Basic Andor Thoughts From Someone Who Doesn't Particularly Like Star Wars (Spoilers)
(originally posted November 25, 2022)
My own relationship with Star Wars is that I was in elementary school and middle school when the prequels were happening - the perfect age for that, honestly; I still use a cheap plush blanket that has Episode 3 all over it, it's a perfectly good blanket okay - and once those ran their course, I was mostly good. I played KOTOR 2 a couple times, mostly because I like Obsidian rather than Star Wars. I saw the sequel trilogy and more recent movie spinoffs thought they ranged from solid (The Last Jedi, Rogue One) to outright bad (Solo, Rise of Skywalker). I finally played the original KOTOR just recently. I've ignored most of the Disney+ stuff.
This is to say, I've settled into a sort of indifference-learning-towards-grumpiness about the franchise. I try not to be too shitty about this, but old "I used the internet during the 00s" habits die hard. More recently, I've taken an active effort to mitigate this and, as they say, "let people enjoy things".
I watched Andor week to week with my good friend and noted Wars head @yotsuben, and I'd say I broadly enjoyed it. I'm no serious critic, so this'll be pretty surface level; I don't think I can speak too deeply about its themes or cinematography or wider place in the canon or anything, but I can hurl my gut check onto my (co)host's walls here. Proverbially.
(I certainly have other thoughts than listed here, but these stick out in my head, and just for the record I don't think "it will get resolved in Season 2" is a legitimate argument until after Season 2 is out.)
What I Thought Was Awesome
- The acting, across the board. Luna is great. O'Reilly is great. Skarsgård is amazing. Kathryn Hunter (Syril's Mom) is incredible.
- No lightsabers. I don't think anyone said "The Force" even once, either (it's an easter egg on the space rap sheets, and I wish it wasn't).
- Good weird local traditions that the Empire is explicitly cracking down on.
- The prison arc.
- They had a lot of physical sets. This shouldn't have to be on here.
What I Thought Was Boring
- The title intro sequence. Western TV intros will move beyond "po-faced whirling CG stuff" one day, surely? I'm begging them to watch at least one anime OP.
- Completely human central cast. We get like two scenes with wacky alien dudes. It's Star Wars, come the fuck on.
- Star Wars consistently treats entire planets as Single Locations the size of like, one town and its environs. This is an impossible problem to solve due to genre convention and scale of production but it bugs me every time.
What I Thought Was Confusing
- The finale, from a storytelling standpoint.
- 90% of the cast converges on Ferrix but their threads don't intersect.
- Syril and Meero's plotlines don't really resolve, they more just... stop.
- Mon Mothma's "ending" is just more of what she's been doing the whole show. I think it's meant to be her making a moral compromise with the arranged marriage but they also went out of their way to make it Not Really Her Fault, so...
What I Didn't Buy
- Andor is supposed to be in his early 20s during this show, and Diego Luna simply isn't. For the record, this is far preferable than the CGI face shit they've been doing elsewhere, but I still think it's silly.
- Nobody found Andor's little shower-shelf stash in the beach timeshare? Nobody?
- Luthen's anti-tractor-beam tech takes a good couple minutes to dramatically charge its meter and then turns out it's literally just shooting out a bunch of physical chaff. Okay.
- The show is really unclear about how Kino Loy ends up becoming Supreme Leader Snoke; if they weren't played by the same actor, I wouldn't believe that it happens at all. Something for Season 2, I guess.
---