It isn't the most controversial Star Wars movie ever made, but it still inspired a lot of passionate debate about the place it holds in the beloved sci-fi saga. It was always a risk to make a war story set in the period just before the events of Star Wars: Episode IV - A New Hope, but it paid off as the third highest-grossing film in the series.
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The studio is doubling down on that bet with Andor, a sequel that looks at the formative years of Diego Luna's rebel spy. Like the film that inspired it, Andor's Star Wars story has a simmering tale of espionage in the early days of a rebellion.
Andor isn't the action-packed adventure that fans of the Star Wars franchise have come to expect with The Mandalorian and The Book of Boba Fett. The series offers a more thoughtful, slow-developing story about the conditions and events that led to the environment we are thrown into in A New Hope, with a small group of rebels engaged in a seemingly un-winnable war to overthrow the Empire.
Have you ever experienced life under the Empire through the eyes of Cassian, doled out memories by memory and through one bad turn after another? It is the sort of ground-level perspective we have not seen enough of in the Star Wars universe.
From rank-and-file members of the Empire to the inhabitants of overlooked planets that have become just another part of the Imperial machinery, Andor does a nice job of reminding us that these characters exist.
It takes almost four episodes of Andor for Luna's character to find his way to the still-forming rebellion, so it will be interesting to see how patient Gilroy and the series' creative team can be with the story at some point.
He makes for a compelling and unique lead in the series because his character wasn't necessarily the star of the film. You can either fall in line or live every day on a razor's edge if you slip, because one slip can put you on the wrong side of an Imperial blaster. It feels like a character with a moral compass that hovers on the side of good, but just barely, is Luna's Cassian.
When we meet him in the film, Andor introduces a few intriguing supporting characters who help to bring his trajectory closer to the point. As the season progresses, Luthen Rael will play a bigger role in the series, as he is as fascinating and complex as many of the actors roles. As an ambitious, but nave, local law-enforcement agent, Kyle Soller's Syril serves as a nice counterpoint to Luna'sCassian, exploring what life is like for someone on the ground level who buys into the Empire completely.
There are a lot of rewarding moments in Andor's first four episodes, but they barely scratch the surface of the character's story.
Andor filters the Star Wars universe through a much grittier, wartime espionage lens. The live-action Star Wars shows we have seen so far have had fantastic alien environments and outer-space ship battles, but this one might not be the same.
There is a lot to like about where Andor is going. There is plenty of flexibility in the franchise as far as the stories and cast of characters it can encompass, thanks to projects such as the Star Wars: Visions anthology series. As it carves out its own unique place in the Star Wars canon, Andor builds on the themes and tone of the film that set it apart.
The series Andor is on Disney+.
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