ANDOR aka Glum Village : its own thread

I also think those episodes were excellent, some of the best work SW has done, but you have to watch a LOT to get to that point, and much of it is not great. Think I mentioned somewhere that Clone Wars starts out bleh and gets steadily better and more consistent each season - increasing returns. One of those shows where I'd definitely recommend someone follow a guide and only watch the best/most important episodes

― Vinnie, Thursday, April 27, 2023 7:44 PM (yesterday) bookmarkflaglink

Yeah, after watching Andor, I was listening to the podcast A More Civilized Age, which primarily focuses on the Clone Wars, but took a 12-episode detour into Andor. They kept dropping Clone Wars character references and plot points in the Andor episodes so I decided to revisit it. I had watched a season or so when my son was a kid. I even found a list of the "essential" story arcs somewhere, trying to avoid getting bogged down. Still couldn't hang with it.

The sticking points for me were: 1.) the animation style, which has never sat right with me; 2.) the numerous gruff New Zealand accents all sounding very samey; and 3.) the presence of battle droids - "roger, roger" and all that insipid humor.

Mando S3 had IG-12 which probably leaves it in net positive territory overall IMO.

I believe you mean:
Yes. Yes. Yes.

Cool News: Tony Gilroy, creator/writer of @starwars #Andor, just announced that they are launching a website soon with all 12 scripts & tons of concept art - all free to read!

He worked really hard on his scripts & is proud of the way they turned out- they are production drafts. pic.twitter.com/LbXEOdumaZ

— Jeff Goldsmith (@yogoldsmith) May 1, 2023

LFG

whoa, had no idea. First heard of Gilroy a few days ago while watching this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XpAE7wgP8oA

Andor is Also Resuming Production During the Writers Strike https://t.co/HmhaXkL3d9 pic.twitter.com/H4dLXPVz6V

— io9 (@io9) May 6, 2023

boooo

Yeah that seems tricky at best, even beyond the 'this is a bad look' factor.

It does, tho it sounds like Gilroy and other showrunners are in sort of a tight spot there.

We actually just finished the series last night — been watching it with one of my kids, so it took a while to have time when we could all watch together. We all liked it a lot and agreed it's definitely the best Star Wars of the modern era. We're going to rewatch Rogue One tonight.

Good read:

https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/tv/tv-features/andor-broke-star-wars-rules-reinvent-sci-fi-tv-1235507880/

Finally started a rewatch this very night.

Things I missed the first time: As Luthen and Cassian first talk in hyperspace having fled Ferri, for his wounds Luthen offers Cassian a sip of "Med Nog".

Maybe only abundant in the run up to Life Day, then the Empire takes it away.

One notable thing about Andor vs most other Star Wars related things, is the complete absence of "The Force". Andor is materialist Star Wars, I guess.

Debuted a year ago today.

"Remember this. Try."

<3

Too bad the next season will be written by AI

pockets

are fermenting

Luna now in his last week of shooting for S2 apparently

i'm watching this again. welcome to my blog.

after cassian kills the two security goons, he confers with his friend at work to concoct a lie about it. in the very next scene we see the security team contracted by the empire also concocting a lie about it. this is a world where truth is often v inconvenient

i was struck by how vader-like luthen looks right from the beginning.. he sweeps out of his ship in silhouette, his long cape flapping behind him..

maybe just me, but i liked how we watch the kids of ferrix putting on their warpaint, and then cut to syril - also someone who cares very much about his costume

this show is such a miracle, i need to rescreen too

gets to you, doesn’t it?

that’s what a reckoning sound like.

you want it to stop, but it just keeps coming

don’t you want to fight these bastards for real?

yes, yes i fuckin do

I rewatched it last year and think often about this exchange between Cassian and Maarva:

“I'll be worried about you all the time.”
“That's just love. Nothing you can do about that.”

nothing like being unexpectedly punched in the heart by a star war

still can't quite believe that maarva's funeral speech and stellan skarsgard's sacrifice monologue both happened in a star war, just incredible pieces of writing absolutely knocked out of the park by the actors

comments here making me want to watch it again. i’m almost seeing it as a negative image or anti star war at this point. sure, it exists because of the star war but its purpose is to destroy premise of same.

well it really stands out to me how the OG star wars are all about emperors and princesses and priests and this one is all about thieves and miners and cops and prisoners. yet at the same time it takes the premise of the OG seriously: what if there was an armed rebellion against a corrupt and sadistic galactic order? how would it work? at times is it even distinguishable from robbery, murder?

at the end of ep 3, as the story of andor's escape from ferrix wraps up, his face in luthen's ship as they blast off towards parts unknown - it's not an excited face. it's angry & skeptical. keeping its powder dry. the editing sets up a parallel with maarva taking him from kenari. first a new mother figure, now a new father figure. he loves maarva. does he love this guy? we'll see.

it makes star wars seem incredibly silly

i rewatched a couple of weeks back. i recommend it.

As I mentioned above it’s materialist Star Wars. The Force is a complete non-factor.

yes, saw that comment and was turning it over in my head. thought about the often observed line that the original star wars is itself quite materialist - a second hand junk recycling universe. many people planet-bound, aspirations of flying to the stars extremely unlikely and only adventurers, the extremely wealthy and the politically dominant ever do it.

but yes the presence of the Force as an active quasi mystical quantity in that universe does change things, and that’s emphasised and really becomes the central theme over the trilogy.

royal blood, magic blood is still lucas' central storytelling obsession

“I’d rather die fighting than die giving them what they want” still gives me fucking goosebumps

I had forgotten that Luthen's dramatic speech about sacrifice is in the SAME EPISODE as the climax of the prison break. Just insane

I guess this was obvious the first time around to most people but it really is quite clear how this is the anti-OG trilogy. Not just proletariat vs the OG nobility, not just tone, but the central mystery of the OG movies is how you can 1) fight the dark side without 2) giving in to your anger. fighting, killing, destroying... these things are necessary if you want to participate in a Star War against the Empire. Vader confronts Luke with this contradiction and it feels insurmountable. but in this... the mentor figure is no longer Obi-Wan but explicitly Vader like. a man who's comfortable with moral triage. and Cassian himself is the embodiment of Han's frontier "shoot first" mentality. It's like they took all the interesting rough bits from the mythos, the bits that get sanded away, and put them at the center.

"And the ego that started this fight will never have a mirror or an audience or the light of gratitude." = i.e. no medal ceremony for me. No princess giving me approving looks. It's not the world I inhabit

the cynical part of me thinks this show is just the product of some disney MBA saying "market segmentation" - let's make star wars big enough to accommodate magic and wizards, cute pokemon, and grimdark sci-fi. but it's a good show, a really good show. one thing i'm tempted to say about it is it doesn't need the star wars universe at all, it could stand on its own - but nah, being set in the star wars universe lets you skip a lot of the broad brush worldbuilding and to focus on the local.

Very true that you don't actually need the Star Wars connection but if it's a dialectic with the OG trilogy then I guess you do

It would be interesting to see what someone who has little to no knowledge of Star Wars thinks of this show. I don't think you really need to have seen the movies, but you do need to have at least some minimal knowledge of the star wars universe and how stuff works in star wars.

It's nice to see an angle on SW that returns some bleakness to that universe. The other shows and the Abrams trilogy are just so unserious in comparison, the films in particular being saddled with that awkward Hollywood tone of self aware humor winking to the audience and ott space opera darkness which feels as earned as a very special episode of transformers idk. Andor feels exceptionally well-realized and vv surprisingly powerful.

Very true that you don't actually need the Star Wars connection but if it's a dialectic with the OG trilogy then I guess you do

― Humanitarian Pause (Tracer Hand), Monday, February 5, 2024 5:16 PM bookmarkflaglink

yeah, i think the fact i feel intrinsically it needs the OG trilogy in order to visibly and noticeably negate it means it's the latter. it's noticeable, and part of the viewing pleasure, right?

Something that really struck me in the prison sequence is how good this show is at showing you how much WORK goes into it all. Man when he's sawing away at that pipe... it is fuckin HARD.

sort of, i find it distracting for example to think about how this show's mon mothma squares with the trilogy's cool, stately mon mothma and making it work in my head

this show’s mon mothma is pretty stately and cool! no?

Still find the season 1 structure to be really fascinating, it's basically these four extremely tense climaxes to four separate story parts, vs a single stretched-thin storyline leading to one climax, which is a problem with a lot of shows. Here there's just so much going on, such a wealth of character and plot. And it's never overly busy.

her scenes give me a lot of anxiety! xp

Love the way the season is structured. The first couple episodes aren't that exciting and lull you into thinking it's going to be one of those streaming shows where nothing happens, forever.

Then it suddenly puts its foot on the pedal and doesn't let go for eight episodes, so when things slow down after the prison break, the respite is kind of a relief.

abandoning the double life and embracing her role as a leader of the rebellion movement would probably feel like a weight off her shoulders

xp

Also, I like that it's proof that you can make something fun and exciting without veering into sassy self-knowing Marvel territory, or doing something horribly hetero and grimdark

All true, the total lack of sassiness was pretty damn refreshing, as was the lack of shocking deaths for the sake of having shocking deaths.

i don't think andor needs star wars, but andor being set in the star was universe makes the OG trilogy better, and in that sense it makes watching andor more rewarding.

To me at least it's an ideal version of where Star wars as a franchise should have gone

I think creating this story that parallels many events in the real world in a familiar fictional environment gives it some legs. The cost of entry is lower when people notice historical and aesthetic reference points that they've absorbed over years.

Andor's well-written enough that it conveys why you should care about these characters, their particular hardships, the oppression fairly quickly. But it's an easy sell when it's presented as fiction and it's a well-known fictional landscape.

Trying to get the random guy on the street in the US to watch The Battle of Algiers (language presentation aside) is probably trickier than getting them to watch Saving Private Ryan despite the former carrying a lot of historical weight.