In one word, Solo is meh. It's perfectly inoffensive, not too much of anything in any one direction. Another word for it would be bland. Another would be forgettable.
Solo is a sorta prequel, sorta origin story for the sarcastic, shifty, rogue smuggler Han Solo. Chewbacca is in it. Lando's also there. And a few other new characters. Han finds himself in a tussle with some bad people and through his wit and some luck, gets out of it.
This is the new anthology Star Wars movie, meaning it doesn't directly relate to the core trilogy of Star Wars movies, but because it lives in the universe of the most valuable IP in the world, it naturally has everything to do with the core Star Wars movies. This has always been the most overt benefit but also the most compromising flaw of any cinematic universe.
I don't mean to overlook the movie - there's really nothing bad about it. The tone is consistent. The visuals are fine. The acting is better than I expected. But being not bad is not the same as being good. My expectations sound so low largely because of Solo's tumultuous production. It's difficult to overlook all the behind the scenes drama without getting the overwhelming sense that Disney is just placating the audience, trying to pull a wool over our eyes to sell us a product that isn't all there. This is the corporate machine at full capacity - silencing individuality to protect the brand, valuing appeasement over stimulation.
I'll get off the soapbox now. Solo is ostensibly a straightforward heist movie in the shell of the most recognizable sci-fi property in the world. But there's one fatal flaw to the movie, the same one that sinks almost all prequels. Throughout the movie, we're told (multiple times) that Han is his own man. He's a loner, a rebel, a rogue. In fact, we learn Solo isn't even his birth name, but a title he earns.
But he has a long-lost girlfriend and a surrogate family. He instantly befriends Chewbacca for no other reason than fan appeasement. He also quickly grows close to Lando, a trickster he's known for what must amount to just a few days. He does care. He's Han Duo, at least.
When a prequel contradicts a character's essence so absolutely, it's difficult to feel any dramatic tension. More than once, characters tell Solo he's a good man with a heart of gold. It's easy lip service, meant to mold the character into his log-line description from A New Hope. In this sense, Solo isn't much of a movie; it's merely a vehicle for fan service, a simulacrum of a character that we knew from years ago.
This brings me to the final twist of the movie. In the interest of not spoiling the ending, I'm won't go into specifics. But Solo deploys the same trick that the other Star Wars anthology movie, Rogue One, used. Rogue One ended with an unnecessary cameo from Darth Vader, retrofitted as a larger than life villain thanks to the benefit of decades of hindsight. Solo, perhaps already feeling that its plot and new characters had underwhelmed, resorts to a similarly retrofitted cameo of a popular villain, reimagined as something different than his original representation. It's a cool moment, but it doesn't make much sense, either narratively or conceptually. Perhaps that's an apt description of Solo in general.
