In case you've being living on a rock (or a galaxy far, far away) and missed it, here is the Solo trailer:
Looks pretty good I think. Me likey.
Gonna be a busy month at the flicks in May - Avengers, Deadpool 2 and this. Reckon at least one of 'em will be half decent. Maybe...
Sooooo.... while I'm here, I may as well share my thoughts on The Last Jedi, yes? Cos I just know you're all dying to know how I ranked it, what with my opinion on Star Wars being so well respected round here n'all.
Seeing as it's been out for a good 6 weeks now, I'm not gonna be hiding any spoilers in this discussion. If you haven't seen it yet, well... what the hell are you even doing here??
Here goes then: I didn't like it very much. Seen it twice now and although it isn't the worst SW film ever made, it definitely belongs towards the bottom end of the scale.
There are a couple of stand-out sequences, and one or two interesting character moments but on the whole I found the entire story arc to be deeply unsatisfying, lacking substance and well, just a bit boring, to the point of undoing much of the groundwork laid down in Ep7.
Take Luke for example; now, in The Force Awakens, the premise of the whole plot hinged on one thing: Finding Luke Skywalker. When they find Luke, he and the rebellion soldiers can then go and kick some First Order ass, yes?
TFA ended (brilliantly, I thought) with Rey handing Luke his lightsaber atop a panoramic, mountain-top vista. In TLJ, to then have Luke play the reluctant, grumpy old git, reminiscent of the John Candy character in Cool Runnings (but without the charm) just felt so disappointing. Anticlimactic, even. And when Luke does finally come out of retirement to face down the evil First Order, all he actually does is have a fake, telepathic scuffle with Kylo Ren and then dies. Just... dies, for no apparent reason.
What the hell?? They spent an entire movie looking for Luke so he could save the day, and that's all he could come up with? So let me get this straight; Leia can survive being blown up, sucked out into the freezing vacuum of space and then float back to the spaceship like Mary f***ing Poppins and come out of it unscathed, but a tiny bit of astral projection and Luke snuffs it? WTF?
What a piss poor waste of time that was.
And another thing, how come when Luke's body vanished, his metal hand didn't get left behind??
Now then, that Leia bit. You know, 'that' bit. What on earth were they thinking? Alongside Vader's 'Nooooooooooo' in Revenge of the Sith, possibly the most pathetic and laughable moment in the entire saga. Truly, truly awful.
Rey: I like Rey as a character, I like Daisy Ridley as an actor and I enjoyed the 'journey' she went on in TFA, and to be fair she's pretty good in this one too, but her 'relationship', for want of a better word, with Kylo Ren is badly written, clunky and totally unconvincing. Some of their dialogue was downright cringeworthy, bickering like some old married couple; "Can we not do this right now?" and "Can you put a cloak on or something?" Oh purr-lease. I just refuse to believe that Rey would want anything to do him. He's f**k ugly for a start, but he's also petulant, childish and a bit of a dick. Crucially, he's not very scary either, which is kind of important when it comes to franchise villains. Nah, shoulda killed him off instead of Snoke.
There's another thing - killing off Snoke. Snoke was cool, man. I dug Snoke, wanted to see more of Snoke, know more about him, who he was, where he came from but no, none of that matters now cos he's dead. See, that's what I mean about TLJ undoing all the groundwork laid down by J.J Abrams in TFA. It's the same with the arc about Rey's parents - we were intrigued to find out where she came from, who her parents were, where she got her Force capabilities from, but according to Rian Johnson they were nobodies, scavengers, who were both long dead. Wait... what? That can't be right, surely? Ok, so that fact may ultimately turn out to be false, one of Kylo Ren's lies, but that doesn't matter, it still added to the 'anticlimactic' feel of the movie in general.
And then there's Finn. Good guy, we like him, but here he just feels sidelined and unnecessary.
Captain Phasma: Potentially interesting, but underused and again, killed off too soon.
Laura Dern's Admiral Blue Rinse? Apart from her heroic sacrifice at the end (which, to be fair, gives the film one its more spectacular moments), her character was slightly pointless and a bit annoying.
And I haven't even mentioned the Porgs yet. Yes, they were sh*t, but by no means are they the worst thing in this movie. Not by a long shot.
It's like... you know that bit where we pick up where TFA left off, when Rey hands Luke his lightsaber atop the splendid mountain vista, and he just tosses it over his shoulder and walks off in a huff? For me, that's like the perfect metaphor for what Rian Johnson did with the gift that J.J Abrams handed to him. As a 'moment', it was unexpected and slightly amusing, but it wasn't what I paid my money to see (twice) and ultimately it left me feeling a little hollow. Which pretty much sums up my feelings on this whole movie.
My rankings then:
1. Return of the Jedi
2. The Force Awakens
3. A New Hope
4. Rogue One
5. Revenge of the Sith
6. The Phantom Menace
7. The Last Jedi
8. Attack of the Clones
9. Empire Strikes Back