Thoughts on Solo: A Star Wars Story (2018)

I'll admit: when I first heard about a standalone Han Solo movie, I was confused and a bit skeptical. I was honestly thinking, "what could they do with this character that hasn't already been done before?" and "why are they making this a thing?" But despite this, I remained optimistic. There are undoubtedly differing opinions on this, but I believe that in terms of Star Wars movies, Disney have so far been pretty good. In my view, The Force Awakens was pretty good, Rogue One was very good, and The Last Jedi had some pretty glaring problems that still resulted in what I believe is the most interesting Star Wars movie to date. But unfortunately, I am not sure Solo holds up quite as well.

First, I will talk about the good, because I believe there is good in every movie, even the really terrible ones (not that this is terrible). The sound and visuals are as good as they have been for every Disney Star Wars movie––in other words, really good. The CGI has always looked impressive and the sound design is nice too. It led to some visually stunning scenes and some genuine enjoyment out of me.

The performances were mostly pretty meh to me, with one exception. If you have heard reviews of this movie, you may have heard that Donald Glover's performance as Lando Calrissian was really good, and those people are right. He was the most convincing person in the movie by quite a long shot, and more importantly, he felt like Lando. I could look at him and hear him and think to myself, "Yep, that's Lando all right".

The music is also pretty good. While not the best Star Wars music (that honor goes to the music in Revenge of the Sith in my opinion), John Powell does a pretty solid job on the soundtrack. It felt like Star Wars music. And a little thing I appreciated was a little snippet during a scene towards the beginning of the movie––there's a video for Empire recruitment playing, and it has some version of the Imperial March playing. It was a nice touch and I appreciated that.

But that's about where my praises end, because while this movie is not bad, it's not standout either. It doesn't do anything new with Star Wars. It barely expands the world and it felt pretty predictable. I feel they could have done more with this kind of thing but they took the safe route and squandered away a lot of potential. I feel this is quite a big deal especially since Disney is a company with a lot of money and they should take a lot of risks, like they did with The Last Jedi, and also because it goes contrary to the character of Han Solo, who is a risk taker. A movie about a risk taker plays everything safe, and I can't help but feel annoyed by that.

Other than that, there are only a couple of major complaints. Number one is Alden Ehrenreich as Han Solo himself. I had a bad feeling about this ever since the first trailer dropped, and I was right. Ehrenreich is not a bad actor per se as far as I could tell, and while Han's character was written pretty well, the performance just didn't feel like Han. He has only a passing resemblance and their voices are completely different, and despite how many times the movie told me this was Han Solo, I just couldn't get into it. I would say this is because of my attachment to Harrison Ford as Han Solo, but then again, Donald Glover pulled off quite a good Lando Calrissian performance like Billy Dee Williams before him, and I am as attached to that character as I am to Han Solo.

Side note: why did Han need a love interest? It just seemed pretty at odds with what I'd come to expect, and while it wasn't bad, it seemed a little weird. Anyway:

And then the other main complaint I have is one at the end. I will put it in spoilers so don't read it if you haven't seen the movie and plan to.

So at the end, Qi'ra contacts Darth Maul (the guy from The Phantom Menace who came back in Star Wars: The Clone Wars and Star Wars Rebels). It was obviously a setup for another movie, but my question is: why? Why can't this movie be self-contained? I know it's a Star Wars movie, but Rogue One is also a standalone Star Wars movie that was very self-contained, and it only led to a movie that had been out for nearly forty years at the time. This whole Darth Maul thing made it pretty transparent that this isn't just a little standalone movie that you could just watch and you don't have to watch any other Star Wars movies to get it.

There is this one movie that scene reminded me of: The Amazing Spider-Man 2. The movie that was so bad it destroyed any chance of seeing more from that universe and gave Marvel the chance to participate in making Spider-Man movies again. I bring this up because there is a shot in that movie of some costumes and mechanisms for the Sinister Six, and it was obviously setting up a Sinister Six movie that will no longer happen because Sony were so focused on setting up future movies and not making an actual good one. The Darth Maul scene in Solo reminded me of this because while this didn't detract much from the whole movie, it's still a warning of what Disney might start doing: sacrificing the quality of the current movies in exchange for setting up future movies within their current movie. I hope this was an isolated bad decision and that they don't go down this route.

Anyway, Solo: A Star Wars Story is a pretty average movie. It does nothing special, only one performance was really good, and it gave me worries as to what might happen in the future of Star Wars; but on the other hand, the presentation and the music was great and it was at least pretty entertaining. It's not a bad Star Wars movie, but in my opinion, it's the least interesting since either Attack of the Clones or the Clone Wars animated movie, which is a shame because, like I said, The Last Jedi is probably the most interesting Star Wars movie to date. I probably won't go see Solo again, and if I had to give it a score, I'd give it a five or six out of ten.