OK, that one wasn't good either

In my review of Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker a few weeks ago, I mentioned that I'd enjoyed the other new Star Wars movies, with the exception of Solo: A Star Wars Story, which I hadn't seen yet.

Well, I saw it.  And...yeah.

On the up side, it was definitely better than The Rise of Skywalker.  But that doesn't make it good.  That would be like saying that Anders Breivik wasn't such a bad guy because he killed fewer people that Stalin.  It doesn't work that way.  So it was pretty bad.  I'd rank it as the second worst Star Wars movie so far.

The disappointing part was that for the first third to half of the movie, I was enjoying it.  It wasn't fantastic, but is seemed like a decent, straight-forward action/adventure movie.  I distinctly remember thinking, "I don't know what people were complaining about.  This is actually not bad." 

Then in the second half the story started going down hill.  They started throwing in plot twists and flipping the "good guys" and the "bad guys" and it just didn't really work.  Especially since a lot of the "good guys" were career criminals - are we really surprised they're not so good?  Come on.  Add in the corny dialog and some iffy acting that left the characters feeling unrelatable and that just killed it for me.

And then there were the parts that seemed like they were supposed to be some form of ham-handed social commentary.  For instance, Lando's droid that was constantly agitating for droid rights.  That could have been an interesting sub-plot.  Are droids really sentient?  What does sentience actually mean?  And if they are, why doesn't galactic civilization have a problem with basically enslaving them?  And for that matter, why don't they seem to have a problem with enslaving humans or other humanoids?  How do the characters relate to these questions?

But no - they don't even try to explore any of that.  They just have the droid assert that droids are sentient and need to be liberated and then walk around ranting about it like that friend who spends way too much time on Twitter and won't stop talking about politics.  "Yeah, we get it Bob, the patriarch is bad.  Now what do you want on your damn pizza?"  It ends up just being a punchline.

Bottom line: if you haven't seen Solo, don't bother.  My only consolation was that I was cleaning the house while I watched it, so at least the time wasn't wasted.  If you want a good Star Wars story, go watch season 1 of The Mandalorian.

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