I used to do a lot more pop-culture blogging than I’ve done in recent years, but that’s tailed off for a bunch of reasons. Partly it’s that Forbes doesn’t want pop-culture stuff, and they’re the primary outlet paying me to blog these day. Mostly, though, it’s that I just don’t consume much any more– between work and the kids, I’m too busy. Which is sad-making, but that’s life.

Last week, though, for the first time in I don’t know how long, I saw not one but two new movies: Solo and Ocean’s 8. I blew off the afternoon last Monday because it was my birthday, and went to see Solo by myself, then Kate expressed an interest in Ocean’s 8, so we got a babysitter Saturday night and went to that together.

The two end up having more in common than you might think, given that one is a movie about elaborately costumed aliens and the other is a Star Wars flick. They’re both fundamentally heist movies, they both have big casts and complicated backstories, and neither has any really compelling reason to exist in their current form.

OK, that’s maybe a little harsh on Ocean’s 8— as Kate noted, any modern “large crew of impossibly glamorous people conspire to do crimes” movie is going to be compared to Ocean’s 11 these days, so they might as well lean into it. The direct connection to the previous films is more of a distraction than an essential element, though– this feels a bit like a script idea that was kicking around anyway, and lightly re-branded to ride the current “gender-flipped remake” trend.

Which is not to say that it’s not fun. Bullock and Blanchette have a ton of charisma as the principals of the heist, and the rest of the crew carry off their roles well. The heist scenes are well executed, and while the twists aren’t exactly surprising, everything is pulled off very smoothly. It was a fun movie; not an enduring classic, but a pleasant way to spend an evening in the theater.

If it has a weakness, it’s that the whole thing feels a little slight, especially compared to the original (this is where the tie-in to the other films does this movie a disservice). The Clooney-Pitt Ocean’s 11 has Andy Garcia as the villain to provide a sense of menace, as a casino owner who’s not afraid to have people killed. The villain in this is… Debbie’s ex, who’s kind of a dick. The stakes, like the crew, are smaller, and while there are probably some gender studies theses to be written about why that is, the end result is to blunt the impact of the movie a bit.

The same problem of lowered stakes also hurts Solo, in a much more significant way. For one thing, it’s a prequel, so there’s never any question about the ultimate survival of the protagonists. Beyond that, though, it runs smack into one of the pitfalls of sci-fi heist movies: the final setpiece has our heroes fleeing trouble by diving into technobabble, where they’re menaced by technobabble but escape by using technobbable to run one bit of technobabble into another bit of technobabble, creating a new danger because of technobabble, which they escape thanks to a sudden infusion of technobabble.

Despite being the tenth movie in this universe, none of that technobabble has really been established previously, which means we don’t have any sense of the rules by which these things operate. Which robs the whole sequence of a lot of its drama– the visuals are cool and all, but there isn’t the same pleasure that comes from seeing how the “real world” thieves of Ocean’s 8 outwit the authorities. Despite a vastly higher body count, then, Solo somehow feels even less weighty than the lower-stakes Ocean’s 8.

Which, again, is not to say that it’s not entertaining. The visuals are, in fact, very cool, and the execution is reasonably competent. There’s a bit too much box-checking (one of the reasons why prequels are dumb), and there are some missed opportunities to set things up a little better, but given its troubled production history, it’s kind of impressive that it works at all. And it was a pleasant enough way to spend an afternoon.

So that’s your inessential pop culture report for the moment. Come back in six months or a year, which is probably how long it will take before I see another two movies in the theater.