Movie Review: Solo: A Star Wars Story

HONESTLY, Star Wars fatigue is real.
Turning the franchise into an annual event has its price.
Solo: A Star Wars Story manages to rise above it, but barely, with a story set before Star Wars: Episode IV – A New Hope.
Over the span of the original Star Wars trilogy, we thought we knew all that we needed to know about the lovable, stuck-up, half-witted, scruffy-looking nerf herder.
But Disney thought otherwise.
The story tells of how young Han Solo (Alden Ehrenreich) met Chewbacca (Joonas Suotamo), became friends with Lando Calrissian (Donald Glover), got the Millenium Falcon, became a smuggler, and ultimately did the oft-referenced Kessel Run in less than 12 parsecs.
The film is at its best when it is not trying to be a Star Wars movie.
An early battle scene in the movie looked like World War II trench warfare but with lasers.
It conjured up images of the dirty and muddy encounters of the Astra Militarum, the human foot soldiers of the Warhammer 40K universe.
This is how ground-level fighting on a grand scale would look like.
There was also the heist scene, where Han and Chewbacca decide to work with Beckett's (Woody Harrelson) crew to steal refined fuel to pay off their respective debts.
It looked and felt like an intriguing and essential side of the Star Wars universe we have never seen before.
However, to me at least, the Star Wars tropes, cliches, and references were laid on too thick.
Nods, nudges, and winks to iconic scenes, lines, and characters from past movies were too on the nose. I guess old habits die hard.
Another jarring thing about the movie is Han himself. His developmental arc here does not seem to line up with what the character is supposed to become by the time of the other movies.
It also does not help that Ehrenreich did not try to act like Harrison Ford (the original Han Solo), while Glover plays a believable young Billy Dee Williams (the original Lando Calrissian).
I felt I would enjoy the movie more if I knew nothing about Star Wars, and enjoyed it as a story that is part of a larger universe, but not necessarily connected to the Skywalker legacy.