Which story are we talking about?....this thread has moved over to TLJ a bit
I loved the story for Solo,...but found the story of TLJ very poor & amateurish
J
I think the current direction of the conversation speaks to lazy writing, which is a term often associated with The Last Jedi. I don't buy into that association. Writing that is disagreed with is not, by definition, lazy. However, I feel like that's where most of the ire for The Last Jedi comes from: a disagreement with the choices. And dismissing that as lazy is...well, lazy.
Lazy writing is obvious, and almost none of the choices in The Last Jedi were obvious. The Force Awakens, by contrast, made very lazy choices. Almost the entire plot was predictable by being nearly a beat-for-beat remake of A New Hope. It might have been presented well, but it was still lazy. And maybe "lazy" was somewhat of a necessity for reintroducing the franchise, but it also resulted in backing the remaining two films into the corner of also rehashing the basic structure of the original trilogy. The Last Jedi chose to step out of that corner, which many fans admittedly don't care for, but it was not lazy.
When it comes to lazy, amateurish writing, however, Solo is textbook example of how to phone in your story. The entire film is structured around things we already know. So much so that the few elements and characters that are new are given so little to actually do that they don't matter. Almost from the beginning, the film establishes that it is running off of a checklist of Han Solo lore that it is going to insist on feeding us, not with a sense of style, but a sense of obligation and complete disregard for whether or not the lore make any narrative sense.
And before the "weaponized hyperspace makes no narrative sense" crowd grabs their pitchforks, the mere notion of not seeing a concept prior is not the same thing as breaking narrative rules. If sequels were not allowed to expand upon the universe with new elements, new characters, new situations, and new rules, then there would be almost no point in sequels (which, by the way, is why most sequels suck -- they try too hard to not deviate from what "worked" in the first film). The Star Wars films have almost always introduced new elements that had little to no precedent from previous films.
Yet "fans" praise it when they agree with the new choices, dismiss it as lazy when they don't.
Lazy is things like going for a spectacularly unfunny joke about how Solo got his name. It's a writer being so proud of a poorly written joke that the fact that it not only contributes nothing to character development, but it actually removes agency from a character who is supposed to be practically the embodiment of agency.