Can Andor Save Star Wars From Itself?
Andor succeeds as art by throwing corporate synergy to the wind
by Josh McNamee
Over the last decade a single concept has come to define popular cinema: the cinematic universe. Pioneered—or at least re-pioneered, since it cannot be said to be new—by Marvel, the cinematic universe promises continuity of character and world through a series of sequels. But even more critically, it promises consistency. Like food from a chain restaurant, the consumer always has a stronger urge towards consistency than the connoisseur may wish to acknowledge. It may not be great, it may not be art, but it’ll always be “fine”—and, hey, sometimes you’ll be really happy with it.
But Marvel’s success has proven difficult to reproduce. Few people remember the Tom Cruise vehicle The Mummy aside from the Dark Universe it terminally failed to launch. And Warner Brothers and DC have spent hundreds of millions of dollars doing little more than repeatedly trying and failing to launch a cinematic universe of their own (and keeping Ezra Miller on retainer as they tour the world engendering scandal).
Which brings us to Star Wars. Since it was sold to Disney in 2012, I’ve felt in my bones that it was probably impossible to make more good Star Wars. Not to disparage anyone’s talents—obviously, lots of talented people have since worked on a Star Wars project—but Star Wars, despite all its commercial appeal, is the product of an auteur. It’s George Lucas on screen. And without him, how can it work?
Of all the shows to try and grasp for this ring, Andor is the one I expected the least. It’s a seeming afterthought in two directions: a prequel series to Rogue One that no one asked for, and an apparently lesser project developed in the shadow of the blockbuster, nostalgia-laden Obi-Wan and Boba Fett series. I wasn’t even originally planning on watching it, especially after finding Obi-Wan such a draining slog. But I did. And so I’m in the uncomfortable position of finding myself unable to assess it, as I did for Obi-Wan, in the context of being an inevitable footnote, a “nice try” at making Star Wars, something that certainly didn’t restart the fire and at best made an interesting pattern in the ashes—an Aladdin 2: Jafar’s Revenge to the original sextet of films’ Aladdin.
But no. Andor is, against all odds, too good for that.
There was some expectation that the Disney corporation—having bought Marvel Studios and all the people who made Marvel Studios a success—would not fall so easily into the same trap as DC and Universal. Using their unseemly reserves of spending power to try and make George Lucas the world’s first ethical billionaire (it didn’t work), Disney purchased the thirty-year-old license to print money known as Star Wars, and we now sit at the far end of a decade of work intended to do just that. It’s fair to say that it has not been smooth sailing: the bosses at Disney have repeatedly changed directors, scrapped scripts, and shunted planned movies into being TV series. The world of Star Wars, infamous for Lucas’s savvy in reserving merchandising rights and his subsequently ruthless exploitation of the same, has proven ill-suited to the production line approach to cinema.
Star Wars, despite all its commercial appeal, is the product of an auteur.
And so having made a “sequel trilogy” of three films and a pair of spin-offs, Disney announced a pause in the production of Star Wars films. There has now not been a theatrical Star Wars film since 2019, with current Star Wars projects being built around the model of The Mandalorian: pulpy straight-to-streaming serialized drama. A closed playground, rather than attempting singular artistic visions. It’s hard not to perceive this as a commercial failure, despite even the final sequel trilogy film, The Rise of Skywalker, bringing in over a billion dollars.
The Star Wars films that have emerged from this process have been fairly easy to dismiss artistically, if sometimes via faint appreciation. Solo, for instance, is a perfectly serviceable space-opera/heist movie that sketches a world of interesting characters, although the link to Star Wars and the wink-wink-nudge-nudge callbacks that come with it are an almost entirely negative quality to the film. The Last Jedi, a film that is truly loved by some, suffers from being bookended by two other films with an entirely different authorial voice.
Rogue One, the film which introduced the character of Cassian Andor and screenwriter Tony Gilroy’s first entry into the great web of Star Wars imagery, is a mess. Having evidently been stripped down to the bare bones and built back up again late in the filmmaking process, characters appear and disappear seemingly at random. But what does come through is a quality absent from the other Disney efforts: a sense that the original six (or perhaps more emphatically the original three) films are being appreciated and understood for more than just their imagery.
This is most evident in the (sadly curtailed) character of Saw Gerrera, the radical revolutionary whose plot in Rogue One is mostly notable by its absence. Saw, played by a wasted Forest Whitaker, is a hulking mass of metal and piping, with an oxygen mask ever-present. He sits as a perfect mid-point between Revenge of the Sith’s General Grievous and Darth Vader, yet another born rebel estranged from the leadership of his movement, all three crushed in the machinations of the Empire. On the other hand, when Kylo Ren appears wearing a Vader-esque mask in The Force Awakens, it functions mainly to let us know that this guy likes Darth Vader. And maybe he’s hiding behind a mask. It’s just not the same.
Similarly, think back to the omnipresent teaser trailer for The Rise of Skywalker, in which Rey faces down Kylo Ren’s TIE fighter on a vast plain. It charges her; she flips over and dismantles it with seeming ease. Badass! But the theming is all wrong: TIE fighters are the effortless, disposable response force of the Empire, white blood cells spewing from the nearest body part to defend it. When Darth Vader climbs into one, it is to reinforce this point: he is the body of the Empire.
Andor has a very similar scene, at least superficially: our band of plucky insurgents are camping by a small creek when a TIE fighter from the nearby air base does a fly-by. The characters in Andor are no less badass than Rey Skywalker, but they can no more shoot down the TIE fighter than they can blow up the Death Star. Their ability to attack the Empire depends entirely on their ability to pass unnoticed. This common theme of threats to the Empire emerging from beneath the Imperial gaze extends all the way through the original Star Wars trilogy, from Ben Kenobi’s desert exile to the Ewoks on the moon of Endor. The climax of Star Wars (1977) hinges on whether the rebels can pull off their sneak attack before the Death Star is able to get line of sight to obliterate them—before it is able to “see” them.
This recognition of what the source material was trying to achieve rather than just what it did achieve is an elevation, to be sure. A coherent addition to Star Wars as a work is a curiosity, to be sure, but potentially still superfluous. Rogue One is sitting behind that line; Andor over it.
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Andor’s first run of episodes was strong, a short movie chopped and sliced into TV show bites. Were it released theatrically, it would certainly be in the top two Disney Star Wars projects, facing off with The Last Jedi—and my fuzzy memory of it is likely giving Last Jedi more strength in this face-off than it might otherwise possess. That’s poor competition though, as the first three episodes of Andor are closer to classic Doctor Who in their construction, bringing to mind the old cliche of British genre TV in which budget limitations and reach exceeding grasp are mitigated by giving good actors smart, ambitious material. (It would certainly beat out the current run of the Doctor Who revival, which has good actors laboring under leaden scripts.)
In its second run of episodes Andor has wiped the slate clean again. Budget limitations? It looks pristine and expensive. Reach exceeding grasp? It savagely depicts a microcosm of the British Empire, as Imperial agents man a dam over a religious site. Ropey action sequences? The climax of the sub-series is a tense, thrilling ticking-clock heist sequence built around a visual spectacle. And it’s not just a handful of talented character actors filling out the scenes: where Obi-Wan had many of its best moments in the supporting cast glimpsed in passing, whereas here there’s entire background threads populated with engaging casts.
These background threads, in addition to being universally charming, seem in part aimed to insist that the show isn’t just several movies stitched together. With the first three episodes Andor was a cool TV movie that largely eschewed the imagery of Star Wars. In the next three, scenes of infamous non-character Mon Mothma staring out of a space-car window are done just as artfully as the scenes of Cassian Andor himself gazing out over highland valleys.
In pursuing ongoing serialization at the same time as self-contained stories that have time to rise and fall, Andor resembles almost a natural progression of the model that made Sherlock successful, and indeed several of the directors on Andor are alumni of that show. Sherlock’s 90-minute episodes allowed the contrived run-on plots that fueled that show to start slow and grow into a relentless sequence of big moments by the climax. A shorter episode would have felt overstuffed and insubstantial. Andor feels as if it were pitched with movie-length episodes to begin with and then restructured; certainly the six episodes released so far make up two feature-length stories.
A big difference between Star Wars and Sherlock Holmes, of course, is that despite the world of Star Wars now exceeding forty years in age, creative control remains entirely under copyright laws. Those in charge have long been well-disposed towards fan efforts, and Lucas himself was famously a fan of Seth MacFarlane’s various parody efforts. But a serious, professional effort like Sherlock which reimagines the core nature of the character and setting is unlikely to be approved by the corporate body. It’s an unlikely miracle that Andor was produced, a show which is in many ways more conservative than Sherlock was.
The goal of selling a product to a consumer is necessarily at odds with taking risks and reinterpreting.
There is an inherent conservatism to corporate control of culture. Ignoring any question of moral right or remuneration, the goal of selling a product to a consumer—ideally a consistent product, remember—is necessarily at odds with taking risks and reinterpreting. Disney didn’t buy Star Wars so they could make things that aren’t Star Wars, even if the inarguable artistic success of their movement is the show that everyone seems to agree is the least Star Wars.
Corporations understand the idea of being a fan as being someone who is excited and engaged with a particular line of products. True fans know that the opposite is true: to be a fan is often to be more savagely against something than would otherwise be possible. In few places is this more true than for Star Wars fans. Star Wars fans do not like Star Wars. For years the sign of a true Star Wars fan has been how much of the canon you are willing to disavow. Everyone agrees that the prequels are bad, right? You’ve seen the Red Letter Media reviews? But do you caveat that the third one was okay? Do you appreciate the animated series? The Tartakovsky animated series? Do you think Return of the Jedi is actually a little suspect? Have you watched the Holiday Special—did you make it all the way through? Even praise for Andor is often filtered through dismissal of Star Wars—many comments online (including my own!) reference how refreshing it is to have a Star Wars story that does not use the most familiar elements of the fictional world, the Jedi and the Sith and the lightsabers. The fandom that comes with a fictional world like Star Wars is in no way strictly positive, or strictly appreciative. Acting only to appease it is a drive towards unimaginative, corpse-like art.
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Andor goes beyond the other Disney-produced Star Wars projects jointly in having a better understanding of the point of Star Wars, and also in diverging from Star Wars in both form and content. The success of Andor, in contrast to the rest of Disney Star Wars, leaves us with a paradox: if it’s the show that breaks the mold that artistically justifies all this Star Wars, what justification is there for Star Wars to be kept restricted to being produced by the mold? An Andor—a show that respects the artistry and the politics of the original films, but is not beholden to them—is a justification for the commons, not a vindication of intellectual property.
The Man Who Saves the World is an infamous Turkish science fiction film. Full of high kicks and grotesque mustaches, it is most infamous for interpolating distorted shots from Star Wars (1977) at various points through the film—mostly to illustrate nebulous space battles happening in the movie’s backstory. Made at a time when Star Wars was less ubiquitous than it is now, this naked theft is meant less to steal the actual setting of Star Wars and more to gesture broadly at the sort of science fiction settings the creators would like to emulate: epic-scale intergalactic conflict. It serves as a shorthand for the viewer to become familiar with the setting of the film without having time and resources spent establishing it in a novel way, so as not to distract from all that high-kicking.
Similarly, the success of Andor is in doing with Star Wars what Sherlock did with the Holmes corpus: using it as a setting where the audience is familiar with all the pieces in play. No time is wasted setting up the parameters of the intergalactic empire or the overarching nature of events. Otherwise, it is not a “Star Wars” series or a “Star Wars” movie. You might call it a Star Wars story.
Time, and the remaining six episodes, will tell whether Andor can persist with the quality it has displayed so far. Only transformative work like this can save the idea of the “Star Wars universe.”
Josh McNamee is a London-based essayist, videographer, and software engineer. You can reach him on twitter at @fevered_earth.
