After a few years of avoiding it because I heard it wasn’t very good, I finally saw Solo: A Star Wars Story. To be completely honest, part of me was avoiding it because I didn’t care for the name of the movie and I was worried that seeing Donald Glover in it would impact my feelings about Community. I set all of that aside, though, because good old A More Civilized Age watched it between wrapping up the Post-Season 6 But Pre-Season 7 Clone Wars material and starting Star Wars Rebels and I wanted to be able to follow their massive episode. Plus, it’s not like I’d heard Solo was bad, just that it wasn’t actually good. So I watched and listened to AMCA talk about it and, you know, I think it was actually pretty alright. It might be the fact that I watched it between watching Dune Part 1 and Dune Part 2, so almost anything would seem good in comparison to those two movies, but I did genuinely enjoy my time watching it. It was a fun romp, even if it lasted way longer than it should have and maybe had a little too much going on, so much so that I got an hour in and just kept checking the time remaining after that because I had literally no sense of how far along the movie was, in terms of time or plot. Still, all of those too-many parts were at least a little fun and while there’s definitely some problems with the movie, none of them were bad enough to really take me out of it.

The part I loved most of all was Donald Glover’s performance. As I wrote above, I was worried about seeing him in something other than Community, mostly because I didn’t know if I’d wind up either seeing the Lando-ified version of Glover show up in Community or being unable to see anyone other than Troy in this Star Wars flick. As it turns out, his performance was so convincing that I stopped seeing anyone other than Lando Calrissian. The instant he showed up on screen, I saw no one but Lando. Even when I could only hear him, I only heard Lando. It was a convincing performance that sold me on this younger version of the character more than anyone else in the film (even Chewie) did. Compare to the tone that Glover struck with Lando, everyone else felt like a pile of brand new and entirely unknown characters while Lando alone felt like the younger and more brash version of the character I knew from the original trilogy of films. I genuinely think it’s too bad that we probably aren’t going to get more Young Lando ever because that’s a series of movies I’d actually enjoy seeing [though I recently heard a rumor that Donald Glover and his brother had taken over writing such a series,, so who knows]. Though maybe if he was written a bit better and his character wasn’t muddied by the incredibly weird way they wrote him reacting to the death and transformation of his navigation droid, L337 (or L3 as she’s called, because everyone in the film correctly refuses to acknowledge the entrance of “Leet” into the Star Wars). With some better writing and good production, I really think a set of Lando movies would be a real hit.

The rest of the characters all kind of faded into the background for me. I don’t remember much about them other than the weird writing moments where Han was forced to insert himself into a conversation when he clearly had nothing to say and someone else was handling things. I get that he’s self-centered and thinks incredibly highly of himself, but it really sucks that they wrote him in a way where he keeps getting set up to act foolish. I genuinely don’t think there was a single scene in that entire movie where he seems cool or daring. He’s mostly just mouthy. Which, you know, is very much in the character of Han Solo, but Han Solo was also pretty cool. Maybe if I go back and watch the original trilogy again, my opinion of Han will change a bit, but I don’t really hold a lot of nostalgia for those movies. I mean, I watched them a bunch as a kid, sure, but I was never THAT into Star Wars back then. I got into it with the prequel trilogy and because of the Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic games rather than because of the admittedly cool and fun original trilogy. Regardless, it really felt like the people writing the Han Solo movie didn’t really want to write a Han Solo movie. And maybe they shouldn’t have. Maybe the movie would have been better if they’d written it about someone else and not had a majorly famous and cool character get his surname from some low-level Imperial recruiter who needed to fill in a blank box on an enlistment form. A name that he kept and gave to his kid despite being from a really dumb source. No wonder Ben Solo was pissed at him. I would be, too, if I found out where my “family” name came from and it was a dumb bureaucratic necessity from the evil empire whose rise and fall made my family famous.

The rest of the characters were fine and, largely, way more interesting than Han Solo even if none of them felt quite as interesting as Lando did. To be honest, I could see a version of this movie that mostly edits Han out being actually pretty good. I could also see a version of this movie with Han still in it and maybe an hour of it trimmed away so the plot was tight and more interesting being pretty good as well. I just think this movie fell victim to not enough trimming in the editing room, way too much stuff going on, and a really horrible look at what a droid with dreams of freedom might be in the world of Star Wars. Sure, they might not have done Han any favors, but the writing room did L3 dirty by forcing her to become a permanent and conscious part of the ship for the rest of its existence. She can’t even talk anymore. Her enslavement is more complete than ever and that’s especially galling when all of her talk of droid emancipation wound up being played for laughs rather than taken seriously as a viewpoint in the Star Wars universe.

Anyway, the movie was pretty alright. A fine romp. A decent use of your time. An enjoyable way to spend part of a day. I would recommend it if you haven’t seen it yet and really like Star Wars, but I’d also suggest that you could probably give it a pass otherwise. It’s not really that important in the grand scheme of the Star Wars continuity since none of it has come up since then, we already know what happens to most of the characters, and the movie itself seems mostly concerned with making references to the original trilogy or explaining unimportant things like where the dice in the Millennium Falcon (which I’ve never noticed in my entire life) came from. If you’re interested in that kind of stuff, though, then I suggest you dig right in. There’s plenty of it in there.