Solo: A Star Wars Story

I wonder if people are confusing him with Ansel Elgort (who does have a reputation as an unlikable dickwad), since they both have the same initials and unusual first and last names, and both are youngish, attractive white guys.

Like, was there someone else that The Star Wars Fan Community wanted to play young Han that they're angry it wasn't?

Apparently... yes! A guy named Anthony Ingruber who played a young version of Harrison Ford's character in The Age of Adeline!

As I understand it, in order to properly dismiss The Last Jedi all TRUE Star Wars fans have decided to retroactively rehabilitate the prequels.

It's all been downhill since Empire Strikes Back, folks.

   

We saw it tonight, and as a casual fan married to a hardcore Star Wars geek, I thought it was entertaining. Nothing deep or essential, but fun. Ties in to the “main” Star Wars timeline pretty well. Glover is great. Ehrenreich is fine. Woody Harrelson was nicely cast.

Saw it last night (at the drive in which seems like an almost ideal setting). It’s about what people always expected the Story movies to be, fine little things. All the handwringing over the leads was, of course, overblown.

I liked it and as someone completely unfamiliar with anything not alluded to in the films thought it was a pretty appropriate and fitting backstory for the iconic character we know from there. Thought Ehrenreich was actually pretty great, not exactly a great impression of Ford but a fine performance in his own right, whereas I was expecting Glover to steal the movie and he felt more like just a (very good) BDW impression.

Yeah, I didn’t hate it. It was adequate. I was surprised to find  that Emilia Clarke has learned a couple more facial expressions, & yeah, the last thing name was cutesy bullshit.

”the 10 minutes that included the kessel run were good because there wasn't any need to pay attention to the poor acting and political injections from kathleen kennedy.”
I don’t...I have no idea what the fuck that is supposed to mean.  What Political interjections? Is there a Kathleen Kennedy MRA hategroup?

Man, I post on the Last Movie Watched Thread only to come here and discover that I was (inadvertently, I swear) paraphrasing what everyone's been saying over here. Yeah, it was fine. It was cringily fan service-y in many spots, it was surprisingly poignant in others, but mostly it was just a straightforward popcorn flick. I'm curious to know why the box office is missing the mark so much, as Solo seems genetically engineered to provide Star Wars fans with precisely what they want. Maybe Star Wars fatigue? Maybe residual backlash over TLJ? Maybe people are just that upset to see someone else as Han Solo?

I enjoyed this pretty alright as an action romp even if it was extremely inessential all the way down. It shares many of the usual problems that these big franchise spin-offs do, namely the related tendencies of excessively explaining mundane aspects of iconic character's backstories that don't really need filling in and likewise attempting to tie every event that occurs into the grander narrative of the franchise, but it didn't do either nearly as much as I'd feared when I heard it was being made and the core character arcs and main heist plot line function well enough independently of the fan service aspects.

Namely though, it just felt more coherently constructed than Rogue One which jumped around all over the place in a rather unsatisfying way, whereas the middle section of this movie in particular had a nice straightforward momentum and sense of adventure to it that kept me engaged. It definitely starts to sag a bit in the back end, one could definitely excise a lot of the proto-rebellion stuff to have focused just on Han/Beckett's story.

I do wonder if it was perhaps a mistake for the wider franchise strategy to kick off with two spin-offs (Rogue One and this) that are a bit on the grimmer side. There's some solid humor and traditionally adventure-y aspects in this one but it is a bit odd that even the Fun! Star Wars spinoff movie is still a bit of a downer at times, I guess it's a difficult tonal balance to strike with a franchise that has always played with grand tragedy, and as such is best not being just turned into Marvel in Space, but which at its core is also a whizz-bang heroic space opera. Though I did kind of love the brief sojourn into the muddy world imperial military service near the start of this movie and would totally watch more of that so I guess I can't talk.

Not much different to add to the consensus opinion here. I was hoping a little more: as I said a page or two back, I was kinda digging the deep geek, Han Solo Adventures vibe the ad campaign was throwing off, but other than a few predictable nods, it played it fairly safe.

It's too bad it's underperforming: other summers, it would have room for a healthy run. I'd say Disney shot itself in the foot by putting it square in between a major MCU movie and the Incredibles sequel, but whatever, it's all money for their pockets. I don't understand why they wanted to keep this in a summer release, especially after the drama behind the scenes. They could have just booted it to Christmas, where it doesn't seem like they have a tentpole release at this point.

If the movie craters even further, it'll be interesting to see how this impacts their plans for future Solo movies (I had thought this was going to be a one-off; didn't realize how clearly it's set up for a sequel) and the other spinoffs.

I think it is a little different because of the larger age difference. There is only like 7 years real age between Ehrenreich and Ford in ANH. It looks like smarter people have deduced that the character ages are more like 12-13 years apart, but that is still quite a bit different than the 35 years that separated McGregor in TPM and Guinness in ANH. McGregor had a lot more leeway, but I also think he did adopt some mannerisms.