A Tour de Force

Solo: Great Star Wars movie or greatest Star Wars movie?

There absolutely could not be a greater contrast between Solo and The Last Jedi. The Last Jedi was, quite frankly, an alarming movie. Its ambition was clear: to become a critical darling even (or perhaps especially) if doing so required jettisoning traditional Star Wars fans like a shipment of spice at the first sign of an Imperial starship.

Kylo Ren: "Let the past die. Kill it, if you have to."

It's hard to interpret this line as anything other than the Word of God (or Rian Johnson) addressed directly to the audience. Listen up, nerds: Your time is over. The cool kids are in charge now and whatever Star Wars was to you is completely irrelevant. Obviously, no one involved with the production of The Last Jedi had the slightest interest in Grand Admiral Thrawn or Darth Revan.

Equally obviously, none of those people had any influence in the production of Solo. Solo is positively in love with Star Wars lore; the more obscure, the better. This is a movie that references The Adventures of Lando Calrissian by L. Neil Smith!

Lando Calrissian and the Mindharp of Sharu, Lando Calrissian and the Flamewind of Oseon, and Lando Calrissian and the Starcave of ThonBoka are some of the weirdest and least well-known pieces of official Star Wars fiction in existence. They were written before the "rules" of Star Wars had ossified, and some of their elements are hard to square with the rest of the Expanded Universe canon, which largely ignored this trilogy. Unsurprisingly, they were seemingly consigned to a weird "alternate universe" status by the Great Decanonization of April 2014. Until now.

It's difficult to overstate the magnitude of the can of worms that Solo just opened. All of this stuff is now fair game! The Centrality. Rokur Gepta and the Sorcerers of Tund. The trigger-happy idiot on board the Recalcitrant. Vuffi fucking Raa! This is not to say that those books are now 100% canon-compliant, since Lando mentions L3 being with him on Rafa V, and L3 is a character original to Solo. However, it wouldn't take much work to tweak the old stories a bit and shoehorn her in there.

My mind is still boggling at Lucasfilm's complete reversal from The Last Jedi's utter contempt for anyone who liked Star Wars before 2015 to Solo's writers dropping references that maybe 1% of the audience understood. It would seem that the studio has two diametrically opposed factions locked in epic battle. (Almost as if there were Light and Dark sides....)

The Last Jedi was a Star Wars movie for people who hate Star Wars. Solo is a Star Wars movie for people who hate The Last Jedi.

Also, Solo has a Darth Maul cameo, but seriously, who cares about Darth Maul?