I wasn't expecting much from Solo, but I thought Ron Howard was probably capable enough to rescue the project and deliver something fun & tight, if not "Han" or very original. I really disliked it so much though - Howard wasn't enough to save it.
Did we probably see different movies? I think that Ron Howard did a good job. Solo is not a masterpiece, but I was not able to find nearly as many movie making craftsmanship mistakes than in TLJ or even the whole PT. In fact, I did not find any "mistakes". I am curious how it holds up to the dissection by real critics.
Ron Howard is a seasoned director and did what I expect from a veteran, namely being good at his job.
However, we of course had to expect Disney to play safe regarding the story. And I must say that I at first was bored, too, when I read Sabbacc game and Kessel run. And meeting Chewie of course had to take place within that movies plot, otherwise it would not have been complete.
This movie is what 9 out of 10 fanboys would have written if challenged to write a Han Solo origin story fan film in an afternoon. My eight year old could have guessed what'd be shown in this film before seeing a frame of it, and beat-for-beat he would have gotten it almost exactly right. What an obvious, unnecessary, disappointing story.
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We all knew what to expect, the plot tent poles for such a movie have been there since 1977. But would have your son been able to fill in the blanks between those plot points? I did not find the story too disappointing, on the contrary I felt well entertained and pleasantly surprised by a lot of the smaller details sprinkled in. I did like the fun aspect of the movie, the almost campy stuff like Lando being kind of a Maverick who really seems to like diversity in his closet when it comes to cape styles, the sometimes in your face nods to the OT, the interweaving of OT and and newer stuff, and last but not least the ending. Yes, TV series pilot, but that would actually confirm my theory of the ST being nothing more than giant episodes of a misconstructed tv series.
It is rather easy to say "I could have done that, too, and better", and in the past I did play that game with the PT and most recently with TLJ, but with Solo I must say dang, I enjoyed the ride and the nachos and coke I had bought at the concesssion stand. I had hoped for fun, and I was not disappointed.
A caveat, though: the German dubbed version was a bonus because they either chose a voice actor for Han Solo who sounded very much like a younger version of the original voice actor, or they did a lot in the post production to make him sound the part. Not so much for Lando, but that did not really matter. They even stuck with the translation for Kesselrun, which since 1978 translates to "Korsalflug". A small bit of continuity that kind of warmed my heart.
Anyway, lets see how the movie fares at the box office over the next few weeks.
