The Force-free grimness of Andor is the Star Wars story I’ve been looking for

Picture: Disney Plus

Screen 1, the Granada Kingston, Christmas 1977. The ten-year-old me is taken to see a film known simply as Star Wars. A bombastic John Williams fanfare gets things underway, followed by the now-familiar ‘opening crawl’ revealing the film’s context: “A long time ago in a galaxy far, far away…” civil war is being waged by an alliance of rebels challenging the “tyranny and oppression of the awesome Galactic Empire”, which is in the process of constructing “a sinister new battle station”, powerful enough to destroy an entire planet, noting that its completion “spells certain doom for the champions of freedom”. The scene set, the camera pans across space to a small craft being pursued by an enormous Imperial destroyer firing on it, before it is captured. We are then introduced to a princess and a masked, dark-suited baddie. A 45-year legacy is commenced.

Despite the obvious sci-fi setting, that first Star Wars film was, essentially, an amalgam of children’s fairy tale, Flash Gordon, The Virginian and The Dambusters. Little did anyone expect that within six years there would be two sequels and the establishment of a canon that would extend both further forward and further back in the so-called ‘Skywalker Saga’. But it will also broaden out beyond that core, expanding into a complex universe with Biblical degrees of history.

Today, Star Wars is a “franchise”, owned by the Disney corporation, and merchandised through a plethora of films, TV series, novels, comic books, video games, Lego sets (and, indeed, Lego films), clothing, theme park rides and just about anything you can sell with a character embossed on it. It’s easy to be cynical about the commercial monster that George Lucas’s original story has become, especially as some of the original filmed sequels and spinoffs have been patchy. Heartfelt and earnest, but sometimes lacking. Fan lore dictates that of the nine-film Skywalker story, the prequel and sequel trilogies weren’t a patch on that first film (subsequently renamed “Episode IV: A New Hope”) and its follow-ups, The Empire Strikes Back and Return Of The Jedi (or Episodes V and VI if you’re keeping up). But that’s fans for you, and they’re very, very finicky about this whole enterprise.

I’m less critical: remove some of the obvious canonical duplication of the sequels and the awful dialogue of the prequels and there’s actually a story of political intrigue and profound moral choices running through it all. Core to this is the character of Sheev Palpatine, who starts out as a charismatic but ambitious and, eventually, manipulative politician, with a dark secret - he is a member of the shadowy, resurgent Sith, an ancient cult that leverages the Dark Side of The Force for its own supremacy. Over time, he engineers a civil war and all but wipes out the Jedi, another quasi-religious order, representing the ‘Light Side’ of The Force, before eventually becoming the supreme leader of the Galactic Empire, transforming the once liberal republic of planets into a malignant, all-powerful jurisdiction with quite overtly fascist tendencies. 

In 1977, the Empire was easily comparable with Nazi Germany of three decades before. In that first film British actors hammed it up as obedient generals working for Emperor Palpatine to subjugate myriad planets and species throughout the galaxy, who enforced that subjugation with legions of white body armour-clad Stormtroopers, another nod to mid-20th Century history. Over time, the Empire has become comparable with dictatorships at large. It is also strongly believed that Lucas was also making a statement about America’s overwhelming use of force against the Viet Cong. In 2022, however, parallels are even more uncomfortably drawn with modern Russia, not the very least, the ascension of a former KGB agent to become the unopposed supreme leader of a pariah state, now seeking the ideological erasure of an entire nation in order to connect with a shared cultural past.

This brings me to Andor, the latest entry in the Star Wars universe. Set in the timeline five years before the period depicted in A New Hope, Andor is more spy thriller than space fantasy. No surprise, given that the show has been created by Tony Gilroy, who wrote the screenplays for the first three Matt Damon-starring Jason Bourne films. It centres on Cassian Andor (Diego Luna), a petty thief who becomes integral to the burgeoning rebellion. Fans will have seen him in the prequel film Rogue One: A Star Wars Story, which reveals how the rebels acquire the Death Star schematics immediately before the 1977 story (enabling the space station to be - spoiler alert - blown up by Luke Skywalker at the end). Andor establishes how the rebellion builds momentum, both through the actions of its titular hero, but also politicians like Mon Mothma (Genevieve O'Reilly), who would remain a key figure in the alliance all the way to Return Of The Jedi. 

The Disney+ show, which reached the end of its first season yesterday, has been notable for its lack of Star Wars set pieces. There are no light sabre duels, no dogfights between X-Wings and TIE fighters, and no mention at all of The Force or its Dark Side, or Jedi Knights and the metaphysical mysticism of it all. Unusually, too, for Disney’s other Star Wars television entries, Andor has been remarkably good. Gilroy set the standard with Rogue One which, despite teeing up the Skywalker storyline and its inherent swashbuckling, was nothing like it.

Picture: Disney Plus

Indeed, Andor bears more stylistic DNA with Gilroy’s work on the Bourne films. While it doesn’t depart completely from the fantasy, it portrays deeper layers to the rebellion’s origins. It employs a bleaker palette, with cold, wet and windswept Cumbrian landscapes and a disused Buckinghamshire quarry used for locations instead of the more exotic CGI backgrounds familiar to the film series. Like much else in the Star Wars canon, the UK plays a significant part in production, with Pinewood Studios remaining - as it has since that first film - the primary centre of operations, but with that comes a further array of British thespians populating the snarling ranks of Imperial officers. 

Sci-fi shows aren’t meant to do well critically, and the disquiet over Star Wars spinoffs like The Book Of Boba Fett, Obi-Wan Kenobi and even The Mandalorian, put hardcore fans on a footing before Andor made its debut. But at the end of the first 12-episode run, any misgivings have been well and truly forgotten. Critics have bracketed the show amongst the best of streaming TV, alongside recent high watermarks like Better Call Saul. Most have branded Andor the outstanding best Star Wars TV spinoff to date. Viewing figures, however, have not been so ebullient.

Critics have all highlighted Andor’s intentional greyness and its depiction of a rebellion built by ordinary citizens, with heroism and sacrifice on a broad, unrecognised scale inherent to the cause. Some of it resembles very real opposition to despotic regimes, more than anything else in the entire canon, but with neat touches that allude to the core Star Wars story. 

While the Skywalker films concentrated on those at the apex of the conflict - Luke, Leia, Darth Vader, Han Solo, Obi-Wan Kenobi, Yoda and the demonic Palpatine - Andor focuses on its middle-management. In the timeline the series is set in, Luke is still a Tatooine farmboy, unaware of both his real father and the existence of a twin sister, while Leia herself is the adopted daughter of an Alderaan nobleman. Below their dynastic psychodramas, however, a whole stata of society - like Cassian Andor - are putting their lives on the line to challenge the ruling order, raiding Imperial bank vaults and staging town square riots armed only with the space equivalent of pitch forks.

Midway through Series 1, Andor is imprisoned in a harsh Imperial penal colony, forced into manufacturing industrial components under brutal conditions (with Andy Serkis putting in a brilliant shift as shop steward). Eventually, the prisoners riot (in scenes not dissimilar to those coming out of Apple’s iPhone factory in China…). In a coda after the closing titles of the Series 1 finale, we see Imperial droids piecing together the components Andor and his fellow inmates have helped construct, with the camera panning out to reveal them to be part of the Death Star that, ultimately, he will die for in getting the station’s blueprints to the rebels at the end of Rogue One.

Picture: Disney Plus

Disney+ has promised that Andor will be limited to just the two seasons, with the second - currently in production - taking the story up to the events of Rogue One. Series 2 is expected to concentrate further on the zeal with which Imperial Security Bureau officer Dedra Meero (Denise Gough) - a cypher for Gestapo levels of menace - pursues Andor in the belief that he is part of the glue holding together the rebel alliance throughout the galaxy. And there is more to come from Luthen Rael (Stellan Skarsgård), the scholarly agent provocateur masquerading as a respectable antiques dealer who provides a link between Andor’s field endeavours and Mothma’s efforts to fund the rebellion in the background.

Criticism of other entries in the Disney-era Star Wars canon has aimed its fire on the writing, rather than than the lavish production values. It’s the niggle that continually impacts regard for the prequel film trilogy, too, which had George Lucas’s personal involvement. With Andor, Gilroy and his fellow writers have made the science fiction of Star Wars only a minor part, and the show has been more rewarding as a result. All sci-fi is requires suspension of disbelief, and the idea of Star Wars being set in a distant galaxy where humanity has flourished and jazz bands play in cantinas patronised by a multitude of sentient species, has invariably required the audience to blithely accept that life as we know it here has propagated on the other side of the cosmos in parallel. But stripped back to its basic premise, the universe Lucas created drives, in all its chapters, the duality of good-v-evil. 

It was never meant to be thought provoking, which is why it appealed to the ten-year-old me as much as the 55-year-old version now. The difference with Andor is that it appeals more to the adult than the child. And like an excitable child, I can’t wait for the concluding 12 episodes, even knowing what lies at their very end.