ANDOR aka Glum Village : its own thread

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/

U love 2 read it:

A New Hope is about controlling your phallus (“Luke, at that speed will you be able to pull out in time?”) and — after you orgasmically blow up the Death Star — getting a medal pinned on your chest by your sister-mother-wife.

that was an excellent read, thanks for that!

great

good read. starts off a little TOO snarky (like in that honestly really funny line quoted above) but eventually gets to a solid summmation

probably without a doubt the best SW story in a lot of ways. It helps that the acting is exceptionally good, helps that the plotting is tight and merciless without being a feel-bad show, and it’s nice to be very distant from the stories of Mandalorian/boba fett/obi-wan/anything Jedi-related. This type of show would be a great path forward for more series and more films to take, something completely divorced from the usual shit, which is partially what sank the sequel trilogy (the rest was just sheer incompetent storytelling and a rudderless ship guided by a hack.) a lot of what makes this show great is what’s left out, which is a lot of what’s included in the other three shows, and which is what keeps me from thinking the best of them (mando) is anything more than good fun.

This one works as a show for those who don’t know much about Star Wars. The most annoying thing about it is the reminder in the post-credits that, oh yes, it leads to A New Hope. I’m onboard with the Rogue One multiverse being the most compelling aspect of SW. and I mean how good is the buildup of tension in some of these episodes? Mentioned this in another thread but the manner in which the show builds little strands of a tense story and leads to a episode where it all explodes is pretty masterful, and it does this what four times in twelve episodes? The first riot on ferrix, the heist, the prison break, the bloody rebellion climax…it’s all really so well done.

Very pleased that there were zero desert planets in sight. Even more pleased that multiple interesting characters are still out there, to be deployed and presumably dispatched in ways either tragic or extremely satisfying. Also said elsewhere: making an empire that is hateful in not a cartoonish cackling cape villain way but a ground-level boots on the ground way is really necessary for this show, and it makes the rebellion not a plot device but an understandable necessity. So much so that we certainly get where cinta is coming from when she decides to take a side trip to murder an imperial agent.

Very pleased that there were zero desert planets in sight

Huh, never actively noticed that, but it was very refreshing

Doubtlessly the lesson that will be taken from this excellent program’s lower ratings is that people want more muppet/helmet Star Wars and less of this, which would be a shame. I just think the difference in quality between this and the other Disney+ series is vast; this is in service of the story, not the fans.

I expect this will have a much longer “tail” than e.g. Obi Wan. Which execs never seem to consider.

Already forgotten most of obi-wan tbh. I have a certain affection for it overall but it was a major missed opportunity.

wow yeah ratings for andor were basically bad https://www.denofgeek.com/tv/star-wars-andor-lower-viewership/

i think part of that though is bc it’s not really kid/tween/young teen-inclusive the way Mando or Obiwan was, and while there are a lot of adult children who watch (hi) i think theres prob a large portion of parents who only turn it on for kids & if they arent into the parents watch something else

I'm not surprised the viewing numbers for this would be bad. Yeah, not really a show for kids, plus it doesn't have any well-known characters. But a word-of-mouth show can have a longer tail and might reach new customers so I hope they see the value. This show is supposed to be 2 seasons and done, so at least we don't have to worry about its cancellation

Not sure it’s really doing as badly as all that e.g.

https://tv.parrotanalytics.com/US/andor-disney-plus

What Disney will want to see is if:

- Andor drives new sign-ups
- Those new sign-ups tend to stay with Disney after signing up
- Helps them crack a demographic they don’t yet have a lot of

What I appreciate about this show also is that everyone is pretty sharp, very wary, not falling into easy traps, correct in their thinking, undone by hubris or arrogance perhaps; there were miscalculations made by some characters but nothing egregious. They’re all so cautious (on the rebel side) and detail oriented (on the imperial side) and mostly the former managed to evade the latter while it not seeming like it was due to pursuer stupidity or quarry luck.

And really fascinated by the complicated web of loyalty and betrayal Andor found himself in after entering the orbit of Luthen and the heist crew, and how none of them were bad guys but extremely gray area types, and not committed to the single shade of gray they’re in at any given moment.

The most annoying thing about it is the reminder in the post-credits that, oh yes, it leads to A New Hope.

yup, totally. i posted this tweet upthread but maybe it was too oblique, i'll post it again:

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

basically how i felt / my biggest fear watching the conclusion of this season, that you'd get some sort of reveal that takes you out of this world of spycraft and small resistance against the boot on your face.

i think my biggest problem with, er, the star wars universe, not this show, is that yes this is a great show that shades in its story with great care, shows how the rebellion was built out of a thousand small injustices, against an empire that wasn't initially evil but produced evil as a necessity of the grinding machine of the bureaucracy. but it sucks to know that at the end of this storyline lies the Death Star. like, it becomes hard to care about how a small scale rebellion organically came about on ferrix if later on the empire will have this thing that will just zip in and destroy the whole planet should the locals get too much out of line. you see the beginning of that in rogue one actually, how the death star is used to literally extinguish jedha because saw's rebellion started winning. the empire becoming just so comically evil that you need a comically good hero to overcome it. but i mean, that's the original star wars, lucas was always thinking this way hence the name starkiller, and the one we all fell in love with. i'm not saying it's a bad universe. just hard to imagine that story and this one existing in the same universe. i know this point has been made a million times before in the discourse around the show, but just had to get it off my chest, this red yoda moment.

On one hand, I absolutely didn’t need the “see, they were making death star panels!” moment and it’s nice they hid it in the credits. I didn’t even see it originally.

On the other hand, as someone who has suffered through one zillion Star Wars moments for the occasional gems: what if red yoda?!!

give me Zombie Sith Yaddle

basically how i felt / my biggest fear watching the conclusion of this season, that you'd get some sort of reveal that takes you out of this world of spycraft and small resistance against the boot on your face.

I really hope they steer clear of too much Death Star claptrap in S2 and just leave it as foreshadowing for Rogue One. I’m sure it’ll get more play than that but after Andor I have trust in Tony Gilroy, and for all the chatter about how JJ Abrams was such a fan of Star Wars and how that informed his desire to take the reins for the sequels, it shows that being a fan isn’t enough if you’re a terrible storyteller.

one of the many things I liked about R1 and now the show was that it craftily shifted Star Wars away from being the story of one very fucked up family and how this child of destiny saved the galaxy, and to this story of how the resistance worked together from the ground up to defeat the empire. I understand it goes against the whole SW universe as a storyline, but boy I really think Gilroy “gets it”, and gets back to some essential core of A New Hope, which is a ragtag rebellion against an arrogant militaristic empire, and ultimately the pursuit of the skywalker stuff just sidelined and benched much of what is revived here in interesting ways. Not entirely abandoned in the last two of the OG trilogy of course, the empire military made for some fun stuff in ESB and the best part of ROTJ was the rebellion coming together to engage in one epic space battle.

I think where the other revival series fail a lot is that for all the charm and humor and fun stuff in Mando, for the nostalgia of Obi-Wan, for the…whatever Boba Fett has going for it, they’re mostly just not very gripping storylines, there’s fun to be had but they seem designed to reassure and remind vs compel and create genuine tension or try something really interesting.

There is a basic level of fun to be had in The Mandalorian but I find the whole series very hollow. Nearly every episode of the second season felt like a backdoor pilot for some other character. I find the whole series to be a very cynical cash grab - made slightly palatable only because the other shows (Obi-wan, Boba) were even more cynical.

Yeah I mean I get a decent amount of mileage from Mandalorian but it’s almost exclusively due to it being an enjoyable experience for my kid. It’s really more akin to a Saturday morning cartoon show than a great narrative experience.

i don't recall ever seeing more than a handful of characters on screen at once doing anything meaningful - probably a result of those shows all being shot on the volume. i think i posted how weirdly empty the dingy planet in obi wan felt compared to a similar scene from blade runner shot with good old fashioned sets.

in other words, mandalorian is still a hero / western, blah blah blah, small scale stories. andor feels more like, i dunno, i keep on thinking of psychohistory a la asimov/foundation. trying to tell the story of largescale / grand movements across the galaxy, as far as a medium like straightforward linear tv character narrative can, anyway, without feeling like the history channel.

this discussion reminds me of this great tweet

It's really funny whenever they mention the emperor on Andor and you remember what his deal is. It's like if The Wire was set in a city where the unseen mayor is a cackling goblin who shoots lightning at people

— Brooks Otterlake (@i_zzzzzz) November 23, 2022

Also, the actors in Andor are good, whereas what I saw of The Mandalorian was full of terrible acting.

must agree the acting on andor has been v good.

a primary character in mando was a charismatic muppet with an appetite for intelligent-frog eggs.

peak Star Wars has to be somewhere between, where we get a peek behind Tarkin types that is a little deeper and also more egg boy

hah, agreed!

https://open.spotify.com/episode/6pJVHwmLibsAgrohTyZlab?si=53c6feffc68f42ac

I tried watching this, and it just didn't grab me in any way… but nonetheless I can see that it is a high quality production, and so my disinclination to stick with it is my problem, not the show's… many many people have told me they think this is the best SW exponent ever… fair enuff! I more or less have a bad taste in my mouth from SW shit, think Lucas is a bullshit artist and not particularly smart, sophisticated or insightful, and have no warm and fuzzies for SW the way I do for DC, Marvel or Star Trek shit…

However! My wife watches a lot of BBC and adjacent european crime shows (and had only seen SW77 12 years ago, the force awakens with me in 2015 and exactly no other SW shit ever) and so she was right there with Andor, unlike me. Which makes me think that this show, which has as few references to existing lore as any brand extension show I've ever seen, doesn't need to be a star wars show… sorry, star wars STORY at all and would have been better off as its own thing entirely…

But! Maybe no one cares about anything unless its wedded no pre-existing IP! I might convey the sentiment in the above graf to one of my pals, and they'd say "but would anybody see this show if it wasn't attached to SW?" Maybe not! And that's a problem, that new productions must function as brand extension or no one will make the effort to see it. Same thing with the Watchmen show: it seems to me that show should have been its own thing, the points it was making were in no way indebted to Moore's work, and just as Rorschach = the Question is known to some nerds but in no way required knowledge to fathom what is going on, Lindelof could have made it plain that this new character = Laurie, this new character = Veidt and in that he could avoid going against Moore's wishes…

Brand extenstion is a scourge! Make new shit!

The streamers would like nothing more than to create lots of “original IP” that they could milk exclusively for years to come but audiences gravitate towards stuff they know

I'm extremely anti-IP-recycling, hate SW now too, and was reluctant to watch this. But I ended up really liking it and must admit that in this case, the IP serves a useful function: avoiding exposition and tedious "world-building." Since everyone goes in knowing what the empire & the rebellion are, the show is able to communicate a lot through costumes, accents, and decor. Now I do think it's entirely possible to do all that in an original series too, but still it was useful in this case.

On the audiences question, while I thought both movies were merely okay, the popularity of Glass Onion and Everything Everywhere All At Once suggest that people are actually dying to watch silly genre stuff that isn't so familiar and leaden with continuity.

It was helpful to me to watch Andor out of the hype cycle when it was first airing. I binged the whole thing last week - I'm barely invested in extended Wars, but I've always thought that SW was at its best when it got closer to its 70s science fiction roots. Thought it was great, no need to fret about season two.

I was surprised a friend didn’t quite get the gravitas of that ending and the callback, but screaming children might do that. Just a good end to the arc of wondering if Cassian is on the cause. Can a man just live under the empire and maybe take a job subverting it to continue living, or is it worth putting your life on the scale of rebellion or death, when rebellion may mean certain death?

I feel like im approaching it in a tony gilroy-sympathetic way where its like ... he already made the archetypal self-contained against the grain cinematic thriller in michael clayton, why not allow him a little expensive IP as a treat