Film Review Week - Day 1

I’ve watched a substantial number of films and, this being the internet, I’m going to use this forum to spread to my hastily thought out and ill-informed opinions about them. Isn’t that what the internet’s all about? Well, that plus funny cat videos and rudey pictures. Anyhoo, here’s some guff about some stuff. Let’s start with one of the current biggies, shall we?

Solo
Dir. Ron Howard
In a nutshell:- Han Solo: The Early Years

I’ve been a Star Wars fan for as long as I can remember. Seriously - I don’t remember a time when I wasn’t a fan of Star Wars as I’ve been watching the films/playing with the toys/reading the comics/watching the not-very-good Ewok films at school since I was about 5. It’s completely ingrained in me along with excitement about a new film coming out - yes, I was even excited about the prequels (took me a while that The Phantom Menace is actually a bit dull apart from the pod race and the Darth Maul bits). This one, however, managed to elicit exactly zero excitement in me. Is it the proximity to the last film given that The Last Jedi only came out about 5 months ago? Is it the fact that it’s yet another prequel (although Rogue One was great)? Is it the fact that it’s filling in the backstory of a character that doesn’t really need an expanded backstory? Whatever it was, I had zero expectations going into Solo and, I have to say, the film pretty much lived up to them.

Is it a bad film? By no means - it has some exciting moments, some funny stuff and Donald Glover and Phoebe Waller-Bridge are, as expected, both great (if way too underused). Is it a great film? Sadly not; it never manages to rise above the selection of box-ticking fan-pleasing moments (oh, Han gets his name, Han meets Chewie, Hans sees the Falcon for the first time, Han meets Lando, Han does the Kessel Run, etc., etc.) to become something more than the sum of its parts.

Given the public firing of the two original directors (who brought us The Lego Movie and co-created Last Man On Earth), it could have been much more of a car crash of a film. As it is, it’s a competent enough film with some nice moments but is ultimately fairly forgettable. (The film also has a very odd moment which is dependent on knowledge of events in spin-off cartoons; as a nerd, I like things to be interconnected but, if the main films are getting to the point that you have to watch tie-in cartoons to understand them fully, I think they’ve taken a wrong step.)

Is it worth it? If you’re a Star Wars completist then obviously, If not, maybe best wait for Episode IX.