I’ve watched the first three episodes of Andor that have been released on Disney+ and they are a glorious thing. The first season is twelve episodes long so it may do the usual Disney+ Star Wars thing of great opening, turgid middle and then some attempt at redemption at the end, but I don’t think that’s going to be the case. The show itself is about a reckoning, but I also think Andor is a reckoning for the Star Wars franchise.
In order to lay out why we need to step back in time a bit.
Star Wars is not easy
Contrary to the opinion of some fans, Star Wars stories are not easy to write.
One of my favourite books is a book called Moondust. It’s a non-fiction book. It tells the story of the moon landings from the perspective of the people, the time and the place. It conjures up that era in an immediate and evocative way and it’s enthralling.
One of the questions that the book asks is why we’ve never been back to the moon or built on the moon landing to go to Mars? It postulates that the people and time were unique and that is why the moon landings happened and nothing so amazing has happened since.
I’ve come to the conclusion that is exactly the same with Star Wars.
A Cinematic Moon Landing
A New Hope is essentially a cinematic moon landing, unique to the people and time it was created. While some might argue that is true of all films, it is substantially more accurate for some. It’s so true in the case of Star Wars that once time moved on and the mosaic of resources ceased to exist the unique creation failed to be re-created consistently again.
Cinema was ready for something radically different even though it probably couldn’t describe it. We had a lot of proper, premise-based science fiction in the late ’60s and the ’70s such as Silent Running (1972), Planet of the Apes (1968), Westworld, Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1978), Logan’s Run (1976) and 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968). We didn’t have big, bold space opera utilising new approaches in special effects.
Lucas was married to Marcia Lucas during the creation of the original trilogy, not getting divorced until 1983 the same year as the release of Return of the Jedi. Marcia was a highly respected editor. She worked on A New Hope and Return of the Jedi and The Empire Strikes Back unofficially. As well as the editor of American Graffiti and the Scorsese films Taxi Driver and New York, New York. It’s said Marcia resolved key elements of Star Wars like ‘what to do with Kenobi’ and provided numerous touches that are now iconic like the kiss before the rope swing in the Death Star. Yet, in almost all narratives or documentaries about the original trilogy, Marcia is wiped from the timeline.
The cast also got into the writing business with it being said both Harrison Ford and Carrie Fisher edited their lines during the production to make them less verbose and more engaging. While some of their criticisms about Star Wars using specific terms and language are incorrect, they undoubtedly improved the script overall in terms of audience engagement. This is hardly surprising especially when you consider Carrier Fisher went on to be a script doctor for many films.
Lucas isn’t a writer which isn’t a big criticism as he admits it himself. In A New Hope Lucas estimates that 30% of the dialogue was done by Willard Huyck and Gloria Katz. The last thing he wanted to do was write the prequel films on his own. He wanted a partner but everyone was too scared to get involved. He needs someone to take his ideas, filter and process them and actually turn them into something good. If he tries to express them directly himself things don’t go too well. You just have to look at the prequels for that, great ideas obscured and mangled by terrible scripts. Grand ideas and their execution as an engaging narrative are not the same thing.
The original trilogy happened because of Lucas, but only came out in the shape it did because of a confluence of time, place and talent a bit like the moon landing. Since then people have struggled to capture the elusive quality of Star Wars or shake off the template and create something unique.
It can also be argued that even by The Return of the Jedi this confluence of talent was producing something that was already drifting off target and didn’t have exactly the same magic as the first two films.
Sticking the landing
Since Return of the Jedi which just held the line, Star Wars has been repeated examples of people narrowly missing the landing or just performing an epic crash and burn because Star Wars isn’t easy it’s hard and many people totally misinterpret it.
The prequels
While the prequel films have come to be accepted more as part of the Star Wars fabric, they remain very badly written films in which the focus was more on furthering film technology than a great script or allowing the actors to deliver well within the set-up of the new film technology. There is a reason only a handful of actors, those with stage-like experience, survived the process of the prequels even having performed well in numerous other films.
The animations
The acceptance of the prequel films as part of whole has largely been driven by animated shows which stuck the landing. They managed to stick the landing because Lucas found a new partner to execute his work through and handover over the baton.
Dave Feloni went on to create a whole parallel world of Star Wars that existed in an animated space in the form of Star Wars: The Clone Wars, Star Wars: Rebels and now Star Wars: The Bad Batch. The Clone Wars essentially gave the original trilogy the foundation it needed that was hidden behind the turgid writing as well as providing a canon-busting fan favourite character in the form of Ahsoka Tano which just shows when it comes to canon winning makes anything acceptable.
When Dave Feloni talks about Star Wars he talks about it in ways that shows he truly understands it, often in ways many a fan doesn’t.
The Disney Sequels
I can verbalise my view of the Disney sequels as follows: The Force Awakens is a good, relatively safe start, The Last Jedi is (a few comedy scenes aside) a fantastic bolder take of what could have been and Rise of Skywalker is the biggest act of cinematic cowardice put to the screen and absolute trash. I also liked Solo: A Star Wars Story.
We know what happened though, The Last Jedi broke Star Wars fandom and nothing was the same since. Wherever you sit on the divide it proved again that sticking the landing isn’t as easy as people think.
You may be asking about Rogue One? Well, we’ll come back to that.
Extended Universe
I know there are many people who like these books and comics but it remains my view that 90% of them, and I’m possibly being generous, represent a gross misinterpretation of Star Wars. I include much-loved efforts like the Thrawn trilogy and Dark Empire in this.
Disney was right to trash it all and look at it like the new Doctor Who shows did in that it only exists if they choose to acknowledge it, do a different take on it or adopt a loosely inspired by approach.
The impact of Rogue One
Rogue One is a critical film in the progression of Star Wars for a number of reasons. It’s just not for the reasons a lot of fans think. It’s not because of the Vader scene. It’s not because the aesthetic is the same as the original trilogy. It’s not because of the great characters as most of them aren’t characters as such at all beyond Jyn, Andor and K-2SO.
Setting elements are characters. As stated the vast majority of characters in Rogue one aren’t really great characters they are ‘historical’ figures (the rebellion leaders) at best or archetypes at worst (everyone in the Rogue One group but for the trio). The strength of Rogue One is it adopts an approach of making setting elements as characters. In this case, it makes the rebellion a character. The story of Rogue One is just as much about the transition of the rebellion from a resistance organisation to a space opera Rebel Alliance based on hope the triggering event being the Death Star.
The Death Star defines eras. Rogue One does something very clever which is very important for Andor. It essentially does something similar to how comics work. Comics often define eras using pivotal events to separate them and between those eras, the world works differently. That’s why WWII superheroes are different to Iron Age ones or modern Silver Age and the like. The arrival of the Death Star represents an era-defining moment. In the pre-Death Star World we can tell stories about a more realistic, painful and morally grey resistance but post-Death Star we tell stories about a space opera Rebel Alliance as that’s all that makes sense with a planet-busting super laser.
Gilroy explained that he had “no interest” in “Star Wars” when he signed onto the project. Yet, he thinks that may have benefitted “Rogue One” in the end. “I think that helped. It’s effective on a doctoring job to have emotional detachment. You wouldn’t want your cardiothoracic surgeon getting emotional.”
https://www.slashfilm.com/947750/tony-gilroy-had-no-interest-in-star-wars-when-he-was-hired-for-rogue-one/
It introduced Tony Gilroy to Star Wars. Tony Gilroy was brought in to script doctor the Gareth Edwards film Rogue One and the result was a film that told the story of a rebellion that existed in two states and Rogue One was the story of the rebellion moving from one state to another. While the pre-Death Star state was largely eluded it drove the need to obtain the Death Star plans. It seems Gilroy is another addition to the small list of people who can stick the landing with Star Wars.
The world Gilroy set up, specifically the world eluded to in Rogue One was a great exploration opportunity.
What a reckoning sound like
Andor is a reckoning for Star Wars because, based on its first three episodes, it seems to have finally nailed approaching Star Wars from an entirely different perspective. The perspective hinted at in the off-camera lead-up to Rogue One.
It’s born out of desperation. One of the brilliant things about the first three episodes of Andor is the degree to which you felt the fateful choice of the common people when they realised they just couldn’t ignore what was happening. They made a stand despite knowing their lives would never be the same again. The moment they were pushed into it had weight.
It’s a dirty rebellion. This is the pre-Death Star rebellion we’ll see in Andor and the horrible choices it must make and the impact it has on those who perform them. It even damages some so much they go too far as that is what Saw Gerrera’s narrative focuses on. He represents the road that should not be taken.
The Empire is institutional. While the show may touch upon different elements of The Empire as the show progresses it is definitely making the argument that it isn’t just about a space opera Empire, but about the corruption and application of power such an organisation engenders. In the first three episodes, we didn’t see The Empire as such, we saw the corruption of power in the Star Wars equivalent of local enforcement and institutions.
It’s about normal people. This was amazing to see. While the show does go on to tell this story at multiple levels, as it includes Mon Mothma, I hope it keeps a focus on normal people having to face the choice to resist throughout the show. This had people living normal lives. Having sex and complex loves. It had those lives wrecked by corruption and the application of abusive power. It was all the better for it. What would YOU DO when things get to the level you cannot JUST live your normal life and even doing that is a choice?
Screw the volume and use real sets and locations. Okay, Andor does use The Volume, but it uses it in clever ways rather than enforced, redundant ways like Kenobi. It feels expansive rather than small. Not at once do we have characters wandering around in what looks like a crap quarry that doesn’t have the advantage of being in a real quarry and it’s as if it ends after 20 feet. As a result, it feels like a film. It does mean series are going to be very far apart but you have to accept some sacrifices.
It’s a TV show that is a film. We say this all the time. It comes from the 90’s when TV started to make its first steps into something better. We’d describe X-Files episodes as mini-movies and it wasn’t wrong compared to what had gone before. Now we say the TV shows are like films purely because of the budgets and the fact they should have been a two hours films rather than the stretched-out messes we get. Andor is different. It feels like a movie in how it is scripted. Its camera work and effects look a lot closer to a film. It’s a TV show like a film in a good way.
What’s important is this is a very different Star Wars which is something the franchise has never achieved. It’s managed to avoid the Skywalkers. It’s made the conscious choice to not be about easter eggs. It’s focused on real people making real choices and not people wrapped in myth and making mythical choices. It trends towards exploring the realism of people rebelling against tyranny.
That is the reckoning in Andor. In fiction, it’s the reckoning of having to rise up and fight. In the meta-story of the franchise, it’s the reckoning of Star Wars finally telling a different style of story, one which potentially breaks the foundation the space opera films are based on, and doing it well and showing it’s possible to be different.
It’s the above that is very clever, as it’s dangerous ground, but that is where the clever post-Death Star and pre-Death Star line comes in that was established in Rogue One. Andor can happily tell the story of a galaxy that is rising up in a realistic way against insidious corruption from the top while relying on the arrival of the Death Star to shift things to a space opera Rebel Alliance and tell a different story from that point forward.
The Last Jedi
This brings us to the ultimate irony of the whole franchise. Rogue One and Andor have the exact same message as The Last Jedi. They both present a Star Wars world in which The Empire is just the tip of the iceberg and underneath it is a web of corruption and misappropriation of power that exists at every level.
In both of these stories, this can only be solved by providing hope.
In Andor / Rogue One the need to give hope is triggered by the Death Star as the rebellion realises the only way to fight an Empire capable of destroying planets is to become something bolder and more hope driven and the Rebel Alliance is formed. A space opera rebellion, the one that exists in the space opera films.
In The Last Jedi, the problem is similar but different. Resistance has been ground out of the universe. Why wouldn’t it? The Rebel Alliance won yet the galaxy proved that people will seek out power and corruption anyway allowing a new Empire in the form of The First Order to get its hooks in. This is so insidious when it gets to the point the new rebellion reaches out no one replies! They need new hope and that new hope is provided by Luke Skywalkers’ sacrifice.
Basically, Rogue One / Andor and The Last Jedi share the same theme and message, but I’m not sure many people take the same thing away from the two different stories.
And, Finally…
We’re three episodes in. Possibly Andor will crash and burn in the usually crap-tastic middle that is offered in many of the Star Wars TV shows outside of The Mandalorian. I just don’t think it’s going to. I think Andor is going to steadily expand the story of a dirty rebellion’s rise that is going to unfold under more and more pressure. We are going to see corruption at every level and the application of power that feels painful, harmful and dangerous rather than being about blowing up planets.
It’s broken the rails Star Wars seems to always find itself on again and again and I hope it continues to be enthralling as the first three episodes.