‘Andor’ Puts ‘Obi-Wan Kenobi’ To Shame In Every Possible Way

Andor is the latest Star Wars live-action show to come to Disney+ and it’s actually really damn good.

If you’ve wanted a grittier Star Wars more akin to Rogue One than to The Force Awakens, this is it. Unlike The Book Of Boba Fett, which was basically the TV show version of an identity crisis, Andor actually gives us the seedy underbelly of the Star Wars universe.

Disney’s only mistake here, so far as I can tell, was releasing the first three episodes as three separate episodes. They form one coherent chapter in this show’s run, and should have been released as a single, longer episode instead. I think this would have been better for audiences. Anyone who stopped after the first or second episode might have felt confused or letdown.

Watching all three consecutively gets you a pretty fascinating arc that not only introduces Cassian Andor’s backstory, but gives us some really top-notch action and suspense. The action sequences in the third episode are truly outstanding, including one shoot-out in a factory warehouse with giant metal beams falling all around as the good guys and bad guys engage in a tense shootout.

Andor (Diego Luna) is little more than a petty thief at this point. He owes money all around town and seems to be constantly cooking up a new scheme—though he’s no fan of the Empire, something he makes clear when he meets a mysterious buyer of stolen goods, Luthen Rael (Stellan Skarsgård).

The young thief has gotten himself in trouble for real this time, however. He visits a very cyberpunk club in the first episode where he’s harassed by a pair of hostile security guards perhaps a little too far into their cups. He’s looking for his sister; they’re looking for trouble. When he leaves, they follow and soon there’s an altercation in which Andar accidentally kills one of the guards. He can’t leave a witness, so he kills the second guard in cold blood.

Already, this is a darker Star Wars than we’re used to. Rarely are Star Wars protagonists willing to outright murder someone to protect their own skin.

What follows is both a noir-ish murder investigation—corpo security investigator Syril Karn (Kyle Soller) ignores orders to cover up the killings and is hot on Andor’s trail—and a setup for Andor’s introduction to the nascent rebellion, vis-a-vis Rael.

In the backstory flashbacks, we discover that Andor comes from a little-known planet that was destroyed in some mining accident long ago. He’s part of a primitive culture that seems to be entirely comprised of children (the whereabouts of the adults is a mystery, though I suspect they were pressed into slavery by the mining company, or killed off). When he’s separated from his companions and knocked unconscious, a woman named Maarva Andor (Fiona Shaw) takes him with her off the planet and adopts him as her son.

In the present timeline, Andor is betrayed by his friend Bix’s (Adria Arjona) boyfriend, Timm Karlo (James McArdle) and soon Karn and his corpo goons are after him. What follows is a fascinating clash between the workers and the fascistic security forces that operate as little more than an extension of the Empire. When the security guards touch down and begin searching for Andor, the entire workforce comes alive, banging on anything that will make a sound, alerting everyone to the danger.

I won’t go into too much detail, but the third episode’s action sequences are top-notch, a far cry better than anything in Obi-Wan Kenobi, which managed to make a lightsaber duel between Obi-Wan and Darth Vader boring somehow.

Indeed, just about everything in Andor is far superior to just about everything in Obi-Wan Kenobi, which is very odd. Andor himself is a relatively unimportant character in the big scheme of things, yet this is a TV show that has clearly been given a much more skillful and loving treatment than the famous Jedi’s own Disney+ outing. Everything from the CGI to the world-building to the fight scenes and, perhaps most importantly, the script is far, far superior to the clunky, confused Obi-Wan show. It’s very bizarre to see such a massive gap in quality between the two.

Andor feels expensive. The cinematography is terrific with lush camera shots perfectly complimenting a rousing original score. The sets are slick and well-realized and brimming with aliens, droids and futuristic machinery. Nothing here feels cheap or rushed.

The story is also far better than Obi-Wan’s. Sure, it’s a little slow at times, only really picking up in the excellent third episode, but at least it’s not a jumbled mess that doesn’t make any sense.

It’s also very much Andor’s story, which makes sense given that this is a show called Andor. But again, this was not the case in Obi-Wan Kenobi which used Obi-Wan like a prop more than anything, passed along between characters rather than ever really taking charge. That was a show about Leia and Reva far more than it was ever a show about the Jedi Master himself.

Ah well. What’s done is done. Obi-Wan Kenobi will go down as yet another embarrassing misfire in the Star Wars franchise’s long and uneven legacy. Hopefully Andor will continue to be as excellent as it has been in its first three episodes. There will be 12 total episodes airing weekly every Wednesday. Episode 4 comes out this Wednesday, September 28th. I’ll have a review here on my blog which you should absolutely follow.

You can watch my video review of Andor below:

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