Solo: A Star Wars Story (Spoilers)

[Scott]

I saw this over the weekend. I thought it was pretty entertaining. There were a few things that I would have considered terrible in most other movies, but were expected in a Star Wars movie. Of the five post-prequel movies I think it was the best, the story was more engaging and the characters were much stronger. The Kessel Run was a bit of a let down, and there was an unnecessary Darth Maul cameo. I guess they incorporated his survival from the Rebels cartoon.

[Scott]

I was also reminded, again, of how I’ll-conceived and just terrible the prequels were. The Empire seems so less epic when you consider it only lasted about 20-ish years. The “president” of the Congo has been around longer than that. It’s funny that the new movies draw so heavily on the original trilogy and kind of pretend the prequels never happened.

[GRWelsh]

For the first time, I may wait for a STAR WARS movie to go to video before seeing it. I no longer feel any excitement about the movies because it doesn't feel like my STAR WARS any more. It just seems like a franchise now, without any exuberance of creativity. It's like they don't know what to do with it... "Let's fill in all the gaps and do movies based on every little thing referenced in the original trilogy." They're telling stories I don't care about or that I already know. How will our heroes destroy the Starkiller Base? It's just a bigger Death Star, and we've already seen that. How did our heroes get the plans to the original Death Star? Who cares... Was anyone even asking? How did Han Solo become the charismatic scoundrel we all know? Who cares why he was selfish and cynical, because the original trilogy was about him starting to care about more than just himself.

It's like you said, they keep tinkering with the background and details, but sometimes they end up degrading the original trilogy with all of this fussiness. It makes it less epic, not more.

[geneweigel]

Yeah, I feel potential has little wiggle room as well.

I want to watch this but my STAR WARS fandom was crawling to the clinic (because of the Lucas prequels and Disney post-Lucas films) and got hit by a car (friends disowning their flag-waving entirely and dumping their glib SW zealousness on me of which I have none) on the way over.

I still haven't seen LAST JEDI but I feel obliged at this point. Its coming on NETFLIX in 2 weeks so I guess I'll squeeze it in. Disney has a deal for all SW films after FORCE AWAKENS headed towards Netflix after Blu-ray and Pay-Per-View.

[GRWelsh]

I saw this and liked it. I agree this is the best of the post-prequel Disney STAR WARS movies. It had a strong script, and that should be no surprise since it was co-written by Lawrence Kasdan and his son Jonathan Kasdan. Lawrence Kasdan co-wrote V, VI, and VII. These felt like the STAR WARS characters we know and love, especially with Han, Chewie and Lando. There were some fun call backs to the original trilogy and even the prequels. I agree that the Darth Maul cameo seemed a bit unnecessary yet what I liked about it was that it treated the events of the CLONE WARS as canon, and that show is my favorite STAR WARS anything since the original trilogy. The music didn't feel very STAR WARS at all, and I noticed it when they first see the Millenium Falcon and they played some notes from the original soundtrack. There was no opening crawl either. But those things didn't bother me, since I watched this as if it were a story set in the STAR WARS universe and not part of the grand saga -- which is what was intended. I had a hang up about the lead not being able to capture the same magic of the character that Harrison Ford did, but he wasn't terrible. If only they could have got an actor who seemed like he could have been the younger version of Harrison Ford's character, like in this short film -- "A Smuggler's Trade":

www.youtube.com/watch?v=BvPfCTyd3X8