Solo: A Star Wars Story is a romp.
It’s a blue-crème-filled Easter egg for fans and a solid action flick for casual watchers.
There’s drifting in spaceships, wall-to-wall laser-filled shootouts, and a respectable number of dodgy card games.
THIS is the rollicking Star Wars adventure every film-goer has supposedly been looking for… so where are you all?
Despite the literal meaning of its title, Solo is a movie for everyone. And it has something for everybody.
It has the cinnamon bun hero in Han Solo, Che Guevara wannabe revolutionary droid L3-37, the ever-charming Lando Calrissian (siiiigh, those capes) and all the undistressed damsels you can poke a lightsaber at, most notably Val and Qi’Ra.
Yet it’s floundering around at the box office like a scruffy-looking nerf herder in a garbage compactor.
And that makes NO sense.
It doesn’t make sense, because in the wake of The Last Jedi, fans of the franchise threw a temper tantrum reminiscent of a newly-Vadered Ryan Philippe the sixth member of N*Sync that Hayden guy in Episode III.
The argument presented – let’s be generous and call it an argument – was that The Last Jedi “wasn’t Star Wars enough.”
So, overlooking the fact that this argument demonstrates a deep misunderstanding of how story progression or the Star Wars formula works…
Then Solo is, surely, exactly what those very fans were asking for?
Solo is wall-to-compacting-wall Star Wars with extra Star Wars in the smuggling compartments hidden in the floor.
Of course, we can’t talk about The Last Jedi criticism without addressing the big stinky tauntaun in the room.
The tirade of abuse directed towards Kelly Marie Tran that ultimately forced her off Instagram is about way more than a pouting nerd writing a scathing review on their blog.
It’s been a targeted attack on an actress whose only true crime has been to lay siege to my heart by being delightful as heck.
Even if you didn’t adore Rose as a character, Tran embodied the every-geek on the set of that movie. She was unashamedly awestruck and excited at every stage.
And somehow, upset by this, fake fans tried to destroy her and her love of Star Wars.
Yes, I know they deserve a stronger label than “fake fans”, but if you’re cool with making rape threats I doubt being called a bigot is going to cause you much alarm.
I’m instead naively hoping that calling them fakes will alert them to the fact we’re on to them.
You can’t be a fan and then call for more “Straight White Men” and “less politics” and rationalise it with “because canon.”
You certainly can’t do that in a Universe whose main hero – yeah, I said it – is a princess-turned-general whose feats include defying one of the strongest men in the galaxy and strangling her captor with the chain he put on her.
Do you even Star Wars, bro?
No, you don’t. So get out and stop taking up the time we should be spending arguing about who shot first. (It was Han).
What does all this have to do with Solo?
Look, Solo is not the cure to the toxicity plaguing Star Wars at the moment. Being better humans is the best cure for that.
But surely if we can all just embrace things that are fun, and remember that fun is why we all fell in love with this universe in the first place, we can become fans again – rather than just a sarlacc pit of endless nitpicking and howling dissatisfaction, where fun and joy go to be swallowed up in the dark.