total bad-ass and then wasted.
I also think the film explained a lot of things that didn't really need to be explained. I mean it's fine that we now know the story behind the infamous Kessel run, but did we really need to know that story? Did we really need to know that Han had a girlfriend back in the day and that he and Chewbacca won the Falcon from Lando in a card game? I mean none of this is really that shocking to me. I'd rather have something that moved the plot along in some way, but like Rouge One it didn't really happen.
Probably the most frustrating thing was that there were some obvious storylines that they could have gone with instead. Why not have Jabba the Hutt in the movie? There is obviously a lot of history there and it would have been a cool villain to expand on. And why not spend more time on Han's time in the Imperial military? We get almost zero perspective to the people who live and work in the Empire so it might be interesting to see that for more than the few scenes we got here. Some of that was cut from the movie which is a shame but you can see the deleted scenes which I think would have improved the movie a bit if they were left in.
As smaller nitpick, I have to say that I think it was pretty dumb that Han ended up as an Imperial Solider. So he gets busted out of the flight academy and gets busted all the way down to the Army? How does that work? If you flunk out of the Naval Academy in real life you don't suddenly get enlisted into the Army. Plus, pilots are already cannon fodder in the Star Wars universe, at least when it comes to the Empire. It's not like getting transferred to ground forces is really going to decrease his life expectancy much.
From a filmmaking perspective I have to say that the darkness of the film was very annoying. Not in terms of tone but in terms of actual physical brightness. Not seeing the movie on the big screen, there were a lot of scenes where I just couldn't see much due to how dark everything was due to the crappy monitor I was watching it on (I wasn't home when I saw it). I can put up with that in a horror movie, for example, but in a big dumb action movie? I want to be able to see what is going on!
As far as casting and acting go, that was probably the movies best strength. Though many people didn't like Alden Ehrenreich as Han Solo, I thought he was ok, even if he doesn't look a damn thing like Harrison Ford. Donald Glover was the perfect choice for Lando though and you could tell he was having a blast with the role. Woody Harrelson has always been a favorite of mine and it wasn't an exception here. As for Emilia Clark, I am usually not a fan after Terminator Genisys (ugh) soured me on her, but she kind of redeemed herself in my eye in this one. Everyone seemed to give a good performance and there was very little cringeworthy acting that seems to plague Star Wars.
The culture war stuff that overshadowed the film didn't really seem to have much of an effect on the finished product. Much was made of the so called "feminist" robot L3-37, but it didn't really effect much. She was only in the film for a couple of scenes, and hilariously enough everyone thought she was a joke in universe as well. I'd almost say that she was an obvious parody that everyone took seriously but that's probably giving Disney too much credit.
I generally think that Disney was trying to drum up controversy as the film was pretty average on it's own. If so, it backfired horribly because I think many people stayed home because they thought they were going to be preached at. They were trying to sell it as a social justice movie when it really wasn't. Sure there were strong women characters and more non-white people, but the actual story itself wasn't some kind of feminist/cultural Marxist statement/nightmare. Lando wasn't gay or sleeping with a robot, like he was implied to be in various interviews and honestly the whole controversy was pretty stupid in the end.
So was Solo a bad movie? Not really. It wasn't a good one either. I think out of the four Disney Star Wars films, it's probably the most boring but it is still a much less frustrating movie than The Last Jedi was. It was well acted and decently written but it also didn't take any risks at all while at the same time never answering the question "why did this movie need to be made?"
Would I recommend it? Not really, but if someone wanted to watch it I would say go ahead. I don't think anyone that does is going to really be blown out of the water but I doubt there will be any of the anger and confusion that happened after The Last Jedi. As a movie, Solo just kind of exists and isn't really a good or bad thing. You don't gain much by seeing it and don't miss much by ignoring it. I am guessing 20 years from now Solo is going to be the Star Wars movie that everyone forgets about while the rest of the Disney films will still be talked about, one way or the other.
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