Review of Solo: A Star Wars Story (2018) by Nikolayg — 25 May 2018

The reason you don't see any spoiler reviews here is because the story's not worth talking about. The 3 main characters did a bad acting job. At times it felt like a fan film with a really big budget. The actor playing Lando did not have the charisma or way of carrying himself to pull off the character.

The sexual implications about Lando and his robot were creepy. The other two actors didn't pull off their characters very well, either. But at least they had each other and weren't getting it on with robots.

The secondary characters, including Thandie Newton and Woody Harrelson, were good, but it was critical for the primary characters do a good job too and they just didn't. The story idea was generic and the pacing was off, and the action was overdone.

It got to the point where it just seemed messy. There should be a beginning, middle, and end to each scene. An action sequence should have structure. Some of the action scenes felt like the editor had no awareness of that, like fireworks that go on for days.

Enough already. And the music was too loud, as if they thought that would convince us this was really Star Wars. It did not. Just as showing us the Falcon dice over and over and over again does not convince us this is really SW.

A movie does not magically become a real SW movie because of the props or because you turned the music up. The whole 'Kessel Run' thing wasn't explained well. They applied a similar explanation as used in the SW expanded universe (that Disney removed from canon), but they gave the explanation so little screen time in Solo they basically squandered it.

There was one scene on the Falcon that should have been suspenseful but it was full of so many dumb jokes the mood was spoiled. I suspect this was a scene left over from the original directors. If so, that demonstrates how much worse this movie would have been if Ron Howard had not stepped in to improve it.

But there was only so much he could do. He could not recast. All in all a disappointment. They really should have gone with Anthony Ingruber.