Last week during 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:Star Wars Celebration, Lucasfilm announced a bunch of new projects in the works, including three new Star Wars movies. One, directed by Sharmeen Obaid-Chinoy, will see Daisy Ridley return as Rey on a journey to rebuild the Jedi order. Dave Filoni is working on a movie set in the “168澳洲幸运5开奖网:Mandoverse” which will serve as a culmination to the story unfolding across 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:The Mandalorian, Ahsoka, 💎and The Book of B🥃oba Fett. And James Mangold is taking the series back to the earliest point ever explored on screen for the story of the first Jedi. The company also showed off a trailer for the upcoming Rosario Dawson-led live-action Ahsoka series, which will hit Disney Plus in August.
I'm a Star Wars fan, and I've seen excited reactions on social media that suggest that many fans are hyped. But I just can't muster the same enthusiasm. Instead of looking forward to the release of these projects, I'm instead thinking back to how good we had it last fall when new episodes of Andor were regularly airing. At the time, I wondered if Star Wars had turned a corner after the abysmal 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:Obi-Wan Kenobi. After watching some of this season of The Mandalorian and the trailer for Ahsoka, I'm convinced that nothing has changed.
Andor was remarkable because of how well it did things that Star Wars has struggled with in the Filoni/Favreau era. It eschewed Stagecraft, which The Mandalorian, Obi-Wan Kenobi, The Book of Boba Fett, and Ahsoka all use, in favor of location photography and constructed sets. Stagecraft can be used well — Steven Spielberg — but the way Disney's Star Wars series use it often results in scenes that lack any sense of place.
In Obi-Wan Kenobi, for example, one scene has Obi-Wan going to meet with Haja Estree, Kumail Nanjiani's fake Jedi. The scene called for a table for the two to meet at, and that was all it got. The rest of the room was almost entirely bare, save a few crates. Because the room doesn't seem to be a real location, set designers aren't dressing it. And Disney's clogged VFX production timeline means that if it isn't necessary, VFX artists probably don't have time to flesh it out. Andor avoided this problem by just… building sets and shooting on location. It uses VFX, but as creator Tony Gilroy indicated at Disney Celebration, both seasons of the series will have spent a year in post-production before release. That's significantly longer than Obi-Wan and Boba Fett. The series looks better and feels more concrete as a result.
Andor also had the benefit of being about something. When George Lucas was creating Star Wars in the 1970s, his work was rooted in his own progressive politics. He drew from the war in Vietnam, . Star Wars is, at its root, a political work. But it's also an incredibly popular one, with Lucas pointendly modeling his story on Joseph Campbell's monomyth to give it universal appeal. In the time since, the revolutionary edges of the series have been sanded away. Many of the writers and directors who work on it now, like Dave Filoni and Jon Favreau, are drawing deeply on their love of Star Wars lore, but not paying much attention to the themes inherent in the original work. As a result, The Mandalorian, Boba Fett, and Obi-Wan Kenobi have increasingly felt like a long parade of cameos headed in no particular direction.
That's why Andor cut like a knife. Creator Tony Gilroy wasn't interested in Easter eggs. He was interested in telling a story that drew from the same thematic inspirations as the original film. The series focused on the practical details of fighting back against fascism, depicting the political duplicity characters like Mon Mothma and Luthen Rael needed to employ to do their work in the heart of the Empire, and showing the down-and-dirty struggle of characters like Cassian Andor and Vel Sartha who were risking their lives to fight the the authoritarian state on the ground. Gilroy attempted to understand and present the ways in which fascism works and how its power can be resisted. During a time of political instability, I've found it an edifying work.
When I look at the rest of the Star Wars slate, it's all empty calories. And that's if Disney lets us sit down at the table in the first place. At this point Lucasfilm and Disney seem to have canceled more Star Wars projects than they've released. Mangold's film about the first Jedi sounds interesting, but when creators like David Benioff and D.B. Weiss, Patty Jenkins, J.D. Dillard, and Rian Johnson have all had projects iced, it's tough to feel like the series isn't frozen in carbonite. Mangold's project, and the other announced films, may eventually hit theaters. But right now, it seems like Star Wars is devoted to playing it safe.