Yeah so that day job kaffufle is over and I can get back to my one true love, writing about weird shit and complaining about various forms of media for no money haha.

Just gonna blog about stuff today, I have some content but I’ll put it out tomorrow so just typing this thinking about what I need to do today and also trying to think of things to say about the Han Solo movie that haven’t already been said. Probably the most surprising of all the fact I didn’t hate it, in fact I rather liked it.

I know right, that is pretty shocking. I think maybe it’s because I had such low expectations of it, but I also had really low expectations of last jedi and rogue one and I still thought they sucked.

Anyway this is gonna be laden with spoilers because this movie has been out for awhile so if you’re reading this I’m assuming you’ve already seen it or don’t care.

The first scenes aren’t great and I feel like some of the references and jokes fell flat but on a whole I found the movie fun and inoffensive. And what’s more some of the things people complained about in the movie seemed kind of trite in the context of the film.

The first thing that comes to mind is Donglover’s Billy Dee impression, which was a little cheesey at times but didn’t ruin the movie on the whole. His character was ok, all the characters were pretty likeable and fun. I liked Alden Errenreich’s Han, I thought it was very accurate without trying too hard. Another complaint was the annoying robot side kick L337 who reviewers hated because she’s like an sjw robot. But I felt the way she was presented was for comedy. I didn’t feel like the movie was putting her up as a character to be taken seriously. And it made me think the people complaining just didn’t get the joke, or it was too subtle.

I actually think L3 is mocking sjws, not glorifying them. She’s kind of a C3PO type character, just a silly robot extra who’s not meant to be taken seriously. Just a wacky broken robot who thinks its a person. We’re never meant to take anything 3PO says seriously or see him as a representation of a thing or an idea. So I don’t get why L3 is taken as that. Maybe some of her scenes were cut but she isn’t even in it very long so I think the hate for her is totally overblown as she was never given enough screen time to get annoying. I just think people are overreacting because of the subject matter and it was just a harmless joke, not meant to be taken seriously.

The story is kind of meh and it feels more like Dredd as in a day in the life biopic instead of an epic story. The action is serviceable but I feel like so much is held back as sequel bait which weakens the film. It references Bosque but never shows him, why not? Is Bosque such an important character he can’t be in another star wars movie? What about Boba Fett? And yes spoilers, darth Maul is in it very briefly and I couldn’t help thinking why he wasn’t just in it. Like what is so special about these characters they can’t just be in the movie but have to be hinted at and shoved to the side? I really hate that shit, sequel bait nonsense, just put them in the fucking movie or don’t mention them. Its not clever, its just irritating.

I just really wish they would stop making movies already thinking they’re gonna get a sequel. You should make a movie like it’s the only one and throw everything at it, put all your ideas into it and make it work. Because as it stands the biggest problem in this movie is it has no real villains. And the only villain we really get is Draydon Voss I think his name was which is Paul Bettany’s character but he’s literally only in it for like two scenes.

He’s in it for his introduction scene and then again for his death scene. And that’s one of the things that really lets this movie down, it’s pacing. It just seems too fast, you’re never quite out of one scene or plot point and you’re already in another and I think there needed to be more breathing room and more building of characters definitely of the villains.
Because the other would be villain is Emfiss ness, however you spell that and again she’s only in it for a handful of scenes and then is revealed to not be the bad guy after all and it’s all sort of anticlimactic.

I really wanted there to be some lightsaber action, if not from darth maul himself then from an apprentice with like a lightsaber knife and you basically get that with Draydon Voss. He’s a decent villain, I just wish he was a little more fleshed out.

But in the same breath I can sort of justify this movie not having a villain relation to it not having a hero. Han out right tells us that he’s not a hero, he’s not the good guy. So it stands to reason that a movie about grey areas has no moustache twirling villain. It’s not a typical star wars movie about good and evil black and white, it’s sitting comfortably in the middle and in some regards that can feel a little unsatisfying but I guess it works.

Overrall I liked the movie, it looks nice, the acting was good, the action was decent, the ending was pretty cool. I expected it to be a lot cheesier and unbearable to watch but it really wasn’t. It was kind of like rogue one but good. Rogue one if it had any sense of fun and interesting characters and wasn’t just a dull gloomy slog that tried to trick you with a a stupid darth vader scene that got idiots clapping like trained seals despite ruining the cannon entrance of the original film.

The weaknesses of the movie I could see were that Han didn’t really have an arc he was pretty much the same character throughout. It kind of hints at a change towards the end, or well maybe it has a subtle arc because he’s sort of more trusting and happy go lucky at the start but learns not to trust people and shoots down his mentor in a reference to the Guido shooting first scene.

So I guess it did have an arc just not one that was particularly groundbreaking and sort of didn’t feel earned.

I honestly think it might have made a better tv show than a film because it has a lot of potential but a movie didn’t give it a lot of room to explore that. It could have been decent if it stayed away from netflix, maybe amc or amazon could have made it work.
I think the main reason people didn’t like this movie or weren’t excited for it is because no one really asked for it. I think if this movie came out and it wasn’t a star wars movie like it was just a standalone sci fi movie called Dan Solo space guy it probably wouldn’t have been released because it’s not really that special or mindblowing. It basically rides the coat tails of the films and also doesn’t stack up well against them so it’s like a double edged sword. It wouldn’t exist without the originals but is also measured by them.
I think when you’re making a movie you have to ask yourself ‘does this story really need to be told?’ and in regards to this movie I don’t really think it did. People would have loved Han whether this movie existed or not, whether we knew how he met Chewie or not whether we knew how he got his name/blaster/waist coat or not. So without that necessity it just boils down to a movie that’s made just to make disney lots of money on action figures and really nothing else. Just a paint by numbers, mildly entertaining movie.

It’s kinda just seen as a movie that didn’t need to exist but what movie really does? Maybe my standards are slipping (fat chance haha) but I thought it was a fun popcorn movie just to turn your brain off to, maybe take the kids too. It wasn’t spectacular but it was serviceable and nice looking and fun and really that’s all you can ask for these days.

It makes me a little sad that these star wars movies aren’t going well because I can see the potential there. It’s a world too tempting not to mine but they’re just consistently coming at it from the wrong directions and milking it like a weird alien cow with blue green milk udders. And it’s reaching a point where its like they should have just left well enough alone because now Star wars is a franchise with more bad movies than good, more bad games than good. It’s a franchise that has been ground into the dirt by greedy feckless ideologues and there’s no real coming back from that. It’s like if someone asked me what I would do with the dcu right now I’d tell them to scrap it and start again. That’s all you can do at this point. But maybe don’t start it again haha.

That’s pretty much my full take on it, I probably wouldn’t watch it again but I can’t say I didn’t enjoy it. It was a fun romp, it was a long movie but I never felt bored or irritated and it ended in a satisfactory way. But herein lies the problem, should a star wars movie be just ‘satisfactory?

Anyway that’s enough from me, spent way too long on this already and just faffing about in general, trying to reset my body clock again to get my sleeping schedule back on point and thus I feel like death right now and just want to nap until doomsday.

See you…