Andor: Season 1 [2022]
“I’m condemned to use the tools of my enemy to defeat them.”
To start with what might be an unpopular opinion, Star Wars has almost always been something better remembered than experienced. Like an abstract piece of art, your perception of the piece – your intuited meaning behind its lines and curves and strokes and colors – Star Wars has always been best as something to discuss and embody than to actually behold. As an adult, the galaxy far, far away is served with a hearty helping of nostalgia — a taste that turns even the most mild experience into a delicacy. True, it’s one that can be visited again, and again, but one that, when the rose tinted glasses are removed, never quite becomes what I remember it being. The music, the sights, the sounds, the words are all there… But it’s always in my memory where they hold the most meaning; not in the moments on screen. Star Wars, to conclude this unpopular opinion, has almost never actually been very good.
What Star Wars has always been, however, is mystical and grand. It's images and concepts have inspired worldwide imaginations, while it's neatly boxed characters and kitschy plots have always been better for a laugh and high school English classes than anything else.
While most things from childhood are that way, the Star Wars properties serve as a particularly ubiquitous set of experiences. You remember them fondly — their impact on your worldview, the games you played with your friends, the characters you wished you could be, and the things you wished you could take straight out of the screen. For me though, Star Wars has been more akin to an abstract piece of artwork – one that makes me feel a way I just can’t explain. The one that I desperately share with others to revel in the magic it brings them, while I try to experience it myself again and again. Though, famous abstract art, Star Wars has seemed like more of a happy than an intentional stroke of cultural brilliance for quite some time.
Tony Gilroy’s 2022, Andor, has changed that.
With characters that serve more as actual people than stilted stereotypes, choices that show the true cost of running a rebellion against an impossibly large enemy, emotive and adept filmmaking, and masterful execution of a time, a place, and a journey for which we already know the conclusion: Andor is truly the Star Wars I’ve wanted for far, far too long now.
While the show is not entirely without its weaker moments, Andor – by and large – is an incredible ride that paints many of our favorite roles, groups, and factions in colors that make us question our allegiance to their methods, if not their cause entirely. There are always casualties in a conflict, and which side of history you’re standing on is always a matter of perception. This grayness is something Andor executes with a deftness never before seen in Star Wars, and one that is rarely seen in film generally. I can only hope that Disney takes some notes from this production and carries the overwhelming quality of this entire journey into future projects.
I know this wasn’t a typical review in that it took half of it to get to the point, and that’s because Andor was not your typical experience – it was a revival. Andor reinforced and reinvigorated a love I thought was doomed and lost to shiny, consumptive “filmmaking”, bad special effects, loose and forgettable plots, and rehashes upon rehashes of ideas we’ve seen before. So, in a lot of ways, this isn’t a review at all.
It’s a thank you.
It’s a relieved breath as something I thought was gone entirely has wandered out of the rain, stronger and better than ever…
It’s a love letter.
I have loved Star Wars longer than I can remember, and I have loved the memory of Star Wars even more fondly. In the same way this is a love letter to the show, I see the show as a love letter to the soul of the franchise at large. I finally have, and I believe that I can say we finally have, Star Wars content to be truly proud of and fall in love with all over again.
Andor is the Star Wars we thought we had as kids, wanted desperately as adolescents, thought was lost as adults, and now… Actually exists.
I love you Star Wars, and I'm so glad someone else has finally proven that they do as well.
"... know this, the day will come when all these skirmishes and battles, these moments of defiance will have flooded the banks of the Empire's authority and then there will be one too many. One single thing will break the siege. Remember this. Try."
