fujishig

If you can buy that they're speaking English then you can buy that the Universal Translator you're using to watch the movie translated the beverage as something that you'd recognize.

Same with the Imperial theme. Where's my no-prize?

kefrank

As for my thoughts about the movie, I thought it was a light, fun ride but it did feel off to me at the same time. The best way I can describe it is that it felt like what would result if someone within the Star Wars universe set out to re-enact the lore surrounding Han Solo and the Millennium Falcon for the Star Wars universe-equivalent of a TV movie or something (entertainment hologram projection?). Some of that "re-enactment" feeling is due simply to other actors playing such iconic characters, but it goes beyond that to the way the plot elements are stitched together and the physical spaces are portrayed.

I agree with what someone else mentioned about enjoying how it showed more of the criminal underworld in the Star Wars universe. I think I would much rather have had a Star Wars Story about a smuggling or pirating crew comprised of characters we've never met, that maintains only a loose connection to OT such as them doing a job for Jabba or perhaps making a passing mention of someone named Han Solo. This would be more in line with the Rogue One concept and would enrich the cinematic universe more, in my opinion.

Mabuse

I assume Val is the lady who sacrifices herself.

Not only didn’t the thought run across my mind. But these are alien worlds! The only underclass in the galaxy are droids. Everyone else seems on an equal footing. Audiences are so dumb sometimes.

JeremyM

To be fair, I personally think any beef people have with Luke's character would have to be with Abrams. Once he made the decision to have Luke in exile and left TFA off that way, there really weren't many routes you could take to adequately explain it. I've given some thought to it and I haven't been able to come up with anything better than what Johnson did--what would be significant enough to make him disappear and refuse to come out of hiding?

I suppose you could argue that Rey arriving at his doorstep should have swung him back into action. (I originally wrote "aroused him to action" here and yeah, that ain't the way to put it!) But I don't know about that--his feelings had to be deeply held to get him into exile, in my opinion.

I really don't think you can blame Johnson for much of the Luke story any more than you can blame him for Han being dead, at least up until Luke decides to stay on the island when Rey leaves.

Anyway, this probably isn't the place for another rehash of TLJ arguments so I apologize.

Paul_SD

Luke's exile was a truly dopey, totally Abrams-esque, MacGuffin in TFA. It was flimsily predicated and with ultimately no larger purpose. But like most Abrams stuff it was laden with...Mystery.

Abrams storytelling is always gift-wrapped boxes inside of larger gift-wrapped boxes. You get the thrill of opening one after the other, and that escalating sense of expectation. Until the point where you start to realize that whatever prize is in there is getting smaller and smaller. Then finally, you get to the last one and there's nothing but air.

But wasn't it grand fun opening all those boxes and anticipating what you were going to be getting?

That's an Abrams movie/TV show to me.

funkyryno

Not necessarily in regard to the Empire, which is definitely pro-human and tends to subjugate the other alien races (the Wookies are an example of this). Admiral Thrawn was one notable exception where a non-human gained a prominent role in the Empire, mainly due to his brilliance and ruthlessness.

milo bloom

I wish you hadn't. It was neat to see other Wookie types, but that one could have been done a little better.


It's simply mind-boggling to see people complaining about women and persons of color characters being introduced, when scifi has always tried to do this, with Star Trek as early as the 1960s being the biggest name doing it.

If you honest to goodness can't watch a movie without a 99% white male cast, there is something mentally wrong with you. Movies are simply better reflecting the world we live in.

bluetoast

Thought it was all right, but I think it may grow on me. The use of Lando was great. Woody is awesome as always.

Disagree with the guy saying it needed a crawl. Then it would have huge music making it seem like a wide sweeping epic like the episode movies, which it’s not. That would have been like pulling out a Magnum and revealing a peg from the game of Life. The text is small scale, like the movie, at least relatively.

Obi-Wanma

I'm not saying it needed a crawl, I'm saying I'm not a fan of several screens of text as a way to open a movie, and if they were going to do that, they might as well have done a crawl, which I would have liked better than what we got. Rouge One got a along just fine without any text at the beginning of the movie.

Josh-da-man

I think they're probably reserving the crawls for numbered episodes.

Obi-Wanma

I know that they are. And what I'm saying is that if you're not going to do one, just start the movie. There was nothing essential in that text which would have left someone who hadn't seen it lost. It felt like someone wanted to write a crawl, and perhaps even wrote it into the script that way, but because LF wants to save them for the saga movies, they did this instead.

dhmac

This I completely agree with. L3 was the only character I did not like in this movie.

This I completely disagree with. Droids in Star Wars are artificially created machines that are there to do a job. They need "freeing" about as much as an Amazon Echo or a toaster needs freeing. THis is some serious BS that the movie would've been better without.

Goldberg74

Just waiting for those fans who like L3 to demand a film called "Lando and the Real Droid."

Draven

So Artoo and Threepio are the same as toasters? Those are some heroic, galaxy-saving toasters!

fujishig

Yeah, while I wasn't a huge fan of L3, I can understand the robots not wanting to be just battlebots or whatever, considering they have personalities, a sense of humor, and thus seemingly free will. Some are pretty much completely independent, like IG-88.

The fact that we're even talking about it probably proves L3's point.

Ranger

Glad they announced the novelization. I was afraid they wouldn't release one.

The Scoundrels book by Zahn is pretty good.


Plagueis was a good book, but it says Maul was only trained as a Sith assassin, not Sith Lord as Plagueis was still Sidious's master. I prefer Maul and Sidious as the two Sith Lords.

Some say Maul only works alone. I hope the novelization explains Maul's new role more.

rocket1312

I thought this was completely and utterly unremarkable in just about every conceivable way. As divisive as The Last Jedi was, at least it was interesting and worth talking about. The most noteworthy thing about Solo is that I guess it didn't suck? Ehrenreich was fine. I liked Paul Bettany. He was fun, even if he didn't really do much. I continue to be mystified by Emilia Clarke's appeal. The first time Donald Glover spoke, I thought "Oh my goodness, he IS Billy Dee Williams!" but from that point on it just felt like a weird impression to me. Han meeting Chewie was a decent scene (although I thought Han speaking Wookie was kind of ridiculous), but I can't believe anyone who ever spent more than 10 seconds imagining Han making the Kessel run or winning the Falcon from Lando would be satisfied by what we saw.

I know every movie that gets a review thread here seems to hover around 4 stars, but I'm sorry guys, I just don't get it. I guess I'm not seeing what what you all seem to be seeing. I would have rather it been a trainwreck than the cinematic equivalent of mediocre cheese pizza. I have no idea what Lord and Miller had up their sleeves, but given that the 10 seconds worth of Star Wars cameos in the Lego Movie had more life in them than just about all 2+ hours of Solo, I can't help but wonder what if.

Azor Ahai

Saw it again tonight and enjoyed it considerably more the second time around. But there are undeniable problems. That entire first hour is still quite choppy pacing and plot-wise and just doesn't flow as it should. The comedy also doesn't work. There are hardly any memorable lines or jokes that hit their mark. The one and only bit that got any laughs in my audience tonight was the Han backing up bit after Lando takes off with the Falcon and he goes "Okay, do your thing" to Beckett.

Alden is pretty decent throughout except when he delivers the line, "I'm an outlaw" to Daenerys with that shit-eating grin and nasal, kiddie voice. That was eye-rollingly bad. Seriously, Wtf was with the overblown music and stunned looks from all of the characters when Enfys Nest takes off the helmet and reveals she's a woman? Han, Beckett and even Chewie look positively stunned. "What the hell??? A WOMAN!???! But...but HOW CAN THAT BE??? WHAT IS GOING ON??!?" Just a very odd scene the way it's played.

2 things I noticed the second time: Beckett mentioning that he killed Aura Sing. And L3 telling Lando to "stop flirting" with Han on the Falcon. Not sure how I missed those the first time.

3 nitpicks that I know are silly but they still bugged me: The blasters don't sound the same as they do in every single one of the other movies, including Hans'. It's higher-pitched or something, dunno, but they sound noticeably different here. There was no mention of Chewie's 'life-debt' to Han which kinda disappoints me. And I wish the planets, villains and crime/'maurader' groups had more distinctive or memorable names. I'm still having trouble recalling the name of the planet where they meet up again with Voss.

fujishig

I was confused by that helmet reveal too, I thought maybe that was his kid or something, but no, just a surprise that she's a young girl? Made no sense to me.

Lando's the one that mentioned that Beckett killed Aura Sing, saying he did him a favor since Lando owed her money. And the flirt thing was a gag because of how fanboyish Han was in the cockpit. I'm not saying you thought it was something different, but I don't think that's like a "pansexual" reveal or anything like some may think.

tanman

I agree and mentioned that. It was weird. I thought I missed something earlier or I thought it was supposed to be Becket and Val's daughter but nope nothing. Just some bad telegraphing. Wow I didn't catch that about Beckett He was kind of boring to have accomplished that. And yes I thought it was pretty hard to follow at the end. Everyone kept switching sides and we never really got to know who the Crimson Dawn is or who Enfys nest is working for and why we suddenly care about her and her pirates when earlier we just killed a bunch of them on the train heist. The first 2 acts of the movie was almost ridiculously simplistic with the last act playing off as a last ditch effort to set up a trilogy.

tanman

I totally didn't know anything about SJW in Star Wars. Is this a new thing? I had to google that SJW means social justice warrior? Is there a crackpot subset of the population that believes that KK is trying to push such radical ideas as women in movies and interracial couples?

They obviously don't watch Supergirl They had a whole planet that was literally anti-man.

Mabuse

Id like to quote myself

fujishig

Did they? I watched a recent episode where there was some ridiculous plot about them going on a space station where the radiation from the sun or whatever was deadly to people with a Y chromosome, but did they follow that up with an entire planet too? Besides that ridiculousness, they sent a depowered supergirl on that mission with a bunch of bad guys, I have no idea how that made any sense when they were plotting it out, like they just had an idea that they wanted an all girls team and then worked backwards from there.

I did forget about the head of the not-marauders being a young girl, I suppose that got people up in arms as well.

tanman

Oh yeah you're right it was a space station not a planet. I chalk it up to bad writing as apposed to an agenda although it is pretty clear they do have an agenda. To me the best way to go about that is representation and equality. In Supergirl they continually have to beat it over the audiences head that she's a girl. And they have to make it that she beat Superman and have to keep saying that he was at full strength and she beat him honestly. We get it. Just show that she beat him and that's it. Wonder Woman did a much better job of it because she was just a complete badass and they didn't have to have characters keep pointing out that she was a woman.

joe_b

I'm late to the party here (waited until discount day at Cinemark). I found the whole thing fairly tedious to sit through. The cinematography was drab, muddy and downright ugly throughout. The movie looked like a sink full of dirty dishwater.

Alden wasn't a total embarrassment, but still unremarkable. Glover went overboard with his BDW impression, which felt needlessly comical at times. I thought Emilia Clarke was bland (per usual) and her character had no chemistry with Han. The Maul reveal was groan-inducing. I wish Star Wars would follow the MCU pattern where the films don't acknowledge the TV series. I didn't care for Clone Wars or Rebels... I didn't want any of those story lines creeping into the films. Oh, and the less said about L3, the better.

Just a big pile of "meh" for me. Kennedy and her "story group" deserve a swift kick in the pants for running this property into the ground after only four movies. The only "fatigue" I'm feeling is caused by mediocre screenplays and boring performances. I'll take the prequels any day over TLJ and this pointless, forgettable cash-grab.