Actually I just read that it wasn’t more comedic, it was darker and grittier, surprisingly enough.
Maybe his parents weren’t married, and Corellia is a bit old fashioned about those things.
This movie was set up to make a sequel. It’s glaringly obvious. To not make one shows weakness. They need to make one. They just need to really up their game next time, and start out with a solid proven director to begin with.
I thought that was a little weird myself. The idea of Solo being an alias has been around as early as the Return of the Jedi storybook,but then the former Expanded Universe (now “Legends”) established that Solo was his real name.
So in the beginning, I thought that the new canon was establishing him as an orphan who’d never remembered any parents to speak of. But then they had him talking about his real father with Lando, which struck me as odd–even if he was “never that close with the old man,” are they implying it was so bad he wouldn’t even use his last name?
I thought it would’ve made more sense to leave it as his real name, and have him say to Lando, “Jonash Solo was a good man and an honest man. And none of that kept him from dying a poor man. He went to his grave heartbroken over everything he couldn’t give me. I swore I’d never let that happen. Not to me and not to any kids I might have.”
I could seriously believe that the “official” source bible of the characters established by George Lucas, Lawrence Kasdan, and maybe Gary Kurtz or Ervin Kershner, that has never been released, was where a lot of these sequences originated. The Kessel Run, the idea that Chewbacca was enslaved and Han rescued him, and the winning of the Falcon against Lando at a Sabacc game all have been consistent in their broad details from very early on, seeded variously throughout different outlets. Han Solo’s name seems likely to be one of them too.
I suppose that the explanation would be that Han knows what the last name is but he hasn’t used it since whenever and he certainly doesn’t want what he’s doing to get his father killed.
I would have preferred that Han came up with Solo himself. I like that the Imperial officer didn’t care and just needed a name but Han doing it adds a moment to him becoming his own man and making a journey towards “Han Solo” we see in ANH and subsequent movies.
The poorest performing Disney SW film is Rogue One, which still grossed over a billion dollars. I suspect Solo will miss that by a considerable margin. If a SW film has to rely on word of mouth to make a profit then its in serious trouble.
One flop wont derail the a gargantuan franchise and merchandising empire like SW, but I expect there may be budget cuts to the next film, albeit with a budget still well within blockbuster territory, and agree a more experienced director is likely to be at the helm. Also, December release dates.
I still think it has time to make up some more dollars at the box office.
The next two weekends are totally up for up for grabs with no big titles coming out and a lot of schools being out for the summer.
No real big challenger till Incredibles 2 on the 15th and Jurassic World on the 22nd.
I enjoyed the movie, but it definitely suffered from prequelitis. Not everything about a character has to have a dramatic backstory, and the attempt to do so ends up a bit muddled. For example, I would have enjoyed it if there were a single shot of the alien dice hanging from the mirror. But it felt like it was overdoing it to make them a talisman of his earlier life and love. We also don’t need Han to explicitly comment
Some of the dialog felt a little too on the nose. Solo and Qira’s conversation in the speeder when they’re making their first escape was a little too much “just one more day till retirement” foreshadowing. Similarly, her explicitly calling out Han’s heart of gold wasn’t necessary. Let his actions speak for themselves more.
I was one of the people very confused about Darth Maul’s inclusion, since the math didn’t work out for me. Honestly, taking a character who was sliced in half on screen and fell to his death and throwing him back into the mix seems dumb. But certainly not the dumbest bit of Star Wars canon.
Speaking of which: I wish they had not doubled down on the fact that Lucas didn’t know what a parsec was, but the way they did it was decent. I did love the detail that when Han claims afterward that they did it in “12 parsecs”, Chewie rebuts, and Han says something like “if you round down.” His claim in ep IV is that the Falcon did the Kessel Run in “less than 12 parsecs”, so the rounding down continues.
Further speaking of which: when Chewie was talking about searching for his family/tribe, and Han was poorly translating, I desperately wanted him to say something like “I didn’t get all of that. Something about ‘Lumpy’?” I mean, not really, but kind of.
Another bit that didn’t make sense to me is that they lost a whole train car of fuel, and I believe even named the amount as 1000 kilograms, but paid their debt with two handheld cases that Chewie can carry? Did I miss something there? Did the writers forget what happened at the beginning of the movie?
Donald Glover was the reason I saw the movie on opening weekend, and he did not disappoint. I wish he had had more screen time.
L3 was a joy, and the prison break was great. I also liked that while her claim that Lando was in love with her was legitimately funny, it was maybe also true?
I loved the backstory of Lando’s pronunciation of “Han” as a purposeful dis.
The humor mostly worked for me. The movie was fun, and felt like a good-old rollicking Star Wars movie.
Was I the only one getting a Brienne of Tarth vibe from L3 and a Rocket Raccoon vibe from Rio Durant?
My wife thought L3 was voiced by Gwendoline Christie but I already knew it was Phoebe Waller-Bridge going in so I didn’t even make the comparison.
Rocket and Rio do have some similarities, I think, but I got more of a schlubby, laid back vibe from Rio whereas Rocket is a little more agitated.
Saw Solo on Saturday, very pleasantly surprised. Hats off to Ron Howard. I forgot he directed movies like Apollo 13 and The DaVinci Code.
It’s almost nonstop action, but in a good way. I think they mostly did a great job of addressing the major references and questions you may have had about Han. Solo surprised me many times, I expected more formulaic action movie and was glad to see it didn’t go that way in many instances. Like Han’s final meeting with Woody’s character.
The actor that played Han was good, but I still don’t see Han when I look at him. He didn’t duplicate the mannerisms properly either but was still a likable character.
I was pleasantly surprised how much I liked the Han/Chewbacca meeting and interplay throughout the movie. I like how Chewie was his own independent being when he strayed from the job to help the Wookies, but decided to go back with Han after that.
Lando/Donald Glover was great, but I wanted more of him in the movie.
Overall a great Star Wars movie, reminded me a bit of Rogue One but more action. Hopefully word of mouth will help this one do better than it has been at the box office.
Also the ending of Solo was good but definitely left me wanting more, now I want to see what Kira and Maul get up to, and how exactly Han gets in trouble with Jabba.
AM I THE ONLY ONE WHO GOT LANDO?!?!?!?!
In his narrating of his adventures he name checks both Thonboka and Sharu. These are from some truly awful - that I loved as an early teen - and truly surreal - read them to believe it - Lando adventure novelizations.
No one. NO ONE. At my theaters laughed when he did that twice.
Truly. I am alone.
Alone.
Lando Calrissian and the Mindharp of Sharu
Lando Calrissian and the Flamewind of Oseon
Lando Calrissian and the Starcave of Thonboka
I read those, and the Daley Han Solo books, decades ago, and I remember them as short and loads of fun.
Oh yeah, baby. Them’s some GOOD teen reading.
the fuel at the end of the movie was refined. It started out as those big containers so I assume the refining ends up with a lot less. But there still should have been more.
Also a train seems like very outdated way of moving stuff when you have all kinds of spaceships. I guess they wanted an old fashioned train robbery scene.
I’m pretty sure that the fuel on the train was refined, as well. The scene with Han, Qi’ra, Beckett, and Dryden, in Dryden’s office after the botched train heist, flowed like this:
“We’ll make it right, we’ll get you the coaxium that we promised you?”
“How are you going to do that? There’s no other place where you can get coaxium.”
“That’s true of refined coaxium. But, wait! We can get unrefined coaxium at Kessel!”
“Unrefined coaxium has a very limited shelf life…so then what’ll you do?”
“We’ll get it to the refinery at Savareen before it blows up.”
Yeah, the stuff on the train was also refined. In addition to the dialog, all the refined fuel we saw was in little bright blue-white vials encased in larger things, while the unrefined fuel was in large tanks with a window and a temperature readout.
Even if it weren’t refined, the 12 tanks that Han dragged on a cart is noticeably smaller than a whole train car. 1/4th as much at best. I’d estimate more like 1/10 or 1/20th as much.
Also, I left a sentence trailing off. We don’t need Han to explicitly comment that Chewie’s name is too long and he’ll need a nickname. I don’t want the writers to elbow me quite so hard in the ribs. I get it.
Maybe they added Darth Maul in there since they know so many fans hated the movie he was in. Jar Jar Binks could be in the sequel - he did not die . 
Here is what I would change:
We did not need both Rio Durant and L3 in this movie. Clearly, these two should have been merged into one character. I would have gone with L3 as I liked her more.
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L3 was introduced too late for us to truly care about her “death”.
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Rio Durant was in the movie too briefly to care about his death.
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L3 was more fun and it would have made sense for her to fly the ship with Woody Harellson’s crew. Her death would have had more impact if she’d been in the whole thing.
I also think it is odd that both L3 and K-2SO have been trying to achieve the same thing in Star Wars movies lately. The funny, kind of attitudy robot. Neither were as good as HK-47 in KotOR, clearly the inspiration for these robots.