Han is naive in this film. He’s had a hard life but he thinks being a thief is great and the life will be glamorous. As this film progresses, he learns that you can lose the ones you love, you can die alone, the people you trust can betray you and other people in the galaxy are suffering too. I imagine that if there is a sequel, he will be broken and jaded somehow by Q’ra. She will either be killed by Maul or betray Han to the point where he doesn’t trust women or “sticks his neck out for no one”.
There is growth in this film. It just doesn’t hit you over the head with sweeping orchestra and slow motion realization.
Yeah, but considering this film takes place only a few years before ANH that doesn’t really make sense. Han’s portrayed as this naive good guy who wants to be a rogue, and has a generally very optimistic outlook on life, despite growing up in harsh circumstances. This doesn’t seem all that consistent with the jaded cynic, and opportunist we met in ANH. That guy seems to have had a very tough life, literally fighting for survival his entire life only relying on himself, and Chewie. Now, it seems Han was a good guy all along, a self-confident optimist who apparently just had the blues over his former lover when we meet him in ANH. While Solo is entertaining that doesn’t really add to Han’s arc in the OT for me, in fact it diminishes it to an extend by softening the character more explicitely than Greedo shooting first ever did.