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I didn't think this was very good. Squee-harshing below cut; no major spoilers but probably don't read if you liked the movie. For calibration, the Star Wars movies I like best are A New Hope, The Empire Strikes Back, The Force Awakens, The Last Jedi, and Rogue One. I think the prequel movies are terrible and Return of the Jedi largely meh (not big on Ewoks.)
This is literally the only movie I've ever seen in which I hated the lighting so much that I couldn't resist whispering complaints about it to the friend I saw it with. Except for a sequence near the end, every single location is lit so dimly that I struggled to make out the actor's faces, and all the locations look gloomy and depressing and samey. There was obviously a deliberate decision to dim out the actors' faces specifically, because at some points windows, knick-knacks, etc would be lit so they could be seen clearly, but the actors' faces were always deeply shadowed. It gave the entire movie a general air of gloominess and not being fun, which is about the opposite of what you want in a movie about Han Solo.
I was so perplexed by this baffling decision that I looked it up afterward. Apparently the cinematographer is very highly regarded for his use of dark lighting. Apparently it actually looks good if presented absolutely perfectly, but in many or possibly the average theatre, the projection quality isn't up to the job and the result is muddy, gloomy, and a strain to view. Okay, but I've seen lots and lots of movies at that theatre, and none of them had this problem. If your technique is going to look dreadful in tons of theatres and only looks good at the absolute best ones, maybe it's not the best choice for a blockbuster movie that's going to be shown everywhere.
So, if you haven't seen this yet and want to, it's probably best seen in a prestige or IMAX theatre.
In addition to the indistinct lighting but really not helped by it, there was a lack of cleanness/clarity in the action sequences and editing, especially early on. It was hard for me to parse exactly what everyone was trying to do and how events were happening in the sequence where they're trying to hijack a shipment in (dim, gloomy) snowy mountains.
When Han is escaping his (crappy, gloomy) childhood home, he hurries through a crowded spaceport and apparently steals a cloak off one passerby's back and a hat from another. This could have been shot/cut/lit to show what a brilliant pickpocket he is, to literally be able to steal the clothes off people's backs without them noticing. But it isn't - it just looks like he grabbed them and they inexplicably didn't notice. I actually had a moment where I thought I might have misunderstood the entire sequence and that wasn't actually what he'd done, because I couldn't figure out how anyone could just not notice that someone just yanked off your coat. What did this sequence look like to you? Was it more clear/funny if you saw it in a theatre with perfect projection?
I did not like Alden Ehrenreich's performance one bit. I thought he came across as a smug douche. TBF, Han could be described that way, but Harrison Ford is so charismatic that it works. Also TBF, Ehrenreich probably had an impossible task and my friend did like him.
I did not like how almost the entire movie just seemed to be checking off boxes to explain every bit of Han's backstory, generally in a less-than-fascinating manner. I liked Han and Chewbacca's meeting, but everything else seemed very pro forma: here's how he got his gun. Here's why he shoots first. It was predictable, but not in a fun way. However, I don't think the script was really the problem, as none of the Star Wars movies have brilliant screenplays. There were a number of scenes that should have worked better than they did, but the pacing/acting/visuals were off.
There was a droid, L3, who on the one hand was one of the few characters I actually found likable. On the other hand, we get the very first female-voiced droid in the entire movie sequence, and she's a direct parody of shrill feminists (couched as droid rights, but the language is the exact language used to parody feminists) AND has a romance plot. How about just having a female-voiced droid who is a character like the male-voiced droids are, not all about being female? There was also a weird shift where at first her droid rights thing is a feminism parody, then it's suddenly taken seriously and she leads a droid rebellion which was one of the best sequences in the movie. If done better, it might have come across as a shift in the audience's perceptions, but it's so sudden and awkward that it seems more like the filmmakers changed their mind about her between scenes.
I liked Donald Glover. I liked Chewbacca. I LOVED the storyline with the pirates. Woody Harrelson and Thandie Newton were good. But overall, I just did not think this was a well-done movie. It didn't give me a sense of wonder or an emotional experience. It wasn't pretty or engaging or fun. It wasn't as bad as the prequel movies, but I was bored for a lot of it, and the prequel movies were the last time I was bored in a Star Wars film. I'm a little torn on saying I never want to see it again because I might feel differently if the cinematography suddenly became clear and gorgeous which apparently might be possible, but I can't say that I'd stand in line for that.
This is literally the only movie I've ever seen in which I hated the lighting so much that I couldn't resist whispering complaints about it to the friend I saw it with. Except for a sequence near the end, every single location is lit so dimly that I struggled to make out the actor's faces, and all the locations look gloomy and depressing and samey. There was obviously a deliberate decision to dim out the actors' faces specifically, because at some points windows, knick-knacks, etc would be lit so they could be seen clearly, but the actors' faces were always deeply shadowed. It gave the entire movie a general air of gloominess and not being fun, which is about the opposite of what you want in a movie about Han Solo.
I was so perplexed by this baffling decision that I looked it up afterward. Apparently the cinematographer is very highly regarded for his use of dark lighting. Apparently it actually looks good if presented absolutely perfectly, but in many or possibly the average theatre, the projection quality isn't up to the job and the result is muddy, gloomy, and a strain to view. Okay, but I've seen lots and lots of movies at that theatre, and none of them had this problem. If your technique is going to look dreadful in tons of theatres and only looks good at the absolute best ones, maybe it's not the best choice for a blockbuster movie that's going to be shown everywhere.
So, if you haven't seen this yet and want to, it's probably best seen in a prestige or IMAX theatre.
In addition to the indistinct lighting but really not helped by it, there was a lack of cleanness/clarity in the action sequences and editing, especially early on. It was hard for me to parse exactly what everyone was trying to do and how events were happening in the sequence where they're trying to hijack a shipment in (dim, gloomy) snowy mountains.
When Han is escaping his (crappy, gloomy) childhood home, he hurries through a crowded spaceport and apparently steals a cloak off one passerby's back and a hat from another. This could have been shot/cut/lit to show what a brilliant pickpocket he is, to literally be able to steal the clothes off people's backs without them noticing. But it isn't - it just looks like he grabbed them and they inexplicably didn't notice. I actually had a moment where I thought I might have misunderstood the entire sequence and that wasn't actually what he'd done, because I couldn't figure out how anyone could just not notice that someone just yanked off your coat. What did this sequence look like to you? Was it more clear/funny if you saw it in a theatre with perfect projection?
I did not like Alden Ehrenreich's performance one bit. I thought he came across as a smug douche. TBF, Han could be described that way, but Harrison Ford is so charismatic that it works. Also TBF, Ehrenreich probably had an impossible task and my friend did like him.
I did not like how almost the entire movie just seemed to be checking off boxes to explain every bit of Han's backstory, generally in a less-than-fascinating manner. I liked Han and Chewbacca's meeting, but everything else seemed very pro forma: here's how he got his gun. Here's why he shoots first. It was predictable, but not in a fun way. However, I don't think the script was really the problem, as none of the Star Wars movies have brilliant screenplays. There were a number of scenes that should have worked better than they did, but the pacing/acting/visuals were off.
There was a droid, L3, who on the one hand was one of the few characters I actually found likable. On the other hand, we get the very first female-voiced droid in the entire movie sequence, and she's a direct parody of shrill feminists (couched as droid rights, but the language is the exact language used to parody feminists) AND has a romance plot. How about just having a female-voiced droid who is a character like the male-voiced droids are, not all about being female? There was also a weird shift where at first her droid rights thing is a feminism parody, then it's suddenly taken seriously and she leads a droid rebellion which was one of the best sequences in the movie. If done better, it might have come across as a shift in the audience's perceptions, but it's so sudden and awkward that it seems more like the filmmakers changed their mind about her between scenes.
I liked Donald Glover. I liked Chewbacca. I LOVED the storyline with the pirates. Woody Harrelson and Thandie Newton were good. But overall, I just did not think this was a well-done movie. It didn't give me a sense of wonder or an emotional experience. It wasn't pretty or engaging or fun. It wasn't as bad as the prequel movies, but I was bored for a lot of it, and the prequel movies were the last time I was bored in a Star Wars film. I'm a little torn on saying I never want to see it again because I might feel differently if the cinematography suddenly became clear and gorgeous which apparently might be possible, but I can't say that I'd stand in line for that.
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For accuracy's sake, the last name is Ehrenreich. He is adorable and charming in the highly uneven Hail, Caesar! (2016), so I am inclined to blame the production here and not the actor.
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I think the big issues here were poor direction and editing, some poor story choices, and cinematography that doesn't work in many theaters. There's some great actors in the prequel series but they did not give great performances. I blame the director.
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That just sounds baffling. I understand releasing a movie in a rare format that will guarantee box office at the theaters where it can be seen as originally envisioned, like Dunkirk in 70 mm. I don't understand releasing a movie with lighting that can be shown anywhere but shouldn't.
I blame the director.
Am I correct that there was development/production hell associated with this movie, as with Rogue One, which is not really comparable because that movie worked?
[edit] Yes, wow.
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I am taking people's word that this movie actually looks good with perfect projection, because I never would have imagined that otherwise. And everyone who's saying that is also saying that this was a known issue, so... why do it? Why shoot a movie that you know will look bad to a significant percentage of viewers? Every other Star Wars movie was shown in the same theaters, and every other Star Wars movie looked great. (Including the prequels which I otherwise think are awful). The Empire Strikes Back managed dark/noir visuals in a way that was clear and looked good. "How to shoot a movie so it's dark and shadowy but everything can be easily seen and it all looks good on the average theatre" is not exactly an unsolved problem in filmmaking.
You could see some of the scrambling with Rogue One in Forrest Whittaker's character, I think; that part showed visible seams. Otherwise the rescue job worked. With Solo, the first third especially had pacing that was both choppy and slow, and really strange storytelling.
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Maybe it will do badly enough at the box office that no studio will try this sort of thing again.
What I am afraid is that the people who made this movie don't care how bad it looks in most theaters; they know it will look fine on a back-lit computer screen and that's how it will mostly be purchased and viewed, so screw you people for whom movies in theaters are an important experience.
"How to shoot a movie so it's dark and shadowy but everything can be easily seen and it all looks good on the average theatre" is not exactly an unsolved problem in filmmaking.
Going on at least seventy-eight years of it!
You could see some of the scrambling with Rogue One in Forrest Whittaker's character, I think; that part showed visible seams.
Agreed; the first third of the movie is kind of incoherent not in the sense of being incomprehensible, but in the sense of not feeling particularly well fitted together. And then it was great.
and really strange storytelling.
The kind of strange where you could feel other directions in it, or the kind of strange where just WTF?
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I'm not sure it will though. That is one of the things I wondered about, but I couldn't find anyone commenting on how it's likely to look on video. Typically movies where cinematography is important look better on the large than the small screen.
The kind of strange where you could feel other directions in it, or the kind of strange where just WTF?
The former mostly. It had the feeling that connective material had been cut. Like, it introduces Han as a street kid and shows how he joins the Imperial Army thinking he'll be trained as a pilot. Then it jumps to him in the infantry, fighting some war. There he explains that he did get trained as a pilot, but got booted to infantry for thinking for himself (which seems like a key scene that probably should have been in there, since he doesn't seem like much of free thinker in the actual movie), then he deduces that a soldier is actually an infiltrator trying to steal equipment because they're wearing a dead man's uniform (this was a bit ??? for me; I think it would have made more sense if we had any idea of where they were or the context of the battle, then he tries to join up with them because he thinks they can get him out, they turn him in instead, he escapes and convinces them to take him on in their ship (very unclear what they were even stealing or why they thought it was worth sneaking into the middle of a war where everything is blowing up and everyone is dying left and right), then it sets up the smugglers as a crew and Woody Harrelson and Thandie Newton as a couple; there's a very long and confusing action sequence, she dies in a sequence where it's not clear why they couldn't rescue her and Woody Harrelson is sad for five seconds, and the smuggler pilot dies and Han is sad for five seconds.
That entire storyline does set up the next sequence, in which Han and Woody Harrelson now owe the Big Bad as they lost the stuff they'd been hired to steal for him. But it feels like a set of characters were set up as important, then dropped unceremoniously. Like, I found myself asking what was the point of Thandie Newton's character? It's a bit like the opening sequence of The Last Jedi with Paige, only without the emotional impact and the importance of her having been Rose's sister.
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Agreed, but a computer screen pours out a lot of light—I was just talking with someone about how this affects the material reproduction of digitally created images. It might compensate for the muddiness even if it lessens the overall effect.
There he explains that he did get trained as a pilot, but got booted to infantry for thinking for himself (which seems like a key scene that probably should have been in there, since he doesn't seem like much of free thinker in the actual movie)
Han washing out of Imperial piloting for not being enough of a drone is both a possibility I hadn't thought of, an interpretation I like (it chimes well with Luke's aspirations in A New Hope), and something I would absolutely not have left out of a film about how he got where he is when we meet him.
This movie as you describe it sounds like it had a lot of action, but not a lot of script.
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I thiiiink (it is decades since I saw the book, which may be somewhere in the attic at Mom's) this was old canon? From one of the novelizations? I seem to recall a flashback in which---I THINK---Han was recalling being drunk, hanging upside down, and winning a target shooting contest. Something like that. But, definitely, academy washout or crashout was one of those original character bits.
The Solo script sounds like a lukewarm mess.
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I mean, I believe it. I can see upside-down Harrison Ford.
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But yeah, the guy playing Han was basically a non-entity. They should have made the movie about Lando and Elthree, or Enfys Nest, the young rebel pirate leader, with Han's story as the B plot.
On the plus side, none of it made me angry the way TLJ did, which I felt was a bunch of interesting ideas poorly executed (with a terrible characterization of Luke).
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The bad lighting bugged me most with Paul Bettany's face. I thought the red lines (scars?) were really cool looking but was frustrated the entire film by not being able to see them clearly.
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- I don't know why I expected that Thandie Newton and Woody Harrelson's narrative roles would be switched, but somehow I'd got that in my head and I feel very strongly that it would have been better
- I was very conflicted on the handling of L3, who did also seem to me to be getting the Parody SJW treatment in the beginning and then treated more seriously later during the triumphant -- but I wonder if this depends on the audience, because when I saw it people laughed at her lines and I seethed, but a friend who felt she was taken seriously throughout said that in her theater, no one laughed at her lines and everyone seemed very excited by her revolutionary ideas
- I really wish they had not shown us Han actually getting the Falcon at the end, but left how that eventually plays out to the imagination
And a minor confusion that has somehow become my biggest takeaway:
- why were British accents gendered female in this film??? Every single female character has one, regardless of backstory or origin, and I don't understand why
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Thandie Newton and Woody Harrelson switched would have made some things less predictable. Though then all the major female characters (minus L3) would have turned out to be Bad Guys All Along. And, I can't believe I'm saying this, but JUST THIS ONCE having her death be more like a fridging would have made more sense than "Oops, my girlfriend died, OH WELL."
I wanted more in general left to the imagination. Unless you're really witty about it, you don't need to use a prequel to explain everything. How about showing us more stuff we don't already know about Han rather than explaining what we do already know?
I didn't notice the British accents but a lot of the dialogue was very soft and hard for me to hear.
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I kept finding it very worrying that they were giving Han noticeably few spoken lines in the trailers I was seeing, and this... substantiates that.
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I lost enthusiasm for this one based on the trailers and only went because Halle wanted to see it. She liked it (and Han) a lot more than I did.
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Overall opinion: it explained a few things that didn't really need an explanation and it needed significant cuts, but I found everyone charismatic and found the overall movie funny and involving. I think it helps that I have a very high tolerance for potentially douchey vibes. I wouldn't rush out to see it again, but I had a good time and came out with a Han/Lando ship.
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I liked this one a lot, but I am pretty easy to please wrt to Star Wars and I've liked all the Star Wars movies, yes, even the prequels. (And I have a special place in my heart for Jedi just because it's the first one I saw in the theater after having seen the first two on TV and eight year old me was super excited about it.) I actually wasn't expecting to like it as much as I did because I wasn't really excited about a Han Solo movie, but I loved Lando and I loved all the new characters, especially L3, who like
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That Landmark is pretty new, comparatively, so I'm surprised it was so bad, but I think technology has just really changed a lot very quickly so the newer/fancier the theater the better the experience is going to be.
(In semi-related news, I can't believe the West Side Pavillion is closing down!)
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I liked a lot of the characterisation. I liked how Lando and L3 bitched to and about each other until she is shot and we see his grief. I liked a whole bunch of lonely people desperate not to die alone, or choosing to go with someone obviously dodgy but they're still better than loneliness. I liked that Qi'ra was neither a Gangster's Moll nor a guntoting savage but someone who climbed the ranks of a criminal organisation by diplomacy and being really good at brokering deals between ornery people. I hadn't realised Thandie Newton was in there, so it was great to see her, too.
I mean, I think your criticisms are valid (though my theatre had no problems with lighting), but I'm definitely watching it again.
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Has that been re-retconned? :-)