Quick-View: Solo: A Star Wars Story

What a lackluster movie? Solo might be the dreariest Star Wars film ever released. It looks uninspired and feels lame. The production design all looks the same for all of the settings and generally speaking is simply ugly. The planets are not interesting because it is like traveling to one junkyard world to another. The film had no mystique and no truly interesting villains. Even the Empire seems like a bad cartoon villain here. So are they evil just for the sake of being evil or maybe they would be far more interesting if the Empire actually comes off as though it's officers actually believe what they are doing is correct as opposed to just having every imperial be a one dimensional black hatted villain in a film that is a sea of flat black hats. Shoehorning Darth Maul at the end felt forced and contrived, especially when considering the character's trajectory in both The Clone Wars and Rebels animated series. The effects for some of the creatures looked surprisingly bad for both practical and CGI and a lot of the background elements were just reused pieces slightly dressed up to appear different, but ultimately, they just contributed to the film appearing cheap. Howard's direction is uninspired and Clint Howard's obligatory cameo stuck out too much like a soar thumb and was annoying rather than fun. Overall, this is the weakest of the Star Wars films released in the Disney era and one that needed a lot more thought and development. Lucasfilm could learn a lot from Marvel Studios on how to plan out a franchise so that the individual pieces feel complete and yet it feels like this has been merticulousky planned out as opposed to being tossed out without any real plan out in place. 

(C) Copyright 2018 By Mark A. Rivera

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