Review:

Solo is what happens when you give Ron Howard a Star Wars film. It doesn't often feel like a Star Wars film rather than a generic, stand-alone Sci-Fi movie. Being a prequel certainly limits what can and can't happen, but with the un-canonization of the extended Star Wars Universe, they had a lot of room to play with, however, after the first 30 or so minutes, Solo is incredibly predictable. For the most part, Solo is exactly what I imagine 85% of people expected it to be. The Marvel influence can be felt with the terrible "jokes" and now obligatory girl-power characters. The writing is surprisingly solid, but the acting is terrible from most of the cast: no one expects a good performance from Emilia Clarke, but she does a sufficient job for her under-written character, Woody Harrelson plays a shade of the same character he's played for the last decade so he does okay, and a few of the supporting characters are fine. The problems come with Solo and Lando. I've seen all the Star Wars movies and endulged in the novels and video games of the (now irrelevant) extended Star Wars world, but I'm not a hardcore Star Wars fan. I don't care that Alden Ehrenreich is not Harrison Ford and doesn't even make an honest effort to even capture an air of Ford's version of Han Solo and with as detached from the Star Wars Universe as this film feels, it's hard to even connect them as the same character. I liked Ehrenreich's character and he grew on me as the minutes past, but Ehrenreich is a bad actor; nothing he said felt real and all his emotions were unauthentic. As bad as Alden was, Donald Glover was so much worse. Glover's version of Lando was even farther from the Lando of the original trilogy, but again, i don't care. My issue is that Donald Glover isn't even trying. Glover sleeps his way through his scenes and lacks the swagger and attitude that his character is obviously supposed to have. Aside from the acting, i don't have any real issues with Solo beyond some stylistic choices (which mostly come from having Howard direct a film so different from every other Star Wars film), barely written characters, and pushing too many minor characters into such a small story. For all these issues, Solo is a surprisingly enjoyable movie; it's not a great movie, but it is a fine film. It has some really fun action sequences, beautiful and exotic scenery (although the CG was really bad in some parts), and wasn't bogged down with exposition like the prequel trilogy. Watching Solo, I was always interested, not invested, but interested. While the box office reception paints a pretty bad picture of Solo, I found it thousands of times better than Episode 7 & 8. The bad parts of Solo can be overlooked for the pure sake of enjoying the film. It's a pretty decent Sci-Fi adventure movie that happens to have some Star Wars characters in it (even though it would probably be better without them).