Yeah. I never got the hate for Solo either. I enjoyed it. At the end of the day, it's a one shot film, and does exactly what it needed to do (tell the origin bits for Han Solo). It checked every single box it needed to check: His signature pistol? Check. Millenium Falcon? Check. Chewie? Check. Kessel Run? Check. Why he's a smuggler? Check. It had good dialogue and well written characters (and lets face it, the whole "robot rebellion" bit was hillarious). Harrelson's character made sense and fit in. Han's introduction into the criminal world worked and made sense. There were no glaring plot holes (which is a huge plus for me). And they snuck in a few easter eggs and character references/tie-ins along the way. What the heck did people actually expect from the film that they didn't get?

I think that there are three broad groups who rate films.


1. experts/critics. These people are usually insane people who think they know more about art than other people, but are usually complete imbecils whose opinions only seems to actually matter within their own bubble. Unfortunately, they share that bubble with every other expert/critic and have filled the various awards groups with their own crazy members. Which is unfortunately why "award winning show" and "show I want to watch" rarely intersects.

2. fans. Also crazy people. Also convinced that they know better about the subject matter than anyone else. While they don't have the insider pull that the first group has, they can be ridiculously vocal and loud about their opinions and thus influence things (usually in crazy ways). There is also only rare intersections of "what the fans want" and what I consider to be good ideas/stories/whatever.

3. "real people". You know. People who just want a film to tell them a good story with good characters and a good balance of "things" in it (depending on genre of course) and do so in a way that makes sense, doesn't offend them, doesn't preach to them, and has reasonable production value and thought and competance in the production itself.


So sometimes, it's hard to tell which opinion is the "minority" one in the first place. And I really suspect that many times, folks think they are in the minority when they really aren't. You hear everyone on the interwebs telling you "this film sucked!" or "this is the greatest film ever!", odds are those super strong hyperbolic opinions are coming from one of the first two groups, which rarely actually represents a majority of anything. They just happen to have the largest and loudest platforms for their opinions.


I distinctly remember one summer long ago, two "war films" came out. At the time, one of my friends was well into film school and he was raving about one of them. It was directed by some famous director, who had come out of retirement to do the film, and it had hollywood A-listers lined up to be in the film, and it was going to be fantastic, and the work was amazing, etc, etc. So we went with him to a showing of the film. It was "The Thin Red Line". I honestly invite folks to watch this film just to see how bad a film can be made. I could write whole essays on all of the horrible aspects of this film, but I think I can sum it up by simply observing that when the film finally ended (like for real this time, and it's not just another slow fade to black fake out, and there are credits rolling), I actually heard someone a couple rows back say "Oh thank god!".

The other film was "Saving Private Ryan". So yeah... that happened.