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.

Force of nature

It’s an accepted fact amongst the fanbase that the three Star Wars films Ewan McGregor made (confusingly, the story-establishing trilogy which came after the canon-establishing trilogy...) were not the best. Not that McGregor was directly at fault: blame, ultimately, resides with the saga’s creator, George Lucas, who wrote them. I’m not going to list all the faults here, but my principle gripe was that the scripts were awful and the quality control was somewhat off.

Since then, all things Star Wars have fallen into the hands of another galactic empire, Disney, which since buying the franchise from Lucas in 2012 has been Marvelising it with a 'universe' of sequels, prequels and other offshoots from the original Skywalker storyline. These have included films like Rogue One and Solo and numerous TV projects including the ‘space Western’ The Mandalorian and the interconnected Book Of Boba Fett. At a Star Wars convention this week it was announced that a much-anticipated third series of The Mandalorian will come to the Disney+ streaming platform next February, and another new TV spinoff, Andor - a prequel to the events of the cinematic release Rogue One: A Star Wars Story - will launch on the channel in August. 

However, before any of that, today we can add another entry to the entire canon: Obi-Wan Kenobi, a supposedly standalone series in which McGregor reprises his cinematic role as the Jedi master who tutored the young apprentice Anakin Skywalker in the ways of The Force before he succumbed to the Dark Side and became Darth Vader in Episode III: Revenge Of The Sith. 

Set ten years after that storyline - and before the old, reclusive ‘Ben Kenobi’ encounters Luke Skywalker in the original Star Wars film (now known canonically as Episode IV: A New Hope) - Obi-Wan Kenobi finds the Jedi exiled and living in a cave on Tatooine where he keeps a distant eye on the young Luke (whom we all now know is one of Vader’s twin children, the other being the future Princess Leia).

As with all of the Star Wars properties, Obi-Wan Kenobi will frame the classic good-versus-evil struggle, promising plenty of the fairy tale magic that first enamoured a generation of cinema-goers in 1977 and snared another with the prequels and sequels. The series starts from the premise of the Jedi Master coming to terms with the ‘loss’ of Anakin and his emergence as as the Galactic Empire’s ultimate enforcer, Vader.

© 2022 Lucasfilm Ltd. & ™ All Rights Reserved

“We find Obi-Wan at the beginning of our story rather broken, and faithless,“ McGregor explained earlier this year, “and beaten - somewhat given up.” But, he added, the series is not without hope.Along the way in the six-part series we will meet the ‘Inquisitors’, a ruthless band of lightsabre-wielding hunters, tasked by Vader to track down his former Jedi mentor. That means, too, a reprise for Hayden Christensen, who played Anakin/Vader in the second two prequels, Attack Of The Clones and Revenge Of The Sith, which saw the Jedi largely wiped out. Presumably, with Obi-Wan the only known Jedi in existence (along with Yoda, of course), the series will bridge the gap with A New Hope, though it’s not clear yet how. Disney+ is committing six episodes now in a “limited series”, although both McGregor and Christensen have said they’d be open to a second series. ”It was definitely conceived as a limited series,” director Deborah Chow said recently. “It is one big story with a beginning, middle, and end. So that's the way we've always approached it. The approach has always been that it is one full story.” 

Given that the series only covers a period ten years after Sith, and a full nine years before A New Hope, Disney certainly has plenty of scope to fill in the period of Luke’s adolescence (though best not worth getting into the technicalities of McGregor’s Obi-Wan ageing in nine years to become Alec Guinness’s Obi-Wan). “It was made as a one-off limited series,” McGregor told Entertainment Weekly, following the company line. “And in a way, it does do what I wanted it to do in terms of bridging a story between [Episodes] III and IV and bringing me closer to Alec Guinness’ Obi-Wan in A New Hope.” To which he added: “Would I like to make another one? “Yeah, I would like to make another one.”

Time, though, will tell how the fanbase reacts to this latest offshoot. The Mandalorian had a slow start in its first season, but warmed up in its second. The Book Of Boba Fett left many cold for the first half of its run last year, but it warmed up as The Mandalorian character was introduced as a crossover. Another neat segway to the original cinematic canon in The Mandalorian was a significant cameo by a digitally de-aged Mark Hamill as Luke Skywalker. ”It's nice to know that by all of our efforts in making this Obi-Wan Kenobi series, the fans are going to be stoked,” McGregor said. ”I think they're not going to be disappointed by it. Maybe some will, but you can't please all the people all the time. But knowing that people are going to be happy because of our work is a nice feeling.”

Picture: StillMoving.net for Disney

McGregor was not surprisingly tight-lipped as to how Obi-Wan Kenobi would develop, but gave some insight in his interview with Entertainment Weekly. “At the beginning of our story, we know that it’s ten years after Episode III. So we know that the Jedi Order have been all but destroyed, and everyone who wasn't killed in Order 66 has fled and is in hiding. Yoda and some of the other Jedi who Obi-Wan would’ve known and loved are unable to communicate with each other.”

“So [my character is] much closer to the Obi-Wan Alec Guinness played in that he’s on Tatooine and he’s a solitary man. He’s living as normal a life as he can so as not to draw attention to himself, because the Jedi are being hunted down to be destroyed and he will know that. And his last responsibility to his old life is to look over Luke Skywalker, who is with [Uncle] Owen and Aunt Beru [his guardians at the start of A New Hope], and he's doing that from a distance so as not to draw attention to their family in the moisture farm there.”

McGregor sheds a little light on the premise of the initial series: “I think Owen wants Luke Skywalker to have a normal childhood, to grow up in an ordinary way and not to be bothered by that. And also, there's the risk that, knowing that the Jedi are being hunted down, if Obi-Wan is found out and discovered, then [Owen] doesn’t want him anywhere near Luke Skywalker because they would also take Luke.” This suggests a plot line similar to The Mandalorian’s protection of Grogu (AKA ‘Baby Yoda’), which fits into the canon immediately after the defeat of the Empire in Episode VI: Return Of The Jedi.

Picture: Gareth Cattermole/Getty Images for Disney

Time will tell how Obi-Wan Kenobi will play out, there’s no doubting the commitment of both McGregor and Christensen to the project, chastened perhaps by the criticism that befell their chapters in the film series. McGregor rewatched the entire Skywalker saga while Christensen went even deeper, watching all of the films as well as the animated series, The Clone Wars and Rebels, which introduced a number of key character and story developments to the overall canon, which have been touched on in the various Disney-era productions.  

Now older and wiser, McGregor and Christensen appear to have taken a healthy approach to the criticism of the prequel films as they reprised their roles for TV. “For the young stars, there was nowhere to hide. "I found it quite hard," McGregor, now 50, admits of the reaction to the prequels. “For [them] to come out and get knocked so hard was personally quite difficult to deal with,” said McGregor in his interview. “And also, it was quite early in my career. I didn't really know how to deal with that. I’d been involved with things that just didn't make much of a ripple, but that's different from making something that makes a negative ripple.” For Christensen, who was barely out of his teens when he was cast as Anakin Skywalker, he had even more to confiner: “When the films came out and the critics were very critical, of course that was a difficult thing,” he said recently. “Because you care so much about this thing that you've invested so much of yourself into. So, for sure, that's challenging.”

© 2022 Lucasfilm Ltd. & ™All Rights Reserved

McGregor takes the view that the audience who watched his Star Wars films will have now grown up, just as my age group watched the original trilogy and grew up. With that, he hopes, has brought a realisation that the new series has an opportunity to make a new contribution to the saga that spans more than 45 Earth years. It is, he says, one of hope as Obi-Wan heals the pain of losing Anakin, although it remains to be seen, knowing what comes in A New Hope, how much peace he will find. 

“When we last saw Obi-Wan in the prequels, he’s very emotional,” says the TV show’s writer Joby Harold. “There’s a passion to him. And when we get to see him again in A New Hope, he is the Zen master. That was the story that I wanted to understand - what had happened to Obi-Wan between the guy that Ewan had brought to life and the guy that Sir Alec Guinness brought to life.”. Over the next six weeks we will find out.