Solo: A Star Wars Story -- Review
So last night I finally saw the Han Solo movie, on netflix. Altogether I found it really disappointing. The following review will contain lots of spoilers.
On the most fundamental level it seems like they lost track of what they were making. This was supposed to be the Han Solo origin story, the entire point of the movie should have been to give a deeper picture of his origin and character growth. Instead they decided to go for a shallow heist movie with nearly no character development just a series of shallow meaningless adventures.
I would have really liked to see at least a glimpse of Han in the Imperial pilot academy, but they relegated this to one past tense line and fast forwarded to him in some kind of imperial infantry battalion. I was actually kind of intrigued to learn there are apparently previously unseen imperial infantry who are not storm troopers or those naval troopers seen dragging bodies away a few times in the original series. I kinda liked their steampunkish uniforms. Unfortunately from the moment we see Han Solo in this setting he is maximally insubordinate as if he just dropped in here from the previous scene we saw and wants no part in this Imperial thing. Skipping over three years of him trying to fit in as an imperial I think lobotomized a huge chunk of potential character development. I absolutely would have loved to see him standing at attention in an imperial TIE pilot uniform trying to fit in and slowly failing to, rather than this stupid portrayel of someone who looks like he couldn't have lasted a minute and moreover hasn't gone through any find-himself character growing kind of thing at all. Furthermore, as they make it clear that his motives were always selfless, they practically nerf the character growth he _does_ do in A New Hope from selfish smuggler to fighting for a cause.
I felt like the guy who played Han at least recreated the mannerisms of a younger Han fairly alright, and I liked the Lando Calrissian character as well. That big jawed A list actor, whom I learn is apparently named Woody Harrelson, as the honest trailers puts it "appears to play Woody Harrelson stuck in a Star Wars film." I would definitely agree with that, he seemed to play the same character he's played in every other film I've seen him in. It really takes me out of a movie when I can't identify a character as anything other than the actor he is.
So they fast forwarded completely past Han's pilot academy days, and even the infantry battle he's stuck in I'd have liked to see more of (well his character development therein, I don't really care about the combat situation which anyway they don't even touch), but instead they seem in a falling-over-themselves hurry to get to these multiple heists, which I feel like were hard to care about as they had failed to really make us care about the character or the reasons for it. During the train heist I just kept thinking "this is like a bad knockoff of the train heisting of Firefly." And then the whole contrived run to Kessel for the McGuffin Juice seemed very ... contrived. I mean even for an imaginary substance in an imaginary universe with imaginary physics and.. magic, it was hard to buy in to this super valuable substance apparently necessary for hyperspace travel can only be found in one of two places, one of which is a vault under a spice mine, where the facilities aren't dedicated to producing this apparently super valuable commodity, no they mine spice here and the McGuffin Juice is just guarded by one guy and kept in a freezer and yadda yadda it will explode unless you rush it to this remote refinery where they're just twiddling their fingers for a random load of it to come in... what? Like. What? That's... incredibly stupid.
And then the bad guy gang that's been chasing them turns to be good guy social justice warriors and I just had to roll my eyes and groan.
Altogether, not actually as bad as the prequels, which I consider to have collectively been a sort of Star Wars blasphemy, but very forgettable.
Your thoughts?
Bonus: Rogue 1!
In looking the other things in my Star Wars tag I was shocked just now to realize apparently I never wrote a review of Rogue One?? From this distant vantage point it's hard for me to remember much of value of specifics so much as to say I recall I really liked it, I think to me it captured the feel of the original trilogy the best of all the movies that have come out since. It was just kind of bittersweet watching it knowing that all the characters had to die to explain why they don't show up in any subsequent movie. Though I think knowing they were going to die the writers didn't write them with the kind of wankery assumption that we'll love them as new upcoming trilogy stars as they did with all those irritating characters around Rey in the new movies. I really liked the Rogue One sarcastic robot in particular. (sarcastic robot in Han Solo seemed kind of a sad immitation of him, and why does a robot have to so clearly correspond to a human ethnic cliche??)