Originally written June 1, 2018

Oh boy. This is gonna be a rough one. I’ve been dreading this review because I know how thorough this is gonna have to be. Solo is the fourth Star Wars movie to be released in a period of two and a half years, which is…a lot. In fact, the last Star Wars movie before Solo, The Last Jedi, was released only five months before it. I’ve personally felt that each Disney Star Wars movie has been worse than the last, with The Force Awakens being the only one that I had REALLY enjoyed. Now that we’ve arrived at the release of Solo, I’ve found myself groaning when it came out, which has never happened before with a Star Wars movie for me. It’s just becoming apparent that Star Wars is becoming too much, and Disney is just running the series into the ground at this point.

Before I get into the nitty gritty of Solo as a single movie, I just want to further investigate the disdain that I’m developing for Star Wars, because I do think that even though Solo isn’t a good movie on its own merits, my feelings toward Star Wars HAS contributed to my feelings towards Solo. See, I’m feeling that Disney’s current plan of releasing one Star Wars movie a year is bad for the series, as it’s creating some animosity and fatigue for the series. Star Wars used to be something special, having two trilogies that had released movies three years apart, with a much larger gap in between those trilogies. Now that Star Wars has become annualized, it’s losing what makes it special, and it’s showing among the fanbase, as evidenced by the poor box office performance of Solo.

I think what I’m trying to say here is that Solo was destined to fail. You just can’t expect to oversaturate the franchise and still have people be flocking to the theater to see every new movie. Some would use the superhero genre as a counterexample, which easily sees between 5-10 releases a year these days. In fact, even if you’re solely looking at Disney’s Marvel Cinematic Universe, they release three films a year lately. However, you can’t assume that what works for one franchise is going to work for another. I think the reason it works so well for the MCU is because there’s such a large amount of diversity between the different movies that come out. Spider-Man: Homecoming is a very different movie than Thor: Ragnarok, which is a very different movie than Black Panther. This doesn’t feel like it’s the case for Star Wars.

I think the point that I’m inevitably trying to get at here is that I don’t like Star Wars as a movie franchise, and I think many would agree with me. I never would have thought this before, because many people would always get excited for any new Star Wars thing, whether it’s a movie, TV show, video game, book, comic, etc. However, the evidence is becoming clear that when you release too many Star Wars movies in a short amount of time, it doesn’t work. Five years ago, fans would have flocked to the theaters to see a movie about Han Solo, and yet in its current climate Solo didn’t even have as big of an opening weekend as Deadpool 2 did a week before it. That’s just crazy, and I think it speaks a message that’s really easy to see. While I was watching Solo, I realized that I love Star Wars as a saga, but not as a franchise. And this is one of the big problems that Solo has run into before the movie even hit theaters.

So, with that much-needed analysis of the current climate that Solo has been released in to give some perspective for the movie, let’s talk about the movie itself. Not to sound cynical, but Solo decided to go for a premise that never seems to be a good idea in the end. While everyone loves to see more of a beloved character in theory, I find that usually when you wind up delving more into the backstory of certain characters, it makes them lose what made them special, and that’s kind of what happens here. If it hasn’t been obvious already, Solo decides to go into the origins of fan favorite character Han Solo, following his early days as he tries to make a name for himself. Solo gives Han an…interesting motivation, to say the least. While Han was always portrayed as more of a cool, laid back guy who doesn’t let himself get roped in by women, Han in this movie is going through his dangerous missions in order to save the woman he loves. It’s not that it doesn’t make sense in the confines of the movie, it’s just kind of weird to me. All in all, though, it’s a pretty basic origin story.

So here’s the thing, Solo is the second spinoff movie to be released, so I found it hard not to compare it to the first spinoff, Rogue One. Now, I wasn’t crazy about Rogue One, but I also didn’t think it was a bad movie. To sum it up in the simplest way, I thought it was well made and had a great story/theme of sacrifice, but that it was a very boring movie and had some of the worst, flattest characters that Star Wars has ever produced. Compare this to Solo, and it’s pretty much the reverse here. It’s a lazy-feeling movie that goes for style over substance with a very lacking story, but it is exciting at times and has a fun cast of characters.

Let’s go into all of that in a bit more detail, starting with the good. So, to its credit, Solo actually is a pretty fun movie at times. It has some entertaining sequences, not even always just the action scenes, and it puts its characters in dangerous situations. Like I said, compared to Rogue One, it’s a much less boring movie, so to its credit it held my interest at times, even if it was only in that “summer popcorn flick” kind of way.

Also, I was surprised how much I enjoyed the characters. While this is certainly in part due to the established characters from the movie that are featured (Han, Chewbacca, and Lando), I actually found the newcomers to be pretty good this time around. There’s a love interest, a partner, and a villain that Han has to contend with in Solo, and I found all of them to fill their roles pretty well. While they aren’t on the level of the main characters from the main Star Wars movies, they were definitely better than the ones from Rogue One.

In all honesty, I did find the best parts of the movie to be the ones where Solo connected itself to the main movies. Two of my three favorite moments in the movie involved Han’s first meetings with Chewbacca and Lando. These moments felt satisfying to me, but when the movie is off doing its own thing, it usually isn’t as interesting. It’s not awful or anything, it’s just not that great. But we’ll get into that next.

So the movie is really flashy, but there isn’t really a ton of meat to it aside from that. Like I said, the movie makes an attempt to go into the backstory of Han Solo, but it really does a surface-level job of it all. I didn’t walk away from the movie feeling like I had any huge information about the character that I now know. It more just felt like an early adventure of the character than anything. It’s not that there’s anything wrong with being an empty, vapid summer blockbuster if you’re being up front about it, but most Star Wars fans like myself have always demanded a bit more than just a popcorn flick from Star Wars. If you’re okay with a movie that’s more focused on style than substance, then you might still like Solo, but to me it was just disappointing to see what this franchise has devolved into.

The movie does have glimpses of moments where the Star Wars magic is recaptured, but they’re very infrequent. Like I said, it’s mostly the moments where Solo expands the lore by connecting itself to the main movies that I think it’s at its best. During times like this, I did find myself genuinely enjoying the movie. However, then they were usually followed by moments that I just hated. There are certain moments where the writing/story is so poor, that you would think this was just amateur fan fiction that was made into a movie. This huge range in quality made the movie confusing for me at times, because there were times where I thought the movie was awful, and other times where it was actually pretty good. The end result for me was a solid “meh.”

I also think one of the biggest problems that this movie has is an awful lead actor. Han Solo is played here by Alden Ehrenreich, who does sometimes embody the character with a level of cool that the character deserves, but most of the time can’t nearly match the charisma that Harrison Ford brought to the character. In a movie where the main character is Han Solo, it’s bad that the least charismatic part of the movie is Han Solo himself. Donald Glover, Woody Harrelson, and Emilia Clarke are all pretty great in their roles, but Alden just didn’t really impress me at all, and so this kind of tainted the whole experience for me.

I think that’s a good place to wrap up with Solo. The movie itself isn’t all that interesting, and it definitely isn’t anything special, but it does lead to some interesting conversations about Star Wars as a whole these days. The story behind Solo and the environment that it’s been released in is the most interesting thing to talk about with it. I don’t like Solo much on its own merits, but it’s definitely contributed to my apathy towards Star Wars lately. With each new movie, I’m just becoming less and less interested in what Disney is doing with Star Wars now. A movie like Solo might interest some people, but it definitely just isn’t for me. If this is the direction Disney wants to take the franchise in, I think that I might not be interested in Star Wars anymore. People talk bad on the prequels all the time, but to me they felt more like Star Wars than a movie like Solo did. Now that we have both Rogue One and Solo, I just realized that I’m really not interested in these Star Wars spinoffs. I truthfully hope that they stop making Star Wars movies for a while after Episode IX. Whether you’re a Star Wars fan or not, you can definitely skip Solo if you want to.

2.5/5