Film Friday | Solo: A Star Wars Story Mini Review

Hey friends,

I’ve been wanting to expend the content on here (since some of the bookish themed stuff can get repetitive) and I do love movies, so I wanted to start this mini…series(?)…. meme(?)…weekly posts (?) where I talk about the movies I’ve recently seen.

Christian and I have movie pass and we’re planning to use it a lot more over the summer, especially since there are so many movies we want to see.

As you can see from the title, this week we (finally) saw Solo: A Star Wars Story.

Oh and how I’m going to do these posts to make them more than just movie reviews (since I’m just an average moviegoer at best and I don’t know enough about movies to actually do reviews for them), I’m going to start the posts with some predictions/thoughts before we actually see the movie and then my thoughts after we see the movie.

So here are my predictions/thoughts for Solo.

Predictions:

Okay, so Christian is much more of a Star Wars loyalist than I am. He’s been a fanboy since he was 2, knows the script for the first 6 movies by heart, and knows most of the pre-Disney extended universe lore.

I watched Stars Wars for the time my senior year of high school (I was 18 then…I’m 23 now).

As for recent movies, I really liked Rouge One and I liked it a lot more than Episode 7. Christian like aspects of both of them, but also had issues with both.

For Episode 8, I liked it more than Christian did. As time went on, he’s warmed up to Episode 8, but he’s nervous for where the franchise is going.

And that brings us to Solo. He was mad after the first trailer, I was pretty indifferent.

We didn’t watch any of the other trailers and have gone back an forth about seeing the movie, but then we watched a few reviews from people with similar tastes to us and decided to at least give it a shot.

Mini Movie Review:

Getting straight to the point — I didn’t hate it.

So the beginning of the movie definitely turned me off. I didn’t like the humor or set up, and the first 20 or so minutes was exactly what I was afraid of happening. That being said, I think the movie greatly improved as the story went on.

It was fun to see some favorite characters on the big screen in their youth. I think Alden Ehrenreich and Donald Glover did great jobs capturing their iconic characters and portraying them as younger versions. While Ehrenreich’s performance was a bit concerning at first, by the end of the movie he felt like a younger version of Han.

As for the side characters, I liked them. Woody Harrelson’s character was probably my favorite of the side characters, but I like Woody Harrelson as an actor so I might be biased. I thought he brought a lot to the story (but I’ll get into that more a bit later on).

Oh and the dynamic between Han and Chewie was really enjoyable to watch. Knowing this iconic duo and watching them form their friendship was fun to see.

As for the story, it was a simple heist film with the added tension of the Empire. The plot wasn’t the most compelling thing (and it was a bit predictable at times), but the characters really helped elevate it. Though I would have loved to see more of these new side characters.

Beckett’s crew – Val and Rio were fun and likable characters (at least from what we saw of them), but I wanted more. Same with Qi’ra. I wasn’t invested in that B plot because I feel like there wasn’t enough setup.

I think the weakest aspect of this movie is the same as Rouge One – there wasn’t enough time with these new characters to really feel for them. Because it’s a prequel movie taking place someone what close to the time of the main storyline we all know and love, the writers need to account for why we haven’t seen any of these characters in the original movies. There’s really only two ways to do that. Unfortunately, that means that we have limited time with these characters and we know most of their fates before the trailer even releases.

Also, the droids are usually my favorite part of these movies. C3PO and K2SO are by far my favorite, but R2 and BB-8 are also fun. That being said, I wasn’t that big of a fan of L3-37. Don’t get me wrong, L3-37 had some great scenes and some really funny moments, but also some meh moments. L3’s just my least favorite of the (main) Star Wars droids.

The last thing I want to talk about it the appearance of a friendly face. Personally, I saw the reveal of this person coming, so that had no impact, and I’m still not 100% sure why this character was included. Don’t get me wrong, this character’s cameo was incredibly brief and didn’t bring down the movie at all, I’m just entirely not sure why we needed this character.

Final thoughts:

Overall, this movie was a fun addition to the Star Wars franchise, but not a needed one. Han’s backstory didn’t add to the main films the way that Rouge One did, but it didn’t ruin the story either. If you’re a die-hard Star Wars fan, there are going to be bits about this movie that you really like and some stuff you’re going to vehemently loath. If you’re a newbie (like me), you’re probably going to enjoy it more since you don’t know how this story actually was told in the pre-Disney extended universe.

Personally, I’d love to see a movie set in the Star Wars universe that follows characters not connected to the main storyline so we can actually explore them more. Like I mentioned above, my main issue with these prequel movies is that most of the characters feel like throwaway characters and it’s hard to get invested in them. If there was a film where you can see the aftermath or follow characters that are living with the conflict of the core films, but not directly connected to the main storyline, we’d be able to get a story that explores new world and develop characters that don’t necessarily have to be axed off or less important.

Are you a fan of the force?

Have you seen Solo? If so, what did you think?

Be sure to let me know below!