My list of CONS for this movie is 5X as long as my list of PROS...
PROS
- Alden Ehrenreich, Emilia Clarke and Donald Glover were great. They did their best with the material given, and created competent and well fleshed out (as far as the script allowed) characters.
- There were some good moments and pieces of dialogue, although they were few and far between. For example the "I hate you... I know" scene was great, and the 30 soldiers scene as well... but I can only name maybe 2 or 3 more, and that's not much.
- Umm... huhh... I don't really have anything else to say here.
CONS
- The crime lord played by the Vision actor was laughable. Not menacing at all.
- The first meeting between Chewie and Han was just stupid. Am I really supposed to believe that Chewie (at 190) can't figure out something as simple as smashing a pole? They didn't even try to make the scene interesting, and that deeply disrespects the legacy of these characters
- The plot itself was not interesting at all. There was nothing Star Wars-y about it, just a standard crime movie. I expected much more.
- The visuals of the movie were awful! The mud trooper scene overdid the "dis is serious, hurr-durr" vibe, and visually it was just dull: characters dressed in brown against a brown and black background... war was never depicted like this in SW, which is in itself not a problem, but visually the scene was very unappealing. The dark mines of Kessel were also awful. Even the space scenes looked off.
- One of the main set pieces of the movie was when people dressed in grey tried to rob a grey train using a grey ship on a planet where due to the overcast weather the background was grey, and then some grey troopers appeared, and then a rival faction showed up on grey hoverbikes... Watching this unfold, you realize how colorful the previous movies really were (yes, even R1)
- The Darth Maul reveal was stupid for 2 reasons: 1. IDC about Rebels or CW, he flat out died in EP1, end of story. 2. He was not a good character to begin with. Hell, he wasn't even a character, no need bringing him back.
- The Empire was barely featured in this movie, and every time they were, they were really inept, no threat at all.
- There was no interesting world building. No interesting backdrops, no interesting venues, no interesting new droids (L3 kind of... but meh), new ships, nothing.
- There was nothing creative in the scenes themselves. There was no interesting action scene to remember in the next few years. I immediately forgot the train heist, the Kessel action scene, the brawl with the crime lord, etc. Nothing stood out.
- The tone of the movie was all over the place. The mud trooper scene was like a serious war movie, but then the train heist was your standard plot armor bull$h!t, most of the jokes were ill-timed, the crime lord was supposed to be frightening, but came across as laughable, the self-sacrifice of the Westworld lady was rushed, the betrayal of Woody Harrelson was supposed to be heartbreaking, but instead was meh... The movie couldn't decide what it wanted to be.
Lando and the droid... seriously??? I mean it was weird for the sake of weird, and it didn't go anywhere. Also, the cape thing was really overdone, contrived and stupid.