The latest of the Star Wars interstitial movies has arrived, Solo: A Star Wars Story. Before I jump in with my thoughts, I want to recall something I said when discussing The Force Awakens a few years back: unlike the apparent majority of Star Wars fans, Han Solo has never been my favorite character. I suspect your opinion of this movie will be higher if he is.
There's been a long and sometimes lively debate about which Star Wars movie is the best. There's pretty wide agreement about the worst. Now we've got the most average. In maybe 10-or-so years, when there are as many Star Wars films as there are James Bond movies, I think this one will stand as "most forgettable."
Part of the reason this is a spoiler-free review is that there's very little I could point to in this movie as being "bad." There's also nothing that really stands out. Certainly, nothing about it will polarize the audience in the way The Last Jedi did. This isn't going to destroy (or affirm) anyone's childhood. It isn't that it's boring or that it drags in certain places. It just washes over you like any other disposable action movie, making no mistakes and taking no risks.
I suppose playing it safe is exactly what producer Kathleen Kennedy wanted when she fired original directors Phil Lord and Christopher Miller and replaced them with Ron Howard. We may never know. Maybe Lord and Miller actually were making a Clones-level turd, and Howard's efforts muscled the movie back to the best it could be given a fixed release date. They weren't my hundreds of millions of dollars to gamble, and even if they had been, I can't say I wouldn't have made the same choice.
The result is just so aggressively "passable." Action sequences are constructed decently enough without ever really getting the blood racing. The characterization is generally thin, but the actors spackle things in just enough to keep the movie from feeling empty. There are no clunker lines of dialogue to make you groan, but I also can't remember any good ones right now, the morning after watching it.
There's a methodical checklist being ticked off dutifully. Every conceivable bit of back story you'd want to know about Han, Chewbacca, and the Millennium Falcon is here -- right down to the reason Lando pronounces Han's name wrong. Some of feels sort-of clever, but none of it really stands out. There's no "the movie's bad, but at least there's the podracing scene and the lightsaber duel." (But there's also no "I hate sand.")
There are loads of allusions to events of the original trilogy that sort of work. They don't quite feel like cheap trading on existing goodwill, but they don't really feel like they recontextualize things in a meaningful way either. (Maybe it's being hurt by the score by John Powell, which elbows your brain sharply by playing the exact music John Williams created for the original movies.)
A "perfectly serviceable action movie" might be worth a low B-. But I know I liked The Last Jedi considerably more than just taking away a "minus" conveys. So I'm going to call Solo a C+. Don't let me stop you from seeing it (not that you would have). You're not going to hate it. I doubt you're going to love it.
Maybe this will be the movie that finally teaches the masses that we can just have a Star Wars movie, without it being the best/worst thing ever.
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