I know opinions may vary on Andor, but to me it was exceptional.
It was a slow build, and deliberately so. Layers and layers of political machinations told through various lenses as the true horror of what the Empire really was eventually revealed itself.
No Jedi. No lightsabers. No force. Just a text book examination of how authoritarianism takes hold while some people embrace it, and those who fight it have to pick their battles.
Many of the characters who embraced it met their end because of their own failures within the very system they helped propagate. Their ending was both satisfying and depressingly inevitable.
One thing it did do, when the dust had settled, was actually make me a little angry. Why?
Because it showed what was possible within the Star Wars universe.
The original generation of Star Wars fans are in their 40s, 50s and 60s now. It showed it is possible to tell mature and thoughtful stories for them, rather than the slop they had been serving up.
Like Skeleton Crew knew exactly what it was and stuck to it, so was creatively successful, as did Andor.
This is why they are arguably the only real successes of the Disney era.
Andor showrunner Tony Gilroy deserves credit for working with his team to deliver on a vision. Sticking with adult themes and telling a grown up story when the rest of the Disney output seems either completely anodyne or downright wasteful of the opportunities the IP presents.
In a recent interview with Slashfilm he revealed that Lucasfilm’s original idea for the show was an an action-adventure buddy comedy with Cassian (Diego Luna) and K2-S0 (Alan Tudyk) driving hard towards Rogue One.
He explained why he switched it up and took things slow:
“[K-2SO’s late introduction was] something I always intended. The versions that they had of the show prior, they were slick and they were interesting. They were not bad, but they had a fatal flaw, it seemed to me, which is if that’s your show, that we’re going to storm the Citadel in the pilot, what are you going to do in episode 9? What do you do? You’re just going to keep getting the disc?”
Talking about his deliberate pacing decisions for Andor, and comparing it to the MCU, he was very blunt:
“Trying to get the, what do they call it? I can’t remember the name of the box. What the f*** is the name of the box in The Avengers? What the f*** are they going for? […] The Tesseract! That’s why all those Marvel movies are all – that’s why they fail. You’re just constantly … if that’s all you’re doing, then all you’re doing is just trying to get the Tesseract.”
It seems like Tony Gilroy would fit right in down in the Disqus around here.
