As I noted in the introduction to our special series Star Wars Subjectivities:
...search around the internet and you'll find many a lengthy opinion piece on which Star Wars properties are good and which ones are bad. Some will be Original Trilogy fanatics like me, others will tell you how secretly great the Prequels are. Others still will opine on how The Last Jedi is really a Top 3 Star Wars film sandwiched between two cinematic commercials for Disney theme park rides.
This is not only true for the films, but also for the various television shows, animated series, video games, books and comics that bear the Star Wars logo. Except Andor. I have yet to meet someone who loves Star Wars but dislikes Andor. Sure, I've met people who found the first season a bit dry and joyless (as I did, at the time), but not one fan who thinks it's bad. Nearly everyone - fans and critics alike - agree that it's good. Many think it's the best Star Wars property ever made.
I'm too heavily invested in the Original Trilogy to go that far - after all, it did change the way we think about movies. But after the masterpiece that is season 2, I think there's a serious case to be made for Andor. I want to delve deeper into why this show is so compelling to so many people - and, in the spirit of Star Wars Subjectivities, why it is so compelling to me.
(Before getting started, I'd like to note that Phoebe has written extensively on the show, including a great review of Andor Season 1, as well as an essay for Star Wars Subjectivities on Andor as community action - and is currently running a weekly review series breaking down each episode (ep1, ep 2, ep3, ep4, ep5). All are must reads, if you ask me. This will be a complementary take.)
Andor is a grown-up story for grown-ups
Star Wars has always tried to thread the needle between its two core audiences: adults and children. I discovered the Original Trilogy as a boy - and it captivated me the way media only can when you are that age. But the genius of the Original Trilogy is that it continues to captivate as you grow older. However, when George Lucas launched the prequel trilogy in 1999, it was obvious to all of us who were now teenagers or adults that these films were not aimed at us, but at a new generation of children. At Cannes in 2024, Lucas said that people like me were just grumpy because we weren't looking at the films through 10-year old eyes.
It's true that I never saw the prequels through 10-year old eyes, but I have consumed a metric ton of children's media over the years - as an adult - and can say with confidence that The Phantom Menace and Attack of the Clones are not good, not even by the relaxed standards of children's media. As I wrote about The Phantom Menace:
The writing is bad. The acting is bad. The direction is bad. The production is bad. The pacing is bad. The design is bad. The effects are bad. The characters are bad. The plot is bad. The concept is...well...okay, maybe this maybe could have actually been a good movie, in theory, but unfortunately...the execution is, in a word, bad. Like, bad on a very basic, fundamental level.Or as Vance more succinctly put it in his piece on Attack of the Clones:
Of all the millions of stories that could exist in that galaxy far, far away, Lucas picked the wrong ones to tell in these prequels.Nearly everyone, including yours truly, agrees that Revenge of the Sith is a much better film. The story is actually interesting - and highly political, weaving the tragedy of Anakin's turn to the dark side alongside the broader tragedy of the Republic's dissolution and the death of democracy. It has its cringe kid content moments ("nooooooooo"), but ultimately Revenge of the Sith aspires to be a serious film for whoever is watching, regardless of age. Like the Original Trilogy, Revenge of the Sith successfully threads the needle between its core audiences.
Most Star Wars content since has attempted the same feat. In the Disney era, this has worked sometimes (e.g. Mandalorian, Ahsoka) but more often not (e.g. Solo, The Book of Boba Fett, Obi-Wan). You could argue that success just boils down to quality, but the fact is that designing content for the broadest possible audience usually leads to bland, mediocre fare that is passable to everyone but not great to anyone.
The best Star Wars stories enhance the Original Trilogy; the worst cheapen it
Consider this example. In A New Hope, we learn that rebel spies managed to obtain plans for the Empire's Death Star. When Darth Vader boards the Tantive IV, he is specifically looking for those plans - which Princess Leia gives to the droid R2D2, with instructions to hand them over to the Jedi Master Obi-Wan Kenobi. The plans demonstrate a fundamental weakness in the Death Star's design, which the Rebel Alliance hopes to exploit, thus winning a first major victory in their rebellion against the Empire.
Rogue One tells the story of how those rebel spies obtain the plans and transfer them to the Tantive IV. Andor then gives us the backstory for one of its main characters, Cassian Andor. But it doesn't only do that. We get a deep dive into Mon Mothma, the political leader of the Rebel Alliance - who has a small but compelling role in Return of the Jedi. And we get to see the Rebellion - and the Empire - from a range of perspectives, from Senators to regular people (none of whom, I'll note, are lightsaber-wielding force sensitives of destiny).
In every way possible, Andor fleshes out the story and world presented in the Original Trilogy, enhancing our understanding of what happens, why it happens and who is important to the story it tells.
Contrast this with the Disney-era Sequel Trilogy. In The Force Awakens, Director JJ Abrams eschews the opportunity to explore the New Republic's struggles to govern under the power vacuum left by the Empire's dissolution (which all of us who participated in this roundtable were keen on), in favor of...just remaking A New Hope with new, less interesting characters and cheaper looking sets. As Haley put it, Abrams remade A New Hope for Gen Z. And that's probably the nicest way to put it.
The Last Jedi is more daring, but its aspirations are weighed down by inconsistent writing and direction, plot holes and - again - the misguided urge to just remake a film that everyone already loves (in this case, The Empire Strikes Back). As I wrote in a (fairly grumpy) review back in 2017:
This brings us to the on-going Disney trilogy, which so far has presented a vision of...the exact same one as the Original Trilogy. Actually, there is a mild subversion of the original trilogy’s meta-narrative, but one so mild that it's barely a critique. Once again, we have a rag tag group of plucky individuals who confront immense power and (are sure to) triumph against all odds. And the films hit you over the head with the referential frying pan. Starkiller Base from The Force Awakens is the Death Star, but bigger! Kylo Ren is Darth Vader, but emo! Luke’s island is Dagobah, salt planet is Hoth, casino planet is Cloud City and so forth and so on. It's the same old same old, only with crappier design and little romance--the kind of thing dreamed up by corporate executives with checklists in hand and theme park rides in mind.*
So how does the Sequel Trilogy function as Star Wars canon? Not well - and especially not well when the big reveal occurs in Rise of Skywalker (which all of us in the Disney Star Wars roundtable agreed is the worst of the three). All it achieves is to make the Original Trilogy less consequential in terms of canon, while rendering the few redeeming bits of The Last Jedi null and void in favor of insipid fan service that didn't even appeal to the fans who complained about The Last Jedi. I can say one good thing about it, though: it features such an unsatisfying ending that this instantly rendered all those contrarian critiques of Return of the Jedi null and void. After all, why would anyone complain about that ending when there's another one that's so drab, colorless and utterly devoid of life?
We finally see the Empire for what it really is
These are not zealots of the 20th century grimoire, animated by nationalistic hatreds, a radically remade society or a murderous desire for purity. Rather, the Empire is more or less a traditional empire. It is a fundamentally extractive enterprise, the way Dutch colonialism was fundamentally extractive in present-day Indonesia - that is to say, the Empire is motivated by the straightforward desire to take and hoard.
For example, in Season 2, we learn that Director Krennic needs a mineral called kalkite for his top secret Death Star project; a rich source of the mineral exists beneath the crust of the planet Ghorman, a sparsely populated colony world whose leadership had backed the Separatists during the Clone Wars; but mining the kalkite from Ghorman would render the planet unstable - and unsuitable for habitation. Krennic gathers a council of officials from the various military branches, directorates of the Imperial bureaucracy and, of course, the Imperial Security Bureau (ISB) to discuss their options. The meeting is straightforwardly designed to evoke the 1942 Wannsee Conference, where a group of 15 Nazi officials decided to exterminate Europe's Jewish population (as Tony Gilroy himself has stated).
But while there's no doubt that the Empire will commit genocide, if it decides that doing so will further its goals, the Empire isn't motivated by any specific hatred for the people of Ghorman. Rather, the people of Ghorman are an inconvenience, as is the need for their removal - so the conspirators decide to look for alternatives, but ready a plan to reduce any blowback they might face if they ultimately decide to commit genocide and the mass ethnic cleansing of the planet.
Despite the aesthetic similarities between the Empire and Nazi Germany, this is not at all like the Holocaust, which was the culmination of several decades of consistent, ideological antisemitism from a political party founded on the premise that Jews were to blame for just about everything. It is, I'd argue, much more like the atrocities committed by both land-based and seafaring empires: there was something the empire wanted, there were people in the way - and if there was no more expedient way to take it, they would deploy extreme levels of violence to get it. This is bad, by the way - very bad; just not bad in the specific way the Nazis were bad, or as consistently bad as the Nazis were.
For me this as a refreshing take. Popular media routinely ignores 95% of human history while obsessing over a few historical cases, relating anything and everything to said cases. But there is a lot more material to draw on, and the fact that Andor steps out from the shadow of the ever-present Nazi analogy to portray the Empire in ways that evoke other things is, to me, one of the things that gives the show depth.
Andor is about people making difficult choices
This contrasts with life outside the core worlds, where societies are mixed (human and non-human), few people are rich, life is harsh and the decision to rebel is more often imposed than chosen. As it is for Cassian Andor. Resistance, though, comes in many forms - and requires many kinds of sacrifices.
Andor portrays a range of resistance fighters - from the patrician senators Mon Mothma and Bail Organa, to art dealer-turned spymaster Luthen Rael and his indefatigable protege Kleya Marki (played by a scene-stealing Elizabeth Dulau); from the hard-boiled Cassian Andor and Lezine to Supervisor Jung, Luthen's mole within the ISB. None are "chosen," none are Force sensitives; all are simply people trying to do the right thing as best they can under terrible circumstances. These are heroes every resistance movement can claim, from the mighty to the ordinary. All play their part, at great cost, because they cannot simply stand by.
Andor isn't just great Star Wars; it's great science fiction
If it isn't clear already, I see Andor as a triumph. It is - easily, in my view - the best Star Wars story since the Original Trilogy. It achieves this feat by taking bigger, bolder risks than any other film or series since Return of the Jedi hit theaters in 1983.
But it isn't only one of the best Star Wars stories ever told - it is also one of the best science fiction stories ever developed for television. Indeed, if you were to swap out all the Star Wars content and replace it with standard space opera content, it would be just as effective a story. This is rarely true, even for the Star Wars stories I love. It is very difficult for me to see, to cite one example, how The Mandalorian would work outside a Star Wars context - and I love The Mandalorian.
Hats off, then, to Tony and Dan Gilroy, to Diego Luna, Stellan Skarsgård, Genevieve O'Reilly, Elizabeth Dulau, and to everyone else involved in the making of this absolute masterpiece.
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(My view is not an institutional one. There are other ways of looking at all these films and shows, which are well represented across our flock. Haley loves the prequels - all the prequels. Paul enjoyed The Force Awakens - even I did the first time around, as did Joe. Arturo has argued that The Last Jedi is significant, in that it redefines what it means to be a Jedi - and then poses a novel theory, that the film is about the meaning of fandom. It's definitely an interesting theory, one worth engaging with.)
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POSTED BY: The G--purveyor of nerdliness, genre fanatic and Nerds of a
Feather founder/administrator, since 2012.