Entertainment
Andor review: It’s different to Star Wars, but that may just be enough to make it good-Josh Stephenson-Entertainment – Metro
It’s not quite Star Wars though.
It’s not quite Star Wars (Picture: Des Willie / Lucasfilm Ltd.)
How much you’ll enjoy Andor probably comes down to how much you want a Star Wars property to feel like Star Wars.
If you watched the perfectly enjoyable, but undeniably rote, Obi-Wan Kenobi and figured it can’t get much better than this, well, you might find Andor a little bit slow going in these opening three episodes.
But if you’ve been screaming out for the bean-counters at Disney to fund something that dares to show a little more ambition in a galaxy far, far away then Andor is the show you’ve spent most of your life waiting for.
Andor is a prequel to Rogue One – the second-best Star Wars film ever made, yup, we went there – and centres on Cassian Andor, who we met in the movie as an established resistance fighter, but who is here just an ordinary man trying to make a living under the cruel rule of the Empire until events thrust him into the fight in ways he didn’t anticipate.
Diego Luna returns to the role, and does a sterling job once more, but despite his name being in the title this is very much an ensemble piece, with Stellan Skarsgaard, Adria Arjona and Denise Gough all getting meaty roles to sink their teeth into.
The show is about how revolutions start – but also the people on the opposite side of them with Kyle Soller being particularly good as Imperial stooge Syril.
Stellan Skarsgard stars as Luthen Rael alongside Diego Luna as Cassian Andor (Picture: Des Willie / Lucasfilm Ltd.)
Diego Luna does a sterling job once again (Picture: Des Willie / Lucasfilm Ltd.)
Genevieve O’Reilly and Forest Whitaker return as Mon Mothma and Saw Gerrera, respectively, and the always brilliant Fiona Shaw has a touching turn as Cassian’s adoptive mother Maarva. Oh, and worried there’s not a cute droid? Of course there is a cute droid.
One thing that really sticks out about the show is the set design. Recent Star Wars series have promoted the virtues of The Volume – a giant wraparound green screen, essentially – but Andor is a return to hand-built sets and it grants the show its authentic feel. Everything looks so tactile, so real, so grubby, like it has been lingering around for a millennia. It sets the tone for a series that is much darker than anything we’ve seen before.
That darkness is both a positive and a negative. Andor takes the time to luxuriate in its characters and world, setting up a larger stakes story in small, incremental chunks, but it does mean that this opening 90-minutes is very exposition-heavy as it takes great pains to introduce each character properly. This is somewhat double-downed on by running a concurrent flashback story telling us just what happened to Cassian when he was younger to inspire his disillusionment with authority. Scenes which, unfortunately, don’t quite land.
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If this all sounds like a little bit too much going on, well, it is to an extent, but one thing creator and writer Tony Gilroy (returning from Rogue One) has on his side is time as Andor has a larger-than-usual 12-episode run and a guaranteed second series to boot.
How that time is used will be critical because for all its seriousness and boldness in taking Star Wars in a grittier direction, it’s hard to shake the feeling that Andor could end up being a little bit boring. For now, at least, it’s different and that just may be enough.
The first three episodes of Andor are streaming on Disney+ from tomorrow 21 September.
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