Andor, finally, is the right mix of Star Wars and politics
David Mark
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Few movie releases have stoked more excitement than The Phantom Menace premiere in May 1999. The initial Star Wars prequel, the beloved sci-fi series’s first film in 16 years, led fans to camp out on sidewalks for days and even weeks for a first-run viewing.
But when theater lights dimmed, that sense of eager anticipation led to bouts of head-scratching over the movie’s opening crawl and its discourse on the “taxation of trade routes.” The ponderous language seemed more appropriate for a House Ways and Means Committee hearing than the familiar lightsaber-dueling, TIE Fighter-space-battling Star Wars universe.
If The Phantom Menace was the nadir of efforts to make politics a key Star Wars theme, the Disney+ streaming series Andor represents a triumph. The 12-episode series premiered this fall and wrapped on Nov. 23, the first of two planned seasons.
Andor begins five years before the events of the films Rogue One (2016) and A New Hope (1977), the latter being the original Star Wars film that started the billion-dollar franchise, sold by creator George Lucas to the Walt Disney Company in 2012. The show traces the arc of a familiar reluctant leader-type character, Cassian Andor (Diego Luna), a thief who eventually becomes a revolutionary and joins the rebellion against the evil Galactic Empire. And while interspersed with action scenes of stormtrooper blaster fights and an occasional spaceship chase, Andor is at its heart a political drama.
There’s no mention of Jedi, Sith, or the Force, staples of the original trilogy and their CGI-enhanced prequels. Andor instead portrays the life of ordinary people, as well as their reasons for supporting or opposing the Empire. The show is a meditation on power and morality — one beyond the struggle between the light and dark sides of the Force, reflected not so subtly in Luke Skywalker’s green lightsaber clashing with the red laser weapon of his black-clad cyborg father, Darth Vader.
The “good guys” of the original trilogy, X-Wing Fighter-flying rebels, in fact, have more complicated origin stories, Andor shows. They’re composed of, at times, lethally rival factions. Cassian Andor’s rebel “handler,” Luthen Rael (Stellan Skarsgard) offers the series’s namesake a considerable financial reward to lead a risky raid against an Imperial depot on the planet of Aldhani, with the goal of heisting the sector’s quarterly payroll. Luthen, though, orders Andor killed once the mercenary is no longer of immediate use (a change of mind in Andor’s thrilling season finale sets up the series’s next season, being filmed now for release sometime in 2024).
Conversely, Andor portrays employees of the Galactic Empire as more than the pure-evil, British-accented true believers seen in the original films. These Imperial officers and grunts are career strivers who often got into their roles in the service of unseen Emperor Palpatine because it was the best gig they could find. It’s a familiar theme in the history of evil regimes, be it members of Saddam Hussein’s Baath Party in Iraq or Truth and Reconciliation Commission testimony from onetime enforcers in South Africa’s apartheid-era Nationalist Party ruling government. On the other side, characters who support what will become the Rebel Alliance sometimes make suspect moves, as exemplified by Mon Mothma (Genevieve O’Reilly), a senator who is covertly fighting against the Empire.
Andor, to be sure, is hardly the first Star Wars installment with political themes. The prequel trilogy traced the rise of Palpatine from a cunning Galactic Republic senator to a dictatorial emperor through smarmy manipulation and skullduggery, a story that (clumsily) recalled the ends of both the Roman and Weimar republics.
Star Wars creator George Lucas also put his own liberal political take on the films he helmed. Return of the Jedi’s ragtag Ewok army that defeated armies of Imperial stormtroopers on the moon of Endor was modeled, Lucas has said, on the Viet Cong army’s fight against U.S. forces in the Vietnam War. And in The Phantom Menace, there is a pair of bumbling and corrupt Trade Federation officials named Nute Gunray and Lott Dod, slimy alien characters named by major Democratic donor Lucas after the nation’s top two Republican lawmakers during the filming of The Phantom Menace in summer 1997: then-Senate Majority Leader Trent Lott (R-MS) and House Speaker Newt Gingrich (R-GA). (By the time of the film’s release, Gingrich had resigned as speaker and from Congress.)
In the third Star Wars prequel, viewers of a liberal bent drew comparisons between the villain Darth Vader and then-President George W. Bush. Late in Revenge of the Sith, Vader confronts his ex-master, Jedi Master Obi-Wan Kenobi, in an epic lightsaber duel on the lava planet Mustafar. “If you’re not with me, then you’re my enemy,” Vader says in the 2005 prequel finale. The line echoes Bush’s international ultimatum after the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks: “Either you are with us, or you are with the terrorists.”
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Andor never makes its politics that black-and-white. Rather it shows how, as the Skywalker family’s and the emperor’s story plays out at a grandly heroic level, ordinary issues such as money and fear are driving the way regular people behave and form groups. It portrays an often morally ambiguous world, one far more enriching than its past, simplified version.
Politics may be the last thing many streaming viewers want to engage in weeks after a knife-fight midterm election cycle that recorded some of the meanest, deepest rhetorical cuts in political history. Former President Donald Trump has already declared his candidacy, earlier than is traditional, starting what is sure to be a long slog of a presidential election cycle that will feature its share of mudslinging. Yet for all of its political intrigue, Andor makes for excellent escapist entertainment. Tribalism is fun as long as it’s in a galaxy far, far away. Unlike presidential races, you can be glad this show is getting a second season.
David Mark is the managing editor of the Washington Examiner Magazine.