I like the show a lot but I wish people wouldn’t throw around terms like “spy thriller” or “political thriller” or talk about how it dissects capitalism or something.
Those are corporate buzzwords just as much as anything else. The MCU does the same thing, they put out a movie and they’ll call it a “political thriller” or a “heist movie” or a “horror movie” and then they just make a normal superhero action movie with some genre flavoring. And I like those movies a lot, I just don’t like it when people read marketing materials and then spout them verbatim from whatever Kevin Feige or whoever said. People here did it with “The Skywalker Saga.” That was a marketing term used to promote Rise of Skywalker. Even though most here hated that movie, they bought it hook, line, and sinker and felt compelled to make unnecessary 9 movie mega edits because of it, because you have to have the complete Skywalker Saga.
Guarantee most people today who use the term “political thriller” would not even know that genre existed if it weren’t for these corporate brands using it in that way.
Star Wars stands on its own without feeling insecure and talking about how this is ADULT and SERIOUS and INTELLIGENT. It’s just a well written, well made, well directed show.
I think the counter-shill can be just as unproductive, because I do think someone like Tony Gilroy put a lot of thought and effort into making his show.
I think it’s a shame that all other media more or less gets to be taken in as their own pieces, to be analyzed with all the nerdy film stuff that I fell in love with as a film fan in the first place. But Star Wars doesn’t get to have that anymore, because of The Boss, I guess. Not saying every project released under Disney deserves it, but I lament how we can have threads discussing stuff like what balance in the Force means to us individually + other headcanons, or even how much George Lucas may/may not have known what he was doing, etc… But Andor - dense with its own substance and cool things to dissect - is still stuck in the culture proxy war. Even when it’s positive, it’s just, “Can you believe how much better it is than BOBF or Kenobi???”
Either way, I think drawing attention to Disney [The Nebulous Entity] Doesn’t Care, as though that’s news to anyone, is ironically far shallower a direction to lead discussion than anything the show is putting down itself. I’d rather appreciate where studio and artist meet in the middle and that there can be wins on the creative side of this soul-crushing churn, than rehash the same tired cynicism that fundamentally misunderstands how the industry works anyway.
I haven’t used the “political thriller” moniker myself, but I do think this show is very, un-accidentally political. I don’t see the purpose in handwaving any intentions or themes in the material.
It’s just a little disheartening to write up an earnest, excited breakdown of cool things I could take away from the work, and then for someone to twist it as corporate shilling
I don’t necessarily mean Disney specifically, I just mean the marketing around the show and the way people talk about it. The show is good in large measure because it seems like they permitted a lot of creative freedom and budget, which is unusual for them and deserves credit. Like I said, it’s a good show. But I think it can stand on its own without people exaggerating how mature and “political” it is. It’s like they feel ashamed that Star Wars is perceived as childish, so they have to compensate by describing it in serious terms. And generally not serious terms that they would use in other cases, serious terms that come from marketing or from reading thinkpieces about it or watching YouTube essays.
It’s like people that don’t want to admit they read comic books, so they call them “graphic novels.”
The other thing that bugs me is when people say things like “Star Wars has NEVER been this realistic/grounded/detailed etc.” because that’s not true either. There are lots of Star Wars stories that get into that kind of mindset. It’s just that most people only know the movies, and movies by their very nature can’t be too slow or too detailed because of their runtime. The show reminds me of an EU book, in a good way.
edit: Obviously it is political in some ways and some of that is intentional. But I think it should be acknowledged that it is much more subtle and well done than what the people who say “Star Wars was always political” generally mean. Star Wars politics are a mishmash of the Roman Republic and Empire, Napoleon, the American Civil War, World War 2, and the Vietnam War, but when people say “Star Wars was always political” they’re generally defending the sequel trilogy or people in real life interpreting Rogue One in the lens of the 2016 election, for example. An oversimplistic us vs. them narrative that just calls the Empire “fascist space Nazis” as though there’s nothing else to it and nothing else going on. Although Andor seems like it’s aimed at those people and the marketing and some creator statements point that way, the show itself is much smarter than that. People in the Empire are portrayed as real people with real motivations, emotions, and reasons for what they do. People in the rebellion have to make difficult decisions and don’t always come off as sympathetic and heroic. This is good stuff strictly BECAUSE it does not agree with any particular real world political philosophy, it just depicts the realities of bureaucracy and the use of force in various ways.