The Guardian lied to me, not for the first time I suspect. They told me that Solo: a Star Wars movie was one of the top five Star Wars films ever, even surpassing Rogue One which I personally thought was absolutely superb. Sadly it was not to be.

Don’t get me wrong. It was fine. Perfectly adequate for an afternoon’s entertainment in Braintree where, let’s face it, amusement of any kind is in short supply but ever so surely needed. It just wasn’t any more than that.

There will be no need for a spoiler warning here because nothing of any real consequence happened, so how could I give anything away? There were chases, blaster battles, and, I expect, there were witty one liners although for the life of me I can’t think of any and then there was the relentless pointing at familiar things and going “Oh!” as we discover the utterly tedious origins of Han and Chewy’s friendship, “Ah!” as we see for the first time objects that we have, in fact, seen hundreds of times only, this time, we’re told it’s the first time the characters are seeing them.

If this film genuinely ranked alongside Empire Strikes Back and co. we might be able to, for instance, point to mysteries within this film and say “Hey, wouldn’t it be cool if we found out how that unfamiliar thing got there? Or how that odd couple got together?” Not only do I have any desire to dig deeper into any element or character in this film because they’re so obviously as shallow as a shadow on the wall, but it also renders completely banal the “origins” of things that we long held dear, degrading them into tick box moments of recognition and little else.

Do we learn anything new about the Millenium Falcon or Han and Chewy’s friendship? Do we heck. We continue to know what we always knew about almost everything.

I’d say that if the original trilogy was simply a bunch of pointing to objects and people while metaphorically going “Cool”, “Cool”, “Familiar”, “Familiar” as lasers went off those films would never have been made. I’d go so far as to venture that Solo demonstrates very clearly what exactly is wrong with franchises more generally. First they tell a story and then it repeats, rehashes, and self-references itself to death until you’ve replaced something that may have had some kind of meaning and emotional resonance with a bunch of recursive memes that go through the motions of a story but in fact are as soulless as that C3PO toy you had as a kid that lost it’s arm and whose gold rubbed off within the first year you owned it.

But really, it was fine. The blasters popped, the Tie fighters whizzed and Chewy stood in the background thinking, “I’m getting too old for this shit.”