Honestly I couldn't believe that they were able to pull this series off as they did when I saw it. Seeing the Marvel-ised new Star Wars movies, the new series that were mostly just going for the looks (even if they were not bad) like Mandalorian or Obi-Wan - and then we get a depiction of a world of almost documentaristic reality, with figures and costumes that could be of a gritty enactment of the Russian October revolution... Besides some names, uniforms, the idea of an empire, a few easter eggs here and there, this venture had nothing to do with Star Wars, but was still among the best adult entertainment in recent years.
How the showmakers of Chernobyl could pull this idea off from start to finish with Disney's management is beyond me. I understand that they saw the budget, and knew they could never tell such stories outside of such an established franchise nowadays, but Disney had much to lose with making an entry without any lightsaber fights or any semblance of humour, even if they wanted to target a different audience. It gives a pinch of hope for the declining western mass enternainment industry.
It amazes me how being competent is enough to make you the best thing in Star Wars.
Andor is just that: competent (oftentimes barely competent: as most SW shows and movies it still can't master the art of walking and taking at the same time. Even the most "dynamic" scenes are actors making two steps, stopping, talking without even moving their bodies or hands or arms, then making two more steps, repeat).
The article has weird obsession with sex (is the author an adolescent themselves?). There are actual grown-up things Andor did that really work in show's favor:
- people are shown to be generally competent regardless of gender or race, and grown ups are generally treated as grown-ups, and not bumbling idiots
- rebellion is shown as actual rebellion: multiple factions, and "we have to kill a few to save multitudes". Which is refreshing after four decades of "rebels are angels, empire is evil"
- the Empire is shown as an actual thing that exists and works. And it's rather efficient at what it does (and fails as empires often do)
But all that is hurt by the format (three 30-minute episodes making a single "story", repeat 4 times). All that could be condensed in two hours. And it's hurt by Diego Luna whose limited acting ability hurts the character and every scene he's in.
What's amazing is that most folks who get a crack at Star Wars can't even apply the dumbest version of its formula—mash up a few genre-things, apply Star Wars lipstick—competently. That is all The Mandalorian did, and that's all it took to put it well in the top half of all Star Wars media. It's simple, it's easy, yet most of the folks involved just don't seem to get it.
Agree with most of your take. The worst thing about Andor was that nearly every scene was too long. It's not slow in an "it's slow on purpose and is still making good use of its time" way like a lot of excellent film and television is, it's slow in a "the writers and/or editors weren't good enough, or weren't given enough time, to make it better" sort of way. I agree with the article that it's not clear the politics of Andor are in service of any kind of real message, but they sure are shocking to see in something Disney put out. It's not that they're shocking in an absolute sense, but I'd never have believed The Mouse would green light something like it.
Falcon and Winter Soldier actually had some similarly dark, realistic politics going on, and even got a little close to saying something with it at the end (before shying away and saying nothing at all, instead, because Disney's run by cowards) but didn't go nearly as far as Andor. The execs must have been really high when the Andor scripts passed their desks for approval.
Luna was great. The character being straightforward, with not much emotional intelligence at all adds a lot to the atmosphere. He is a traumatised soldier with only a few people to care for, not a gun slinging comedic hero like most of his counterparts in the franchise. Him being still likeable and interesting, and those few small steps he took towards taking part in a rebellion was the best aspect of the season.
You don't have to be gung ho to show more emotion than just blank face ;)
I enjoyed the idea of "thrown into the mix of things and slowly warming up to the idea of the rebellion", but it was handled rather poorly IMO.
So we have Luthen specifically seeking him out because he's so great and good. And in a conversation he mentions how he casually stole imperial star-thingy. So he is kinda gung ho (or at least extremely competent). Then he learns minute details of the rebels he just met by just observing them...
And that's it. Everything else is him being extremely incompetent (how he ended up in jail to begin with), or suddenly competent without any prior explanation (how he was instrumental in the plot to run away).
But this more due to the format of the show I think.
As the piece says, part of the point of the story is that Luthen wasn't seeking Cassian out because he was singularly valuable. He was a cog, and picked Cassian up on his normal smuggling route.
> It amazes me how being competent is enough to make you the best thing in Star Wars.
Really, Andor is the best sw thing since The Empire Strikes Back. The first episode of Mando was OK, but then it continued in the style of 1960s TV western which isn't my thing.
In general star wars is meh. It's like The Who: all energy, little musical talent (which was great at the time but doesn't age well). Except most SW movies don't even have energy.
There are some good paragraphs here but this is mostly overwrought. The piece buries what I think the essential truth of the series is: most of the mature relationship and political context Andor pulls in is just texture and good storytelling.
What Andor does well is make the various cartoony facets of the Star Wars universe seem real. The "Empire" in Andor isn't just evil in the abstract, it's evil in a familiar way. Andor grapples directly with genocide as a real thing, it tries to render the banality of that evil on screen, and then you realize that Lucas portrayed genocide on an even grander scale in the first movie and it was hard to even notice it for what it was? ANH's genocide was literally a Bond villain trope.
But that doesn't make Andor coherently political; it just makes it more grounded. The blasters in Andor are the first in any Star Wars IP that seemed lethal; the TIE fighter that buzzes pseudo-Trotsky and pseudo-Lenin on Aldhani actually felt dangerous; the economy of the mining world seemed like it produced something other than pod races and cantinas; Cassian actually might hook up with people, &c &c &c. It's just decent storytelling. Like, this is one of the very few bits of Star Wars IP where it's clear that goal #1 was "make a good movie".
The rest of Star Wars has been utterly cursed with fan service since the first showing of ANH.
So anyways this review has me when it uses Andor to shine a light on just how stupid the rest of Star Wars is, and loses me when it tries to draw extra meaning out of Andor itself.
> The blasters in Andor are the first in any Star Wars IP that seemed lethal
Andor did a good job with it, but I'd credit The Mandalorian for pioneering that. Much of it thanks to the audio FX and sound editing—it made the blaster bolts seem a lot more like real, physical, violent and dangerous things than the "pew pew!" of most of the rest.
I watched the Mandalorian and didn't really get that feeling at all, but Mandalorian was also overtly cartoony (the army of Boba Fetts!) so that may have thrown me off. The thing in Andor that made me take notice was the TIE fighter buzz on Aldani. I think that's the first time any Star Wars ship ever felt kinetic, which is pretty funny since starfighter porn is part of the rationale of the whole property.
Mandalorian's pretty consistent about it, but it really stood out to me in the shootout when Breaking Bad's chicken man had besieged Our Heroes in the saloon. There's a crack to the impacts, and a speed to the bolts, that really makes you go "oh shit, those might hurt!" in a way that no Star Wars media I can think of (and I've seen/played/read just... way too much of it) had before.
And it was mediocre in the way that basically all the Mandalorian episodes were, but I really enjoyed the use of the AT-ST as a Robert E. Howard, Summoned from the Darkest Jungle by the Forest Savages and their Witch Doctors, primeval monster-beast, in that one episode. Really made the thing seem scary, at least at times. Absolutely perfect example of how to rip off genre media then paint it Star Wars to turn out an above-average Star Wars thing (not that that's a high bar) with minimal effort.
With a headline of "Police and Thieves" (and having stayed in a hotel which had been blown up by ארגון back when they were the terrorists) I had been expecting some kind of Baptists & Bootlegger dynamics, wherein pseudo-ОГПУ finds themselves reproducing the tactics of pseudo-Охрана.
The droids outside looked from jedi to sith, and from sith to jedi, and from jedi to sith again; but already it was impossible to say which was which.
How the showmakers of Chernobyl could pull this idea off from start to finish with Disney's management is beyond me. I understand that they saw the budget, and knew they could never tell such stories outside of such an established franchise nowadays, but Disney had much to lose with making an entry without any lightsaber fights or any semblance of humour, even if they wanted to target a different audience. It gives a pinch of hope for the declining western mass enternainment industry.