ANDOR aka Glum Village : its own thread

Interviews with Gilroy and Luna

https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/tv/tv-features/andor-season-2-post-credits-scene-tony-gilroy-1235268962/

https://www.vulture.com/article/diego-luna-on-andor-interview-finale-narkina-prison-break.html

Plus another Gilroy interview

https://www.vulture.com/article/andor-tony-gilroy-finale-interview.html

Imagine if Andor's season finale is great, just really thoughtful and compelling stuff throughout, but then there's a post credits sequence with an evil Yoda who's like red

— The Man of Astoria (@depechejoe) November 14, 2022

caught up in the show and read the whole thread. good posts folks.

gonna think some more but i do want to point out that i was sure that meero and syril were gonna make out

I really wanted it to happen

those two crazy brownshirts just belong together

cyril was sure too lmao

he was so eerily calm!

Man this was great. I liked Rogue One but felt it would have been better as a miniseries to develop the characters more, and Andor was pretty much that

love that retro intro.

also, had no clue there was a post credit scene; but i assumed thats what the components were for.

WAIT A MINUTE have there been post-credit scenes all along?!??

Just went back and watched it: awwww yeeeeeeah.

i think just that one.

"Every single commodity you produce is a piece of your own death!"

just burned through this whole series in about 3 days and what a great Star War - absolutely fuckin ruled

there were moments when that woozy synth soundtrack felt like it was consciously informed by Boards of Canada? esp on the holidy planet... but anyway that memorydelica vibe was perfect for a show that took my fondest sense memories of 70s/80s science fiction and reworked them in a way that managed to feel totally contemporary

definitely this franchise is best when it gets away from the old characters - although why does this feel so much more urgent than Kenobi did? we know the outcome here too, but for some reason it's a much more compelling ride

Honestly I think part of it lies with the fact that for all that certain key characters obv make it at least to Rogue One there was a real feeling that anyone could die at any point. (Obviously accentuated by the heist sequence in particular.) I admit to mild surprise that there weren't more characters similarly gone in the final episode, but I'll be interested to see where they all go in the second season.

As for your burn through in three days approach, that's what my mom wants to do around Christmas (in that I have a Roku stick I'll bring -- she had a full setup before but got frustrated with it so this is the standin). I'll be happy to fully rewatch that way and as she prefers having subtitles on that'll help me catch bits of dialogue I missed myself.

xp Yeah Britell's score was excellent. I like his work on Succession but this was a tier up

Oh I didn’t know it was the same guy as Succession! Nice.

At times this show reminded me slightly of The Sandbaggers (peerless UK 1980s spy series which has its own thread here somewhere I think) - partly Luthen’s “what it takes” morality I guess, but also the ISB roundtable scenes - something about the brutal decision-making of behind-the-scenes manipulators - and the way we saw this play out in the field. Excellent stuff.

Also a high quotient of English character actors, lol.

Spencer Chow has me wanting to see Star Wars does Slacker now.

Good interview with Denis Gough

https://www.empireonline.com/tv/features/andor-denise-gough-interview-building-star-wars-villain-dedra-meero/

(Fiona Shaw's original line was "Fuck the Empire.")

DENISE Gough I should say. Anyway.

In Gough’s own words? “I am going to Dedra the fuck out of the second season,”

I watched Rogue One again. It’s a pretty good, straightforward action movie. The feature film mechanics demand that certain beats be hit, and they are dutifully hit, but there’s not a lot going on thematically, or with the characters either. Jyn’s not necessary for the story once she gets her dad’s holo-message from Ghost Dog. The “don’t choke on your aspirations” scene isn’t needed but we do get those great shots of Vader’s lair. And, it’s been said before but the CGI Cushing and the CGI Fisher are ABYSMAL, and will of course only stick out more as the passing years bring advances to artificial facial movement etc. I’ve been banging this drum since the prequels but animated CGI human faces just don’t look right, they never have - I mean, they’re not even in the ballpark. If you isolated a still, maybe it could pass, but once they start trying to move it around it’s sub-Red Dead Redemption territory. And this is Star Wars! In 4K! How people think this is acceptable is just wild to me. Anyway I sincerely hope that some day somebody does a “special edition” of this shit to fix it. It’s embarrassing.

Anyway I guess you can see the seeds of some of Andor’s themes here: sacrifice, the ends justifying the means, the petty power squabbles among the Empire’s sub-Vader captaincy.

I just keep telling myself that Mon Mothma has to survive Andor bc she's in Rogue One.

some good content

https://maxread.substack.com/p/what-made-andor-so-good
https://newrepublic.com/article/169206/grown-up-art-andor

xp among other things!

CGI Cushing and the CGI Fisher are ABYSMAL, and will of course only stick out more as the passing years bring advances to artificial facial movement etc.

I totally agree with you, and it annoys me even further that versions of these films/shows are so fluid and impermanent now that they will just change it and tweak it in the future as the tech improves. But that whole last section really let down the film for me.

The whole battle scene?

Well, any bit that they were in. And then as soon as I realized how precisely they were going to join everything up, I got annoyed, because it all felt very DO YOU SEE, and because it irritates me that there isn't a frame or a word of dialogue in original Star Wars that hasn't been picked over and spun off and explained and retconned and fundamentally had all the enjoyment sucked out of it. For me, anyway.

I felt a tiny twinge of that in the post-credits scene in Andor. Like, we all got it. You don't need to specifically show it to us.

Yeah, agreed.

For some reason this time around it came home to me just how neatly the end of Rogue One lines up with the beginning of Star Wars. Leia has the plans, Vader is already chasing down hapless rebels and wrecking shop.

Yes, the fact that Star Wars presumably starts minutes after the end of Rogue One, that Princess Leia was very obviously fleeing the scene of the first massive space battle between the empire and rebels, and that the death star was already used to blow up Jedha and Scarif, all this causes a lot of plot points in Star Wars to retroactively make far less sense.

I'm just bummed with the knowledge that there's also a second, already functioning, death star on the way, so like, who cares what any of these people did? Everyone from Mads down to to blind force guy. Pointless.

Moodles what makes less sense?

dan - that Fascism must be defeated over and over again seems like a pretty valid message

xposts -- Huh. Honestly I've been thinking the opposite! Not in a oh-how-neat-all-the-points-line-up way, but (quite literally and before I checked this latest group of posts just now), earlier this morning on my walk I was turning over a bit how a universe works -- and actually does work -- where there's a hell of a lot of intensity and layers going on for years per the overall Andor plans and meantime at the same time there's a pilot and his shaggy copilot out there just smuggling and trying to get on with it and there's a teenage farmboy feeling like he's stuck in the middle of nowhere with nothing to do except get out somehow, and the only way that even seems possible to him is the military. And that sounds like...life? It's no longer a singular vision and will never be again but as a syncretic series of intersections and creative decisions to look at the universe in different ways and from different points of view (as it were), I'm liking more and more how this is all being built out.

As for caring for what anyone did, per Dan's point...well this is going to sound unnecessarily heavy and weird to bring up and quite obviously I'm not trying to equate anything here but fuck it: the whole reason why I got my library job after realizing I was done with grad school was because someone at said school library had to take a leave of absence due to health issues; from there I've had my over quarter century career as such in the field. Said person was able to briefly come back in another role but just a year or two later she passed. So her personal tragedy -- she wasn't much older than me and left a husband behind -- was also my benefit. You don't know the future, you just go forward and what actions and legacies you leave behind, however accidentally or cut short, have an impact. Their stories aren't any less of value.

xp

The whole "we're on a diplomatic mission from Alderaan" BS, like no we literally just saw you fleeing the scene of a massive space battle.

Then testing out the death star on Alderaan, and the shock that it can blow up a planet when everyone had already just witnessed it doing exactly this with Scarif.

I dunno re the shock point. Luke Han et al are but I'm guessing they didn't know anything about (say) an isolated and literally shielded off from everything else military intelligence base getting partially torched. And if anything Leia doesn't seem shocked at the idea of Alderaan getting destroyed; when Tarkin tells her it's the target she knows damn well what's about to happen.

scarif wasn't blown up as a planet, just the imperial base was annihilated (same as the temple on jeddah)

They somehow revisit Jedha in the comics and it’s basically an asteroid with an atmosphere that’s dissipating. One of those planets like Cassian’s home world that was strip mined and mostly depopulated so the story about it being a mining disaster might stick

Scarif’s just a garrison and data vault far away from any population and, again, they just use a single reactor blast to take out the base. Alderaan was a sovereign, fully-populated planet not under direct Imperial control and they did the first full-scale Death Star blast on it.

As Luthen and others mentioned on Andor, by doing small scale atrocities all over the place, the Empire had deniability for any one incident by making these things the norm. Destroying an entire populated planet? It’s on.

I watched Rogue One again. It’s a pretty good, straightforward action movie. The feature film mechanics demand that certain beats be hit, and they are dutifully hit, but there’s not a lot going on thematically, or with the characters either. Jyn’s not necessary for the story once she gets her dad’s holo-message from Ghost Dog. The “don’t choke on your aspirations” scene isn’t needed but we do get those great shots of Vader’s lair. And, it’s been said before but the CGI Cushing and the CGI Fisher are ABYSMAL, and will of course only stick out more as the passing years bring advances to artificial facial movement etc. I’ve been banging this drum since the prequels but animated CGI human faces just don’t look right, they never have - I mean, they’re not even in the ballpark. If you isolated a still, maybe it could pass, but once they start trying to move it around it’s sub-Red Dead Redemption territory. And this is Star Wars! In 4K! How people think this is acceptable is just wild to me. Anyway I sincerely hope that some day somebody does a “special edition” of this shit to fix it. It’s embarrassing.

Anyway I guess you can see the seeds of some of Andor’s themes here: sacrifice, the ends justifying the means, the petty power squabbles among the Empire’s sub-Vader captaincy.

― Tracer Hand, Friday, December 2, 2022 1:32 PM (yesterday)

andor made me rewatch rogue one recently too - i liked it a lot the first time around but couldn't have told you anything at all about andor or jyn, it's been nice watching with the backfill on andor. i started reading about how gilroy saved the production - apparently, this being disney they were going to have andor and jyn and maybe a few others find a way to get off the planet before the death star blows up the base, but that seemed too ridiculous even for disney, so they parachuted gilroy in who said everybody must die, which in retrospect is obviously the right choice, you're allowed to have sad endings even in star wars thanks to empire, it sets up an appropriate low point for hope similar to empire/jedi. (you can see the evolution of the movie in the various trailers - the initial teaser has jyn saying "this is a rebellion isn't it? well i rebel", a shot of a tie fighter pulling level with the satellite control tower, some other stuff, there are plenty of nerd breakdowns online that take you through all the shots that eventually were cut). i would have loved to know if our intro to andor in rogue one, where he shoots his own informant, was a gilroy reshoot - feels like it must be given the twinning in the opening scene of andor, doesn't it?

cgi tarkin/leia are obviously bad, but i don't mind because this is star wars after all, lucasfilm's mandate is to be on the cutting edge of sfx even if it's bad. watching light and magic, the disney doc on ILM really brought home for me that star wars above all else is basically a george lucas sfx skunkworks, he never really cared about the story (hence offloading that to campbell) he just needed a frame to hang his sfx shots on. you take the good with the bad here, like his endless revisionism and his decision to move to a full digital workstream for the prequels when everybody else was still on 35mm.

Yes, the fact that Star Wars presumably starts minutes after the end of Rogue One, that Princess Leia was very obviously fleeing the scene of the first massive space battle between the empire and rebels, and that the death star was already used to blow up Jedha and Scarif, all this causes a lot of plot points in Star Wars to retroactively make far less sense.

― Muad'Doob (Moodles), Saturday, December 3, 2022 10:45 AM (two hours ago)

i hate this too and feel like i have a pretty strong instinct for retcons but i think rogue one charmed me enough to allow me to overlook anything here. obi-wan is much worse in that regard imo, young luke gets chased by a sith lord (who he miraculously never sees so he never knows she's actually a sith lord?) as a kid, but somehow forgets all that to become a very bored teenager looking to get off tattooine by episode 4? it's bad

the parts of rogue one that makes me itchy is really just the sense of scale / sfx, like there was just this giant epic space battle above scarif but then a few days later you're down to just a few squadrons of snub fighters against the same number of TIEs (the death star couldn't hold any more than that?) and they move slow as molasses on screen. but honestly i had that same feeling as a kid between hope and jedi, the space battle above endor was just so much more epic.

i'd love to see the trench run redone with modern sfx, i'm sure george would too.

They made it clear in the 77 movie that the snub fighters were considered no threat at all until they decided to eliminate the small chance of danger by dogfighting them. Vader had an inkling there was something up but without knowing the built in flaw, the risk wasn’t apparent.
They already CGIed it more than necessary in the special ed, there would be nothing gained and much lost by going fully synthetic imo.

xp

it's true, Obi-Wan did this to a huge degree

not reading the thread yet as i'm only halfway in but there's some brit actors i adore in the semi-down-tier cast (anton lesser, kathryn turner): i was looking at my phone when lesser's voice first dryly cut thru the static and it was a real oh shit waddup / here come dat boi moment lol

oh wait i remember who it is that got me paying attention to this in the first place: a blink-and-miss-it david hayman in a little woolly hat

watching light and magic, the disney doc on ILM really brought home for me that star wars above all else is basically a george lucas sfx skunkworks, he never really cared about the story (hence offloading that to campbell) he just needed a frame to hang his sfx shots on. you take the good with the bad here, like his endless revisionism and his decision to move to a full digital workstream for the prequels when everybody else was still on 35mm.

― 龜, Saturday, December 3, 2022 10:16 AM (four days ago) bookmarkflaglink

I, too, gained this sort of peace from the ILM doc

the telling part about that was when they were talking about how lucas cast american graffiti. the actors were complaining about how long it was taking to choose a cast, and i think george said that they were going to take as long or longer to choose the right cars for the movie too. shows you where his head was at - boys and their toys!

https://pbs.twimg.com/media/FiTAudNXwAEUekm?format=jpg&name=medium

https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/police-and-thieves-on-tony-gilroys-andor/