You're aware of Rogue One, right?
I don't think we'll see anything on the same level as Andor again; they already cut the original plans from 5 seasons to 2; it's simply too expensive and costs too much time to do it this well. But I do hope that future Star Wars shows will try to follow at least some aspects of its example: better writing, more human stories, focus on core themes, not on fan service or milking established characters.
Of course production values will be lower, but I can live with that if they get the other stuff right.
Wow that's a shame. I had no idea. Assuming they could've kept up the quality, that would've been amazing for their reputation and retention.
He realised that everything, absolutely everything in Star Wars needs to be designed, that it took ages to do, and that it would be forever to make 5 seasons. So he pitched to Diego to only make one more.
Thank god. There's not enough meat on the bone, the writing would never have been good enough to support this.
We need more excellent, tightly spun stories.
If we didn't have them, it would turn it into a drag. A dramatic year looks much more impressive when you compare it to what was a year before, than when you look at it day by day.
I think there was more than enough room to fill at least another season. Maybe two.
But hey, I'm more than happy we got this much.
These I think were 12 episode seasons, maybe five 8 episode seasons would have been better.
From some of the interviews I saw it seemed like the time aspect was the big driver. One in particular Diego Luna was talking about a conversation he had with Gilroy and Gilroy was like "God it'd take us 10 years to make this". I get that logistically that can be a tough thing to do with actors, and also it'd be a bit odd to have Diego Luna be very noticeably older in Season 5 than he is in Rogue One.
In my opinion nothing ever came even close and I gave up on SW after the second Kylo Ren movie. Rouge one was cool though, also first episodes of Mandalorian..
Should I really try Andor after all the bad stuff Disney made?
A few days ago I watched the new LILO and Stitch and that was great, so maybe good people still work at Disney …
It's difficult to articulate Andor's quality to someone who hasn't seen it & is framing it in the context of things like Mandalorian. I can't stress enough that it's absolutely not just a "better" tv show than Mandalorian, &c. Not only is that an understatement, but it's also a fundamentally different beast to those shows. It's in a different category of quality.
We are not. Andor is the best Star Wars ever made, full stop. IMHO, it surpasses, by far, anything Lucas ever did.
At least X-Wings, TIE Fighters, Corellian Corvettes, Imperial Shuttles and Star Destroyers. Not a fan of the Millennium Falcon tbh.
Turns out that makes for pretty good adult oriented star wars.
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Army_of_Shadows
Krennic's meeting on kalkite:
* structured like the https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wannsee_Conference
* takes place at the https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kehlsteinhaus
the Aldhani heist: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1907_Tiflis_bank_robbery
Ferrix: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Troubles
Vel Sartha:
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rose_Dugdale
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dolours_Price
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Red_Army_Faction
Kleya Marki: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Noor_Inayat_Khan
the Dhanis: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/S%C3%A1mi_people#Discriminatio...
escape from Narkina 5:
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maze_Prison_escape
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mauthausen_concentration_camp
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sobibor_uprising
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vrba%E2%80%93Wetzler_report
Rix Road:
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Haymarket_affair
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Corporals_killings
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shireen_Abu_Akleh#Funeral
Mon Mothma's speech: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Otto_Wels#Speech_in_opposition
Ghormans: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/French_Resistance
Ghorman massacre:
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bloody_Sunday_(1972)
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tlatelolco_massacre
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jallianwala_Bagh_massacre
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rabaa_massacre
* and perhaps https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Silesian_weavers%27_uprising
Obviously the comparisons aren't exact, but it's clear the show had a great many sources of inspiration (or maybe history rhymes as it always has).
You can't escape your influences, and you don't need to.
Compared to other Sci Fi movies at the time, Star Wars introduced a grungier, lived in universe where space ships got banged up and dirty, various species hung out in treacherous backwater saloons, and smugglers were just trying to make a living in the shadow of the Empire.
That's the reality Andor is set in, without the Jedi, and you really feels the difficulty of living in that reality without magic powers or a laser sword.
The latter episodes were incredibly laboured, with the narrative being spelt out, as if to a child, by various characters. I think it may have always been like that, but the look and feel overwhelmed the ridiculous dialogue for a while.
If they were more clever with the body language of the main character, then the others wouldn't have had to carry the direction of the storyline so heavily verbally. Again, I think this was done well early, but kinda lost in the desperation for grogu storyline and screen time cuteness.
I'd have to watch it again, and right now it ain't worth the time.
Haven't seen Andor, but now it's "on the list".
It really nails the feeling of watching an old Western movie where a cowboy bonds with an innocent person who needs protection against all odds.
There’s a bit where the main character very obviously levels up and gets to choose a power-up. Then he sees somebody else with a different power-up and goes “wow, I should get one of those”. That confirmed to me that it wanted to be a videogame rather than a serious drama.
I recently rewatched season one in preparation for season two with my partner who hadn't watched it, and she wanted to give up around the same point I did previously and only powered through for the same reason. She was also happy that she finished
And from there it was pretty much further and further downhill, with occasional glimpses of hope that were quickly dashed. I tried to watch a couple more entries after the prequels, but I finally gave up and wrote it off. I've missed almost the entire last 10 years of content.
A buddy at work finally convinced me to watch Andor, and I'm so grateful he did. It is superb. I read a reddit comment that said, "This is the show that made me feel ok to be a Star Wars fan again," and I can't agree more. In a lot of ways it still feels different from Star Wars. It's hard to explain because it's in the same universe, and has similar themes (which is why it doesn't feel totally out of place), but the tone is different. It's not about Jedi knights on a mission from destiny. It's about ordinary people making decisions, and choosing hope, in the face of the oppressive might of the Empire. But god is it good. Excellent writing, great acting, suspense, intrigue, nuance, and powerful emotional scenes (that are earned by proper story buildup).
So all of that is to say, it might not be exactly what you expect, and it won't simply be "Star Wars, again," but yes you should absolutely watch it. It's a fine work of art.
A big part of the problem is that these movies were written, basically, for 12-year old boys. You're not going to be able to get that spark back as an adult, and it's not easy to make a movie that appeals so strongly to both demographics. And much like wu-tang, star wars (and other fun stories) is for the children. Andor is at least more adult-oriented, I think.
So, do I like the new movies? No, I literally slept through the last two they were so boring, and I found the lack of coherent plot baffling. And yes, it does make me a little sad. But seeing little girls dressed up like Rey, I'm reminded that there are better things for me to care about.
But there's a reason why the star wars fandom has such a stank reputation, and it's 100% because adult men care way too much about something meant for children to a quite creepy extent. Two things immediately come to mind: 1) the explicit and physical sexualization of Leia, which I understand but definitely don't think was necessary in retrospect (at least not so ham-handedly), and 2) the abuse of the guy who did the Jar Jar Binks voice acting. It's not his fault Lucas wrote the character as a moronic alien speaking patois. I wasn't aware of the abuse until long after it was over, but I adored jar jar binks as an eight year old boy and didn't understand why he was thereafter sidelined. This makes me also question whether criticisms by adults of the new content is a reflection of what we actually loved growing up. Could a character as weird as Yoda make it into a film now without catering much stronger to people eager to deconstruct him into eg orientalist stereotypes? Would Luke really be allowed to kiss his sister? Would Han Solo be allowed to shoot first, really?
Even the sexualization of Leia—look I'm into pulp fiction, I understand what shallow sexual stereotypes can deliver in terms of entertainment, it wasn't and still isn't crazy. You can see the same phenomenon in the current explosion of mass-published erotica ("romance"). But the stories I've heard about what Fisher was subjected to make me look at the fandom with pretty severe prejudice. It makes nerds look bad, and I also think the success of Indiana Jones shows that this wasn't necessary. It's also not the easiest thing to explain to a child or teenager who grasps something of the power dynamic between Jabba the Hutt and Leia but doesn't have the social knowledge or, frankly, cynicism to make the sense of it we do as adults.
Season 2 of the ILM documentary on D+ goes into this, it’s a really fascinating documentary for folks into special effects and/or star wars.
I've never given up on Star Wars, though obviously there's little good to be said about the sequel trilogy and much of the Disney output. It took me a long time to even see Rogue 1, but I recognized it was something special, and Andor even moreso. (Though I will admit I like eps. 2 and 3 of the prequel trilogy more than I did at first.)
Star Wars after Jedi is garbage. Lucas got me with those awful prequels and Disney got me with the first 2 new movies. I will never watch another Star Wars anything outside of the original 3 movies.
Either you never really abandon your Star Wars fandom or you're lying. There can be no other choice.
One cannot be shat upon by corporate hucksters that much and still think, "okay. I'll give 'em one more chance to shit in my eyes and ears"
Is just not possible.
Update: Clone Wars especially benefits from finding a good best-of episode guide to help move the story along.
Andor (at least Season 1) is very slow, boring, suffers from "static heads talking at each other" cinematography of modern movies [1], main character is just not a great actor.
All that said, it's definitely worth a watch:
- most, if not all, major characters (apart from the protagonist) are very compelling, chew through every scene they are in, and are great matches for their parts
- Empire is finally shown as a proper huge, relentless, uncaring bureaucratic machine it must have been. Run mostly by efficient ruthless bureaucrats.
- Rebels are not angels, are not a single conformist mass of do-gooders
- The dialog is mostly great
It's a much better show than Mandalorian. It's arguably the best Star Wars after the original trilogy.
[1] Most modern productions are incapable of shooting "walking and talking at the same time". Most modern movies and TV shows have actors placed against each other rigidly, with not a hint of motion, as they say their lines at each other
I think like the Asimov books, Star Wars is best as fantasy history. The forward looking ones (that horrific “final” trilogy) are just awkward stories.
(I think the prequels were worse than the sequels but they're collectively pretty unmemorable.)
Any way you cut it, it’s really cool how people consume them in different ways, and there’s enough material that over time we can just discard garbage like 8 hours of walking through the desert.
Rogue One was my favourite Star Wars production before Andor, now I wish they could throw it away and remake it as Andor Season 3. It deserves to be told in full.
- Andor running into Pigperson and Grover on Yedha
- That entirely random 20-sec scene with C-3PO and R2-D2
- "Red Leader, standing by" was archive footage from A New Hope (and arguably a tribute to the late actor)
More the presence of the Force and Jedi lore. They were so close to not having that be part of Rogue One but were still forced to include the mystical super beings in some way. Andor was able to fully detach from that baggage, focusing on the little people doing their part. And when they did bring in the Force healer in the second season, it was exactly how you'd expect average people to respond to a mystical power that you didn't directly witness. Hope, faith, skepticism, denial, rejection.
As far as Vader goes...it does make you wonder if he's just toying with Obi-Wan when he meets him like 3 days later...
I disagree.
If you set aside the difference in special effects capabilities, Vader is clearly being cautious in the light saber fight with Obi Wan on the Death Star. And we know that's because Obi Wan kicked his ass on Mustafar (THE KENOBI MINI SERIES NEVER HAPPENED I DON'T WANT TO HEAR IT). And then Obi Wan never actually intends to fight Vader in earnest. He intends to become a force ghost all along. Still one step ahead of Anakin's understanding of the force.
10-20 minutes of static talking heads, 5 minutes of mediocre action. Repeat until the end. Meaningless side-quests. The final is a thousand cliches one after another culminating in a "main computer at the end of a rickety walkway" and "a kiss at the sunset".
The only reason it's hailed as the greatest movie ever is because so much of the Star Wars is just objectively shit.
They don't kiss.
And that's not a sunset.
There's nothing subversive.
> It's an ending about sacrifice that wouldn't make sense in any other context.
There are a million ways to make an ending about sacrifice. Rogue One chose the worst one, after a lot of other ridiculous choices