Not to bum everyone out from the get-go, but I didn't know it at the time, but the last movie my mom ever went to see in the theaters was Star Wars: Rogue One. I might assign that greater significance that she would have, as while she was the more artistically-oriented of my parents, I'm probably the biggest cinephile in the family.
Rogue One is an odd movie, but one that I had a great deal of respect for. While canonical within the Star Wars universe, its tone was bleaker - all these movies (7 before it had come out) about wars in the stars, and this was the first that actually felt like a war movie.
I tend to refer to Star Wars as fantasy because, structurally, it's more fantasy than science fiction. It concerns itself with grand notions like the moral battle between good and evil, and tends to focus on the actions of essentially magically-empowered heroes with a grand destiny to fulfill.
The presence of space ships, aliens, and robots of course put it in a science fiction setting, and one should also remember that science fiction has a long tradition of incorporating fantastical elements.
Rogue One only involved Darth Vader tangentially - his actions at the end of the movie show what a profound horror he is, and how he individually makes up about half the Empire's menace. But the movie set its focus on people who had no magic powers, and who still fought despite being mere mortals. And it showed that, when you aren't protected by a heroic destiny, people in wars often die.
Andor is technically a prequel to a prequel (or a prequel to an interquel, if you prefer, or a spinoff to a spinoff.) It takes one of the key characters from Rogue One, the sort of secondary protagonist Cassian Andor, and tells us his story of becoming a spy for the Rebellion.
Much as the film that introduced us to its title character, Andor feels different than other things we've seen Disney do with Star Wars. (I'll confess here that I never watched the Obi-Wan show and only watched the first episode of the Boba Fett one before checking out.) Having been a bit burned out on Star Wars, I didn't get in on this as soon as it came out, but after a somewhat slow first episode (I wish that these shows would at least act like they need to win us over in the pilot) I found myself really appreciating the difference in tone.
I always worry I'll come off as naive when I suggest that some mega-franchise that caters a lot to our childhood nostalgia (45 years' worth at this point in Star Wars' case) is making mature, adult stuff. But Andor... might be that.
And I don't just mean "dark." I think there's a certain genre of audience (typically adult men in their 20s and sometimes 30s) who feel that darkness is synonymous with maturity. Eventually, you hit a point (hopefully) where you realize that unrelenting doom and gloom can be its own version of childish. Andor is dark, in the sense that there are morally complex things that happen - Andor shoots a man who is at his mercy in the first episode, which is probably the best thing for him to do at the time, but still technically murder.
This killing, of a pair of private security officers who try to shake Andor down, ignites a hunt for him. We follow Detective Inspector Syril Karn, who decides that they won't sweep this under the rug so they can give a good report to the actual Imperial authorities, but decides to hunt the killer down.
Karn is interesting because he's clearly the protagonist of his own story. We see him frustrated by the inefficiencies and indignities of being some half-rate rent-a-cop, and puts into practice a desire for what he thinks of as justice.
But he is either blind to the hypocrisies of the system under which he serves or embraces them. Basically, he's a fascist, and the sort of person who likely thought they would thrive under the Empire. But we also see how a system like the Empire grinds away both those who resist it and those who embrace it.
There's a great deal of worldbuilding in just the episodes I've seen, and we get a fuller picture of how the Empire functions. The banality of evil is something that you don't often see in epic narratives like Star Wars, but societal evils require a certain numbness. We get a strong sense here that the reason the Empire was allowed to form was that people in the Old Republic were simply not willing to stand up to it, seeing it too easily as a minor transition, a change of name, but business being business.
This, of course, feels pretty relevant to the current state of things in our own real world, and I can easily see how existing anxieties about the rise and, even more disturbingly, normalization of fascism is here used as inspiration for the story. Star Wars has always borrowed imagery from World War II, using Nazi Germany as the most obvious visual reference for its evil empire - after all, what regime in living memory, and perhaps all of history, better embodied evil? But the original movies were light on delving into the nuances of how a fascistic society winds up that way and how it works. Really, it meant that we could feel no remorse whatsoever when a space station with thousands of people on board got destroyed.
I don't know where this series is going, but I've been impressed with what I've seen so far.
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