Tinker Tailor Soldier Sith

Earlier this month I broke my lonely boycott of Disney+ to check out Andor, Tony Gilroy’s streaming series about life in the Star Wars galaxy during the late imperial era. A handful of rave reviews from people I trusted had worn down my skepticism. And anyway, the premise—a gritty resistance drama by the guy who made Michael Clayton, one of the 21st century America’s rare mid-budget thrillers for grown-ups—was hard to resist.

The rave reviews were correct. Andor is an anomaly: a canon entry in a blockbuster “cinematic universe” that somehow feels like its own thing. While technically a prequel to both the original trilogy and the latter-day franchise entry Rogue One (which I haven’t seen), it has a self-contained aesthetic quality that is forbidden for most high-yield corporate IP. There are no Skywalkers, no lightsabers, and no discernible fan service; no one is trying to tee up a spinoff or a sequel. It has a real beginning and—hopefully, although I guess we’ll see—a real ending.

Even better, Andor tells a new story instead of repurposing the old Star Wars formula. The charm of the original trilogy is inextricable from its childlike treatment of good and evil; it’s essentially a fairy tale layered over with elements from pulp science fiction, Westerns, war films, Wagnerian opera, and Akira Kurosawa’s samurai epics, among other sources. The result is distinctive and compelling, but there’s only so much you can do with it. Even Rian Johnson’s The Last Jedi, which I liked, was too preoccupied with its place in the Star Wars canon to escape the airless, endlessly recursive quality of creatively exhausted corporate franchises. It was a Star Wars movie that made an admirable attempt at subverting Star Wars clichés—but at the cost of saying anything of substance about anything that wasn’t Star Wars.

Andor, fortunately, isn’t about Star Wars. It has the surface-level trappings of a Star Wars tale, but it exists in a very different—and more interesting—political, ethical, and interpersonal world. As Adam Serwer writes:

To build this world, Gilroy draws on inspirations that are very remote from the original trilogy. You can see a fair amount of le Carré (always a big draw for me) in Stellan Skarsgård’s willingness to sacrifice his own soul in order to preserve his intelligence network. The Empire in this telling is less a monolithic embodiment of pure evil than a vast colonial administration with its own pathologies, blindspots, and competing factions; in other words, it looks a lot like a 19th century European colonial power. (I was unsurprised to learn that the score at one pivotal moment quotes The Battle of Algiers.)

But the movie I kept thinking about as I watched Andor is one of my favorites: Army of Shadows, Jean-Pierre Melville’s brutally grim portrait of the French Resistance. The rebellion of Andor, like Melville’s Resistance, is clearly on the right side of things, but it’s also engaged in a knife fight, where the object is less survival than the destruction of the enemy at all costs.

Something all of the above influences have in common—le Carré’s Cold War novels, The Battle of Algiers, and Army of Shadows—is that they’re all unsentimental accounts from people who drew on their own experiences. Le Carré was in the service; Melville was in the Resistance; Algiers is based on a memoir from a member of the National Liberation Front and featured performances by people who had been present at the actual Battle of Algiers. Using these sources, Andor seems to be trying to leave its audience with an understanding of what life in an insurgency is actually like—albeit, you know, in a galaxy far, far away.

It mostly works. I say mostly because we’re still talking about the Star Wars galaxy here. There are certain guardrails on how far you can go in that galaxy and a certain internal logic that can’t be avoided. Watching Andor, I was sometimes reminded of The Batman, another recent franchise outing that was better than it had any right to be. The latter work is a three-hour epic of inherited trauma and municipal corruption that self-consciously evokes some of the great thrillers of the 1970s. But it’s also about a rich guy who dresses up in a bat costume and fights crime.

With both The Batman and Andor, there’s a certain irresolvable tension between the work’s thematic ambitions and its origins in children’s entertainment. And unlike, say, Alan Moore’s Watchmen, neither work is about that tension in any meaningful way. It’s just sort of there.

Still, I’ll take it. If the 2022 version of Michael Clayton can only secure financing if it gets plugged into some pre-existing, multi-platform cinematic universe, then dayenu. Andor and The Batman may have limitations, but what doesn’t? They still have a unity and clarity of vision that I’d given up on finding from new blockbuster content. I look forward to Andor season two.