Well I am now eating crow. Based on the troubled production reports, the trailers, and the basic concept, I fully expected this movie to be awful, and predicted months ago it would bomb spectacularly (by Star Wars standards) both at the box office and critically. Sadly I was kind of right on that point, but I could not have been more wrong about the movie itself being awful. Granted I went in with rock bottom expectations, so maybe that affected my perceptions when it crossed that extremely low threshold, but on the other hand I was prejudiced against the film from the start and amazingly, it was good enough to overcome that prejudice.

Few reasons why:

It wasn’t pure fan service. I fully expected shoehorned-in Bobba Fett, Jabba, Greedo, etc. to dominate the film. But there was none of that. Sure, there were a few little winks at the audience, callback lines, etc. But for the most part it was subtle and it actually worked. It was nothing like the “you’ll be dead” guy scene in Rogue One or any of that shit.
It wasn’t too much of an “origin story” movie. Yes, there were a few moments – like how he got the name “Solo” – that went way too far and were kind of cringeworthy. But for the most part it didn’t overexplain everything about Han’s backstory to death like the prequels did with their characters. And moments like his meeting Chewbacca and Lando were shockingly well-done.
Alden Ehrenreich somehow managed to pull off what I thought was impossible: He convinced me that he was Han Solo. And I never in a million years expected any actor but Harrison Ford would be able to do that, least of all Ehrenreich after the things I heard about his problems pulling off the role.
It didn’t feel like a stitched-together patchwork film, which again is shocking to me due to the development problems and the change in directors. Looking at other films that did this, i.e. Justice League and Suicide Squad, there is no comparison. I never would have guessed this film was the work of multiple directors if I didn’t already know. It was seamlessly cohesive.
Most importantly, the movie was a low-key, low-stakes, mostly lighthearted (but not excessively so) story that felt like it fit in naturally with the world of Star Wars. Contrast this to Rogue One, which tried to be uber-epic and super-serious at all times, and the comparison is night and day. It’s just a simple story about one man’s struggle, not to save the universe, but to survive. We get to see the neglected side of Star Wars – the underworld hinted at in the originals in scenes like the cantina but never fully explored before. We get to see how a normal person lives in the Star Wars galaxy for once. And we get to do it through the eyes of relatable characters we already like, plus a couple others played by good actors who are actually memorable. Again, contrast to Rogue One and it’s no contest at all.

Hell, there is no mention of the Force/Jedi/Sith at all and a lightsaber doesn’t even go off until the very end. Which was the only thing I strongly disliked in the entire film. I really, really hate the concept of bringing Darth Maul back outside of the cartoon. And regardless, this was an obvious set-up for a Marvel-like follow-up (probably with Obi-Wan), so it felt out of place and kept the film from truly standing alone. But it was such a brief, minor moment that I can’t fault the movie too much for it. Certainly can’t fault Ron Howard because it was obviously studio meddling.

Anyway, I just worry that Disney is going to take the relatively lackluster box office response as a sign not to make more movies like this rather than the real problem: It was just a poorly timed release. Strong competition from Avengers and Deadpool, and the last Star Wars movie was just a few months ago. Of course it’s not going to pull TFA numbers. But Disney has a history of misinterpreting problems with films falling short at the box office – i.e. blaming 2D animation for the underperformance of “The Princess and the Frog,” even though it was released at the same time as AVATAR. I hope they don’t do it again, and let these anthology films remain small-scale, self-contained stories. If they do they’ll have officially gone from my least favorite to most favorite parts of Disney Star Wars.