Quote Originally Posted by gbaji View Post
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?
Solo had really bad press and an immense burden associated with being the Star Wars film that came out after The Last Jedi. The single group of people who were most likely to rush out to see it and then talk about it were also the people most eager to hate it as part of the backlash to TLJ. The film itself is decidedly fine, but it's not good enough and especially not tightly crafted enough to avoid being picked apart brutally by an audience motivated to do so.

Additionally, Solo was burdened by not being a commercial success, which was a first for the franchise, and among the very large number of people who didn't see it this became a self-fulfilling assessment. If it lost money, in an environment where TLJ made money, it must have been terrible. The reality was of course much more complicated, but rarely has a film been painted with such a giant 'hate me!' bullseye in the popular consciousness.