Solo Star Wars for audiences accustomed to action
In the inimitable production of 1960s Startrek, Firefly and other westerns set on other planets showing us that cowboys or the 'rebel without a clou' as Tom Petty sang about, were, are and will be the true heroes of our and every other time, the end of the weekend was crowned with a 'blockbuster in prime time' that would have clogged up the TV earlier on Saturday night. Car chases, train robberies, mining riots and bacon-laden card games instead of space battles.
After the ten-part saga was sold by Gustav Gans Lucas to Scrooge Disney Duck for $7.4 billion and has been called a franchise ever since, the studios that turned one of their theme-park pirate builds into a film series have graced us at least every year with a new story that would have eluded you if creative minds didn't keep watching the films from the late '70s and searching them for sentences that might have something behind them (so with 2016's Rogue One, that an imperial code gave the Rebel crew later (that is, earlier: 1979) gave access to the Death Star under construction).
So the prequel and the information about how Han got his surname and met Chewbacca eventually found its way onto FreeTV, as normal television programming has been called for some years now.
So what's so bad about forcing the worldwide fans into their consumption with ever more pointless and hair-raising (in the case of the Sidekick co-pilot, that's a lot of hair) stories?
Like all old European fairy tales, each of the US Star Wars begins with the words 'Once upon a time ...' - but not long ago, but in the distant future in a galaxy far away ... Then one does wonder how humans per se, car racing, handshaking and smooching get there, when we know pretty well that these are achievements of our modern culture, and we hope that they will never have been able to leave not only this planet, but above all the Milky Way - that is, the distant future in which the franchise claims to have been set.
Since we are talking about achievements
Interestingly, despite the many astonishing parallels, the invention of the wheel does not exist. There is shooting around with laser blasters whose light beams are so slow that any halfway mobile humanoid can easily avoid them with a turning movement of barely 90°, but the cars are short-circuited with wires hanging out and hover above the muddy ground without any recognisable drive and a design that puts IKEA far ahead with its half-assembled cupboard walls.
How drifts are possible with this spectacular mode of locomotion (only the squealing of tyres is missing for the reasons mentioned), the viewer is equally allowed to wonder what the motivation and structures of the early empire might have looked like in the first place.
With the chaos, it is surprising that any conflict and rebellion occur at all, since the only serious antagonist is the aged Darth Maul (the one with the red and black face paint, the funny horns and the lightsaber on both sides, with which he fights Liam Neeson in The Dark Menace (Part 1)), who has nothing whatsoever to do with the missing plot, but only has a brief holo-phone conversation with the pale-acting Emilia Clarke in the penultimate scene.
Fortunately, just in time, before you want to switch off at the first commercial break anyway, the shaggy cuddly bear appears, who will since then appear in parts 4 to approx. 8 - or rather, will have appeared. The inclined viewer unexpectedly experiences a homoerotic scene that shows the feet of the human and the Wookie standing very close to each other and Han says: 'we could have showered one after the other'. - It's as if Roland Emmerich was the godfather of this romantic moment.
The writers have taken particular pains with the female roles. The fact that Han's early lover is called Qi'ra (Keira Knigthley's first film role was as a double of the teenage queen Armidala of Naboo, played by Natalie Portman) and simply disappears at the end of the film is brilliantly solved, because the character never appears again in the earlier - i.e. later - films. The same goes for the model-like droid woman L3, co-pilot of the original Falcon owner Lando. In the tradition of the original series (can we say that? It's not Startrek), the brashly charming dubbing actress Bianca Krahl was engaged, as if she had jumped out of the lap of Elke Heidenreich in Spaceballs in the role of Dotty Matrix, to emulate the human side of C3-PO.
At least it is partially, if not conclusively, resolved that a bright blue liquid in glass tubes secures the energy supply of all spaceships in that distant galaxy; someone should try filling a diesel engine with paraffin or an SUV with biodiesel.
If one of the last Star Trek films with the original crew was still ranting about Spock being able to hover in front of a cliff face with jet boots for hours without refuelling and then catch up with Captain Kirk faster than freefall and set him down safely, it is entirely plausible that coaxium is the universal fuel that, drop by drop, injected into the propulsion system provides enough thrust to escape a black hole, but tons of wagonloads of the refined stuff cause a more harmless smoky explosion when they crash. I've seen more exciting action with Lego bricks as a kid without a budget of 342 million dollars. Of course, I didn't film the whole thing, but I certainly would have kept the camera steady, not in ballroom rotation making you dizzy, just to make the movements look more dramatic.