Solo, the Movie

For John, BLUF:  I had to fill that square.  Nothing to see here; just move along.

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Yes, I went to see the movie, notwithstanding the bad reports in the media.♠  It is part of the Starwars saga, after all.  Yes, it filled in parts of the story, but it was not the best of the genre.  However, I found an article to help me understand.  First of all, I recognized myself in the article as a "fanboy".

I’d bet every fanboy went to see Solo this weekend anyway.

Actually, I went a week later.  And here is an interesting take on the movie and the comments on the movie.

Solo: Garbage Shoot

Here is the sub-headline:

The real reasons the latest Star Wars movie flopped.

From The Weekly Standard, by Mr John Podhoretz, 31 May 2018.

Here are, for me, the two key paragraphs:

Weirdly, every one of these movies centers on an orphaned young hero from nowhere, with nothing, who becomes a player in a major interplanetary game.  Rey from The Force Awakens is a scavenger; Jyn of Rogue One is part of a rebel gang.  The uniquely uninspired idea behind Solo is that he’s basically Dickens’s Artful Dodger, growing up in a slum stealing things for a local crime boss.  Does that strike you as Han Solo’s back story?  Doesn’t he seem more like the louche son of an upper-middle-class family who became a small-time smuggler because he found bourgeois life too dull?

There’s no bad boy to Alden Ehrenreich’s young Han; he’s a boy scout who is determined to save the love of his life.  All he does is sacrifice things and help people.  But the Han we know and love from the original Star Wars movies is someone who sticks his neck out for the first time when he shows up in the last act to help blow up the Death Star and transforms his life as a result.  Solo should be a movie about what made him so cynical yet charming in the first place.  It isn’t.  It isn’t really about much of anything, actually.

That's it.  I didn't really recognize the Harrison Ford Hans Solo in this actor.

Hat tip to the InstaPundit.

Regards  —  Cliff

♠  For all I knew, it was fake news being pushed by lovable old George Soros.