By Justin Wood
The key component to longevity and the near-universal appeal of the Star Wars franchise has always been its simplicity. A student of international artistic influence, George Lucas distilled richer, headier works down to a pastiche of oblique references and mythological constants and a critical focusing by undersung contributors Brian De Palma and Marcia Lucas resulted in a tight, perfectly-accessible adventure film that seismically redefined how popular media was packaged and presented. Beyond simply being a defining achievement in special effects, the polished gleam of binary morality at its core stood in as a radical contrast to the storytelling environment of the 1970s with its grim post-Vietnam ambiguity and despair. 'Star Wars' was the Happy Meal waiting to happen. Its hero plucky and apolitical, motivated by primal narrative impulses of thirst for adventure and romance beyond his station, his opposition unsubtlely dressed by John Mollo by way of Hugo Boss in Gestapo uniforms, pop narrative shorthand later reused by Lucas and Spielberg in their Indiana Jones films. Only a few decades removed from the very real Third Reich, Lucas needed little world building to immediately communicate the partisan lines the audience would be asked to sympathize on. Some distant conception of a Galactic Senate is mentioned to be finally dismantled. An instantaneous Holocaust is bloodlessly committed. We don't need to see the state of the galaxy beyond the barren, untamed Tatooine, our imagination and familiarity with very recent history can fill in atrocities for us, allowing guilt free catharsis at the film's climactic Boom. 'Empire', despite its reputation for its startling dramatic left turn into a twistier universe with its branching storylines and iconic twist, never challenged that moral simplicity. Dramatic heft was carried by a greater sense of consequence and the peak of the trilogy's character writing resulting in heroes we were more concerned with but complexity never surpassed the cheeky scoundrel hearts of Han and Lando. Bewilderingly, Lucas's original conceived ending for 'Return of the Jedi' was to take a wild turn with Luke succumbing to the Dark Side, discarded for the most telling moment of binary morality in the trilogy: the redemption of space Nazi enforcer Darth Vader, unwriting a supposed lifetime of evil acts through the breakthrough of an ambiguously meager kernel of 'goodness' that emerges in an act of self-sacrifice.
Light side. Dark side. Even with Lucas's wildly accomplished contradiction of somehow muddling the nature of the Jedi by defining its Order, the binary was retained, undercutting any potential moment of reflection on the kinds of story Star Wars could be in depicting the fall of Anakin to Darth Vader. Later, during the cataclysmically divisive 'Last Jedi', Riann Johnson and the executive class at Disney were accused of an inanely comprehensive battery of motivations for the the dissatisfaction of audience members but couched in all of them was a sense that whatever ambitions the director had they had come at the cost of disrespecting the capital-L Legacy. Simplicity had seemingly been stripped away from a functionally basic world of heroes and villains. After years of imagining a Goku-like Force God Luke Skywalker crushing Star Destroyers like Coke cans, the historically subversion happy Johnson gave them a spiritually broken hut-dweller, drinking unpasturized giraffe milk and lecturing against the very binary heroism that had made the series successful. It excited some, disappointed others, and impossibly enraged the most vocal remaining. However, Johnson's failure was always that for all of his cheeky ruffling of a narrative construct he was foolishly expected to uncontroversially maintain, it ultimately amounted to no genuine confrontation of the status quo. 'The Last Jedi' teased ambiguity, stepping up to the edge of challenging the nature of Star Wars stories and then baldly whipping back to the Millennium Falcon popping TIE Fighters, a restored heroic Luke, and a happy ending that managed to say nothing and viscerally satisfy few. For all of the accusations of Johnson not understanding the brand, he in reality did the most to suggest that at a certain scale Star Wars was never going to fundamentally grow beyond its mythological simplicity. His failures arguably had more to do with an overabundance of respect limiting the scope of the film's imagination, not a deficit of it.
Disney+'s 'Andor' doesn't suffer from this problem. Whether intentional or not, by intending a more grounded and adult approach to telling a war story in the Star Wars universe, creator Tony Gilroy and crew have managed to produce a show that serves as a refutation of the franchise's approach to storytelling and perhaps even the health of the brand's audience's preferred taste in narrative. Consequently, it effortlessly ranks as one of the most interesting things to be made with the Star Wars brand.
On its most basic quality, 'Andor' succeeds by not requiring any familiarity with the film it serves as a direct prequel to, Garth Edwards 'Rogue One: A Star Wars Story', which featured reshoots by 'Andor's Gilroy. 'Rogue One' also dabbled in challenging the simplicity of the Star Wars universe's binary, with Rebel Intelligence Officer Cassian Andor desperately murdering a rebel contact to avoid exposure in the film's opening act, communicating that the film's grittier approach to the Rebel Alliance would be more in line with modern approaches to war espionage fiction and its grimly pragmatic operatives. In 'Andor' we meet the man behind the trigger in far more explicit detail but part of the reason why the show stands so confidently apart from the film it is leading up to is that Andor himself is only a wing of a larger story. As small events mutate into having larger consequences he unwittingly begins serving as a MacGuffin for distant powers with ambitions that only superficially are centered on him. While clearly part of the show fulfills the function of telling how a tribal scavenger from a forgotten moon became one of the unsung heroes behind the destruction of the Death Star, the show's real focus comes from depicting, for the first time on screen in detail, the texture of the galaxy in the claws of the Galactic Empire.
Indignant criticism has been mounted against 'Andor's pacing, accusing it of being intentionally boring to give it an artificial aura of maturity or padding for length. What is being felt is instead a deceleration of an adventure franchise to the speed of human life in a galaxy of dazzling intergalactic thrills. Characters eat breakfast cereal. They have casual late night hookups. They check in on elderly neighbors. They fret about their dysfunctional relationship with their daughters. In between very sparsely included set pieces of violent action the series keeps pinning moments of mundane existance to the spine of the show's central espionage plot. While frustrating for an audience raised on increasingly high bars for spectacle, these little moments fuel the heart of the show's tone. It gives character's with very little to begin with the last vestiges of agency they have to lose.
We meet Cassian Andor as he solicits a brothel trying to locate his long lost younger sister who he was separated from as a child. A simple and familiar cliché motivation for an antihero, Cassian is immediately knocked astray from this character goal by a corrupt back-alley police shakedown gone wrong that results in his priorities being reorganized to immediate survival. The vortex of escalating consequences he finds himself sucked into exposes him to a spectrum of ways in which the Empire's closing grip affecting the galaxy. Classically, the stories of Andor's adventures would all be morally instructive to the politically agnostic Cassian. The expectation is you'd see the puzzle pieces click in, that by witnessing the misery, despair, sacrifice, and the Empire's atrocities you'd see Cassian's moral rebirth, generating altruism and the construction of a heroic constitution in place of self-interest. You keep waiting for the thudding platitudes of hope and fighting for something greater and doing the right thing for its own merit but when they come they are only delivered by characters with ulterior motives or by characters distantly removed from the forces that actually influence their often bleak fates. Diego Luna, leading a comprehensively excellent cast, plays Andor as a survivor who has never known anything but the bootheel of malicious authority. His seething anger never fully overwhelms his cat-like instinct for self-preservation. 'Andor' slows down and shows us human life in a way Star Wars never felt obligated to before because it understands that the only way many people, especially those who already live on a knife's edge when it comes to resources and freedoms, can be pushed to confront evil is to truly be suffocated by it. In a brilliant turn midway through the season, Cassian participates in a heist of Imperial funds that gives him his escape from the boot-heel. Money, transport, luxury as long as it keeps his head low enough to avoid detection. His reward is a lengthy prison sentence but his arrest and conviction have nothing to do with his undiscovered participation in the heist; instead he is swept up as an innocent bystander by an viciously apathetic government for being on the wrong beach in the wrong moment. Not even money can save him from just not being Imperial enough.
Despite its grim and serious fantasy depiction of very real world expressions of authoritarianism, it is hard to argue that 'Andor' necessarily is a uniquely qualified piece of fiction to meaningfully speak on the perpetually relevant issue of real world fascism. Police oppression, prison labor, all represented with a with a seeming respect to its non-fictional victims. Regrettably however, the lingering Disney brand looming over the show's role, at the end of the day, as a product, will always hobble most of the ambition of the writers from being able to say what other qualified and personally invested artists haven't already on the subject. Despite this, with the many and thankfully not inappropriately included allusions to our global haunting by populist no-authoritarianism, 'Andor' does draw a stark and damning comparison to the brand that has come before it.
The realization comes when thinking about what story 'Andor' is leading up to. 'Andor's characters, across the class spectrums, are called on to make compromises, often awful personally devastating ones. The Rebels on the show do so out of the bleak knowledge that in one way or another they are seeing the galaxy become inhospitable to however they don't align with the monocultural Empire. Either through allusions to the present social climate or implicated through actions on-screen, characters are driven to sacrifice comfort, love, and humanity because the non-negotiable aspects of their birth, race, sex, and orientation will eventually doom them under the resource hungry and indifferent gears serving the Emperor. The struggle depicted here comes in stark contrast to the hero who is the eventual beneficiary of their grief: Luke Skywalker, a bored farmboy who dreamed of becoming an Imperial pilot before his magic genetics fated him to save the galaxy with all of the admiration and literal trophies involved. Contrasted with the cost incurred by rebelling inflicted on the characters of 'Andor', Luke's story reads like the propaganda film the New Republic would have made after winning the war to spin the way their victory was remembered.
The criticism here isn't necessarily that there is anything wrong with escapist entertainment or stories with non-comprehensive approaches to complex real world ethics. Entertainment and art is largely experienced as escapism and has a real role to play comforting, thrilling, and inspiring us in whatever way is most successful and demanding an instructive or social function from art as a justification for its existence is far more in line with the views of history's tyrants. Where the sting of 'Andor's portrayal stems from, intentionally or not, is that it is telling its story in a world that has always benefited from facism as trope without that portrayal taking any responsibility for the history it references. The work of Leni Riefenstahl and Adolf Hitler is used as props because of the inherit potency imagery related to the Nazis is, a result of their being one of the first autocratic beneficiaries of identity sculpting via modern media technologies making their personal branding uniquely iconic. For all of the language borrowed from the Nazis to depict evil, Star Wars was never going to make itself responsible for engaging with why the Nazis were a shorthand for evil. The victims of the Empire, unless immediately relevantly fridged for a specific character, are overwhelmingly vague. Star Wars couldn't be bothered to have anything to say about the evil it exploited the identity of. Star Wars, once again a fantasy toyetic pop brand, also didn't really have the right platform to stage any sort of ambitious criticism of real human evil either, but the present moment only exacerbates what was probably always the case: that exploiting the echos of dark history for escapist entertainment dilutes its meaning in exchange for comfort and profit.
As we creep into the 2020s, autocracies are presenting themselves again to the people of the world as a too quickly dismissed alternative to the unwieldy, hypocritical democracies that served as the scales of power during the post-World War II era. Appeals to traditionalism, renewing the sapped spirit of masculine vigor, sweeping away the complicated trappings of progressive identity politics and negotiation in favor of a binary world right at home in Lucas's original mythos. Disney, like most corporations operating at a scale akin to small nations, is inextricably complicit both in donations to candidates and causes aligned against oppressed communities as it is their cooperation with how their product is distributed abroad, clipped and censored to the tastes of despots. Its understandable that the anxiety surrounding this would encourage the appeal of escapist pop fiction, but when it dresses up in the same armbands as worn by the men at your door without asking any questions of itself, it dismisses its responsibility to the cruelty those allusions draw potency from in a way it has less of a right to. And when, bewilderingly, a show like 'Andor', that eschews self-referential brand building in favor of telling a more adult story in its comic book landscape does so, it can only reflect back at its foundation just how poorly and insubstantially the simplistic language of its world has served us. What began with George Lucas and crew crafting a film with bluntly simple allusions for the sake of storytelling convenience had his choices drawn out over multiple decades as a financially valuable franchise. Star Wars didn't have to point back to the source of its evil, it could just reference itself, turning the word 'stormtrooper' into a child's backpack, thinning the already fragile thread linking the history it exploits to its profitable use of it. With 'Andor', Tony Gilroy and team has crafted a story that put the Nazi back in the Imperial uniform and while it certainly can't be championed as brave it at the very least takes some responsibility for the story it tells in our present moment in history.