Vladius

I definitely get what you guys are talking about. There’s a whole cottage industry of outrage videos on YouTube. They have clickbait thumbnails and titles and talk constantly about which new thing is “the final nail in the coffin.” It can get annoying seeing the same thing over and over. There don’t have to be 50,000 2-hour The Last Jedi retrospectives. I can figure out the reasons to hate it on my own, thank you very much!
But I wouldn’t put anyone on this site in that category.

Thor Skywalker is pretty even handed and sober about it so I would recommend his channel. He has mostly the same opinions as the other channels (and me) but he tries to keep a level head.

StarkillerAG said:

Vladius said:

StarkillerAG said:

I know I say this too much, but if you’re really that done with Star Wars… why are you still here? It’s pointless to come into these threads every week just to complain about how Star Wars is dead to you, and Disney are a bunch of hacks, and you just don’t care anymore. If you really don’t care, just move on. Find something you actually like.

People still talk about it because it’s fun to talk about stuff

But I can’t imagine it’s fun to talk about something that only causes you pain at this point, and that’s the way a lot of the people I was addressing there seem to react to Star Wars. I’ve said my peace, though.

It causes pain but it’s cathartic to talk about it with other people that know what you’re talking about, and sometimes it’s painful in funny ways. Like the teen punks in Book of Boba Fett, it’s painful to watch and to think of the wasted potential but it’s also hilarious. It’s fun to dissect things like that and talk about how they could be done differently. That’s kind of the whole point of this site in the first place.

JadedSkywalker said:

The thing is Force Awakens and Last Jedi are far from perfect but the third film should have been where they should have stuck the landing. Instead they made a film worse than Return of the Jedi. I like Rey more as the adopted niece and a nobody than a Palpatine. Finn isn’t the only character they failed they also just about erased Rose. I mean i get it its Rey’s story and Finn and Rose are supporting roles, but they got even worse than Han and Leia did in ROTJ.

The third one introduced new characters i very much liked like Zorri Bliss, and Jannah. But in adding more characters it was overstuffed no room for Rose Tico?

most films are worse than Return of the Jedi

StarkillerAG said:

I know I say this too much, but if you’re really that done with Star Wars… why are you still here? It’s pointless to come into these threads every week just to complain about how Star Wars is dead to you, and Disney are a bunch of hacks, and you just don’t care anymore. If you really don’t care, just move on. Find something you actually like.

People still talk about it because it’s fun to talk about stuff

I wish he hadn’t and I wouldn’t want anyone to make any more official stuff either. Maybe a separate reboot EU continuity so that people could tell new stories in the EU without worrying about canon.

I have to make some of them tie:

1. Original Trilogy
2. Revenge of the Sith
3. Solo, Rogue One, The Phantom Menace, The Force Awakens, and Rise of Skywalker
4. Attack of the Clones
5. The Last Jedi

If I had to put the shows in there, then

1. Original Trilogy
2. Revenge of the Sith, Tartakovsky Clone Wars, Andor
3. Solo, Rogue One, The Phantom Menace, The Force Awakens, Rise of Skywalker, The Mandalorian seasons 1 and 2
4. The Clone Wars show
5. Attack of the Clones, The Mandalorian season 3
6. Rebels, Book of Boba Fett, Obi Wan Kenobi
7. The Last Jedi

I’m glad I’m not the only one who hates Attack of the Clones for this reason (as well as other reasons.) Pretty much every problem people have with the Jedi or anything in the prequels is related to something established or fumbled in AotC.
The Jedi look absolutely idiotic and don’t do the most basic investigation you would see on a hack police procedural on TV. Nothing makes any sense and there’s no follow up. Okay, the Kaminoans made the clones - who’s paying them? How are they getting the money? How did Sifo Dyas, or whoever it was that ordered the army, have enough money to do it? Were they really working for 10 years without any contact with anyone whatsoever? Who is building all the ships and weapons and armor and combat training? How does none of this have any kind of paper trail?

There is one little exchange between Obi Wan and Mace Windu and Yoda, something like
“Hey do you think there’s a connection between Jango Fett trying to kill Padme and him also being the template of the clone army?”
"No there appears to be no motive 😃 "
“Do not assume anything, Obi Wan.”

And then nothing happens. Apparently Yoda can figure it out but he doesn’t. They’re just stupid, and everything gets plastered over with “the dark side is clouding their vision.” No one needed the Force or premonitions or anything supernatural to figure any of this out! It’s obvious!

The way you guys talk about this stuff is all part of the same pointless cyclical media firestorm that happens every time. If your automatic response to any criticism or any reference to politics is “ugh, those Fox News types, am I right?” you are just the other side of the same coin. You are part of a viral marketing campaign. Some of you are okay with that, I think.

StarkillerAG said:

That was a massive paragraph, but yeah. The only reason why the anti-woke crowd backed John Boyega after TROS is because he was a “model minority”, so to speak. Reactionaries could point to him and say “See, I’m not racist, I support this black guy who agrees with my talking points!” Meanwhile, they could conveniently slip their TFA videos bashing Finn for being a black stormtrooper under the rug, because it doesn’t fit with their new narrative.

And that’s the most important thing to anti-woke Internet personalities: “narrative”. They want some quick, snazzy soundbites to get conservatives riled up about whatever’s popular now, even if they end up blatantly contradicting themselves. They’re the Fox News of YouTube movie criticism, and no one should take them even remotely seriously.

That’s not why. It’s mostly that they just hate Disney and will take anything they can get as far as public criticism or behind-the-scenes drama.

NFBisms said:

The annoying thing about anti-woke discourse is that it’s reactionary to a climate that’s at least a decade past at this point. No one ever really bought into that kind of tokenism except ineffectual lib Disney adults in 2014, or like, literal children. So all the whining about a corporation chasing a profitable demographic feels smug and incurious. If it’s a shield for criticism, then corpos need a new blacksmith, because this discourse has never failed to pop up about anything.

Even if something is crap - why is part of the “analysis” going to the race/identity well at all? The answer is always rooted in specific confirmation biased speculation, and it’s only ever triggered by the subjectivity of if the work in question landed well or not. And even in a positive direction, that lens becomes condescending, as though gay/black/minority/whatever progressive thing rose above itself this time. feels unfair

who needs media literacy when wokeness can be the eternal scapegoat

No one said that anyone bought into the tokenism. I don’t really understand what your point is here.

StarkillerAG said:

Fan_edit_fan said:

Can we just…please…stop bringing up personal politics when talking about the quality of SW writing, acting and directing? 🤷‍♂️

Yes, please. If a black character or female character is written like crap, it’s not because they’re black or female, it’s just because they’re written like crap. Anti-wokeness is the biggest disease that infects modern movie discourse.

You know this already, but the anti-woke point is that they’re written like crap, and their female, black, etc. status is picked ahead of time as a shield for criticism. This happens constantly. All the “anti-woke” talking heads that hate on Disney fully backed John Boyega when he called them out for messing up his character.

StarkillerAG said:

Vladius said:

Why? Why do we have to accept it?

You don’t have to, but I’m sure Disney would like other people to.

Why would it divide the fandom further?

Because there are people out there who actually like the sequels (believe it or not), and Disney suddenly saying “that never happened lol” would majorly piss them off. That’s exactly what happened with TFA going out of its way to shit on the prequels, and I doubt Disney wants to repeat that mistake.

What is wrong with dividing the fandom?

Disney wants money. Fans give Disney money. If Disney pisses fans off, they stop giving Disney money. I could not make this more simple.

Why is it better to salvage something?

Because then the people who still like at least a bit of the sequels will become much more pleased with the franchise as a whole, and the people who unconditionally love the sequels will just be pleased to have that story expanded on. Again, when this strategy was applied to the prequels via the Clone Wars show, it was received much more positively than “just pretend it didn’t happen” was for TFA.

Why is it possible to salvage anything?

Again, it may not be possible for you, but there are plenty of people out there who see at least a few redeeming qualities in the sequels’ story. If Disney can expound on those mostly-liked elements, while rationalizing the bits that pissed fans off, I think the sequels can be redeemed in the fandom’s eyes.

Why are they “the main saga?”

Because Disney branded them as such, and contradicting your own branding is almost never a good idea.

In a nutshell, it feels like you’re seeing this from a subjective, opinion-based point of view, while a corporation like Disney will go with what’s most economically sound. And from what I see, attempting to redeem the sequel trilogy is the most economically sound direction to take the franchise. No matter how you feel about the sequels, they will always be part of Disney’s canon.

I’m genuinely confused. I was talking about your opinion, not Disney’s. Why should we care about whether or not Disney makes money? Why do we care about Disney’s branding?

There aren’t that many people that like the sequels. There are people that liked The Force Awakens when it came out (me), there are people that see them as an opportunity to cut up footage to make something else (faneditors here, so approximately 20-100 people in the entire world, charitably,) and there are many people that like The Last Jedi for political reasons (because many people also hate The Last Jedi for political reasons.) But as a whole, I don’t think that there are a lot of people who like all three. There are good elements that I think everyone likes, like Adam Driver, but that doesn’t mean the whole thing.

I could maybe see an argument that the sequels’ existence appeals to the kind of people who put together wiki articles and timeline videos just because it’s satisfying to connect dots and fill in blanks. I think that’s where the breadcrumbs in Mando season 3 come in. “That guy’s last name is Hux!”
But I don’t think that that is very many people, and they’re more enjoying it because of the stories’ weight than what is actually in the stories.

I actually liked this episode a lot more than the rest of the season. It had some good action, it was nice that it kept Din as the main character, and it was more straightforward and wasn’t about setting up a bunch of Cinematic Universe tie ins.

Marooned Biker Scout said:

I find it a little disappointing how the 3 main series in the Mandoverse: The Mandalorian, Book Of Boba Fett, and Ahsoka (as well as any ideas and outlines from cancelled ‘Rangers Of The Republic’ series, and maybe even the new ‘Skeleton Crew’ series), are going to essentially be a rehabilitation project for the Sequel Trilogy?

Yep, you nailed it!

StarkillerAG said:

As for the whole “desperately making excuses for why the sequels happened” thing, I think it’s something we just have to accept. The sequels were a botched attempt at recapturing the OT’s magic that just ended up feeling bleak and cynical, but they’ll always be there, and erasing them from canon would just divide the fandom further. It’s better to salvage at least something worthwhile out of those movies, rather than treating 3 installments of the main saga like the Holiday Special.

Why? Why do we have to accept it? Why would it divide the fandom further? What is wrong with dividing the fandom? Why is it better to salvage something? Why is it possible to salvage anything? Why are they “the main saga?”

StarkillerAG said:

WitchDR said:

StarkillerAG said:

But what if you think Rey was already a good character? I certainly did, at least until the whole “you are a Palpatine” fiasco. But I feel like a major goal of this movie is to rationalize and streamline some of the messiness of TROS, bringing the sequels’ reception back to the mostly-positive outlook pre-2019.

Remember, both TFA and TLJ had a more than 90% positive critical reception, and I feel like the audience score would look the same way if sequel hate wasn’t weaponized during the Trump-era culture wars. People liked the sequels before TROS, Disney just needs to figure out how to make people like them again.

For one I wouldn’t take payed critics opinions seriously

You lost me here. Anyone who seriously says to ignore the opinions of professional critics and trust obviously review-bombed audience scores instead is not worth paying attention to.

and second - this “Trump-era” culture war you speak of, I don’t think has anything to do with it. What happened is TLJ came out an completely destroyed Luke Skywalker. And people were pissed. You can try to blame outrage culture channels on Youtube for this. But the whole reason they ever rose to stardom in the first place is BECAUSE people were going to these sites to see if people felt the same way they did after leaving the theater from TLJ.

I know some people were genuinely upset by what happened to Luke (although I personally like it, YMMV), but the culture war grifters were the ones who turned it from individual dissatisfaction into a mass movement of right-wing nerd outrage. And it rubbed off on people of other political persuasions too: if everyone around you is saying “Rian Johnson ruined Star Wars”, you’re inevitably going to start believing it.

The only reason TFA was so positive is because it was a new mainline Star Wars movie after 15 years of none. And once that high wore off and TLJ came out, people looked at it far more critically. And it especially didn’t help that the movie itself was horrible.

One, as I already told you, a lot of people like TLJ. Stop acting like your opinions are objective.

And two, it being a “new mainline Star Wars movie after 15 years of none” didn’t stop people from hating TPM. You can have issues with how weak TFA was as a setup to the sequel trilogy (God knows I do), but the vast majority of people genuinely loved that movie. And it also helps that the “culture war” thing wasn’t anywhere near as big in 2015: I remember grifters trying to make people hate TFA because “How dare they have a female protagonist” or “How dare they have a black stormtrooper”, but no one listened to that stuff back then.

But anyways, I’ve said my piece. If you seriously don’t believe there was at least some political element to TLJ hate, you clearly weren’t paying enough attention back in 2017. Does that 40% Rotten Tomatoes audience score really look genuine to you?

There is a culture war aspect to whether or not people like TLJ but that doesn’t matter. The quality and intent of the story still remains. If the people on one side of the culture war are right about it, then they’re right. There are explanations for certain decisions that Kathleen Kennedy or Disney or Rian Johnson or whoever made about the movies that are absolutely related to culture war stuff, but the fact remains that those decisions exist in the movies on their own, and are still bad decisions either way.

The sequels made lots of money because they were big flashy movies. TFA was good and had a lot of promise. TLJ made money off the back of that, but tanked all the goodwill that the fans had for it, which resulted in Solo bombing or getting boycotted. TROS made the least money of the three.

The average non-Star Wars fan might have liked them in a vague sort of way because they like big budget movies in general. An apt JJ Abrams comparison would be something like Star Trek: Into Darkness. It has 84% on Rotten Tomatoes. It made plenty of money. But most Trek fans could probably tell you why it’s derivative and repetitive, why it really doesn’t understand the point of Star Trek or the characters it’s depicting, or why it doesn’t make any sense, which makes it bad.

For people that actually care about Star Wars, the reception of the sequels is generally negative, for political reasons or not. If anything, this site is an echo chamber for people that don’t hate the sequels, because some of the only people left here are people trying to do fanedits of post-2015 Disney stuff.

It’s disappointing how everything, Thrawn included, is going to end up as one big elaborate retcon to explain why the New Republic sucked so bad and how the First Order could exist in the sequels. It’s a rehabilitation project. They think they can get away with it because it worked with so many people with the prequels. Sadly they’re probably right and in 10-15 years we’ll see a bunch of contrarian takes about how underrated they were and how deep the lore is and how all the Disney+ shows “redeem” them.

Not that I trust them to do Thrawn or anything else justice, but it’s extra insulting that that’s what they’re using it all for.

NFBisms said:

I actually liked The New Republic being conceived as its own brand of neoliberal horror, but I don’t know, the conceptualization of what The Empire as an institution even was, is disappointing here. While I get the surface level comparisons to ANDOR, it doesn’t have a grasp on any tangible theory to fill out the spaces it’s playing in. (And certainly not the writing, it’s very journeyman here.) For as much as it “explores” a postwar reconstruction, it still moves in a Good/Evil, malice-of-an-out-group kind of ideology.

It’s a pretty high school social studies understanding of historical play.

Maybe I’m just attached to the interpretations provided by the prequels and then ANDOR, but Imperialism as Establishment, as oppression evolved from power evolved from status-quo, works far better for me than “Imperial” conceived as a pseudo-nationality. The episode codifies the former Empire’s structure as one that went out of its way to be bleak and awful; Palpatine and his powerbase as one and the same.

It just rubs me the wrong way that it’s even being called Andor-lite. They’re not necessarily incongruous in the macro beats, but philosophically coming from entirely different places. Without any real poli-sci informing the premises, its storytelling ambitions are just cynical for the sake cynicism.

You don’t need to try to sound smart here, it’s really not that important

C3PO isn’t annoying

G&G-Fan said:

Will never be a fan of pining the blame of Anakin’s turn on the Jedi. Darth Vader should be a villain with agency responsible for his own actions. Makes him a more powerful and badass villain.

This may be driven by the fact that I’m a Vader fanboy, but it’s just my opinion.

Yes.

StarkillerAG said:

Ending the prequels with an apparent “victory” does seem like an interesting route. The only flaw I can think of is that it would make the sequels seem even more derivative of the OT, given that both trilogies would begin with the previous heroes’ accomplishments being undone in the first paragraph of the crawl. 😉

Who cares what it does to the sequels?

SparkySywer said:

I’d embrace the idea of the Jedi being kind of a cult. The Jedi, on their quest to defend peace and justice in the galaxy, have tried to systematize good and evil to help them understand what their quest even is. I like the idea of the Jedi thinking Yoda was the Chosen One, so maybe he, or some other legendary Jedi who deserves that level of respect, would have defeated the Sith, established the current Republic and a new Jedi order, and came up with a perfect moral code which always illuminates the greater good. In the 800 or so years since this, the Jedi have set out on perfecting both themselves and the galaxy.

The cult-like behavior comes from their sheer commitment to the greater good. The Order is socially engineered so all of its members always prioritize the greater good. They train Jedi from birth so they never meet their family and prioritize them over the greater good of the galaxy. They don’t allow Jedi to fall in love or even have friends because the galaxy’s history books are full of Jedi who turned to the dark side for their friends. It’s dehumanizing, but the Jedi justify it because the Force gives you an immense amount of power, and if you can’t give up your own humanity for the greater good, you don’t deserve that power. Anakin, the one who wasn’t brainwashed from birth, who will fall in love and have a child, is going to be the one who ultimately destroys the Jedi Order and hands the galaxy over to Palpatine.

The Jedi are still flawed though, and if I were to actually write this I’d like to frame it to make the argument that the greater good itself is not for the greater good. The Jedi and the Republic tolerate slavery because the effort to end it would cost many times more lives than it would liberate, and (temporarily) tolerating some evils is for the greater good. But you can’t exactly tell a slave that their slavery is a good thing, and if it turned out that the Chosen One is a former slave, you’re going to make a natural enemy of him by continuing to tolerate slavery, even if he recognizes ending slavery would let out more evils than it would abolish.

Anakin’s fall to the dark side has more to do with the Jedi’s failings than his own inclination toward evil. Anakin’s respect for all the good the galaxy’s done at first puts him on their side. But as it becomes more clear to him how much evil they tolerate, he becomes disillusioned with them. When it becomes clear that he’s the Chosen One, not Yoda/whoever, and their arcane rules prioritize the greater good over him fulfilling his destiny by ending the war and defeating the Sith, he becomes radicalized against them. He embraces fear because it’s a natural reaction to danger, anger because it’s a natural reaction to injustice, and hate because it’s a natural reaction to evil. He turns to Palpatine and the Sith, not because they were the real good guys, but because in a galaxy where moral thinking is so completely dominated by the dishonest, delusional, and ineffective Jedi, the only option he really has to turn to is the Sith, who definitely do not give a damn about the greater good, but don’t force him to tolerate slavery and don’t stop Anakin from ending the war destroying galactic civilization itself. With the Sith and the Empire, the galaxy is his to shape according to his will, but radicalized against the extreme selflessness and peacefulness of the Jedi, he becomes a brutish tyrant whose will becomes just as much of an evil as what he once fought against.

I’d like to reconstruct this in the ST. If the PT Jedi’s failings were that they prioritized the greater good over the individual good, and there’s this idea that in the ST that the Force is to become decentralized, maybe Luke and/or Rey teach the galaxy to defend their own personal good. The galaxy shouldn’t have one group of people defending peace and justice, but everyone should be defending peace and justice in their own lives. The Republic, too, would have to go, because there’s no way to enforce one singular greater good over trillions or quadrillions of people in the galaxy. Someone’s always going to get fucked over for the greater good, and some people more often than others. The political status quo after Episode 9 would be a network of small, local Republics which keep order and peace on a small scale. This is bittersweet, because without the institutions that keep galactic civilization together, civilization can not exist on a galactic scale. But that scale of civilization led to the tyrannies of the Republic and the Empire, and the hell that the Clone Wars and the Empire were weren’t worth the luxury of galactic civilization.

This is the bog standard internet interpretation right now with almost no changes.

I think you’re right that starting with him already as a Jedi or at least as Obi Wan’s young adult student would be much better. Also remove anything to do with chosen ones.

Wexter said:

Yoda doesn’t appear at all, but is talked about a lot, being a living legend with unknown current whereabouts. Obi-Wan is kind of a big deal in the Jedi order as he has been trained by Yoda himself. Anakin and Obi-Wan may actually only be supporting characters in this story to preserve the surprise reveals of the OT. Obi-Wan takes multiple apprentices during the prequel trilogy.

At least three decades separate the Clone Wars from the OT and it is actually the bad guys who start with the cloning, creating themselves an army of mutants of all shapes and sizes to combat the Republic and its Jedi. The Clone Wars is actually a series of conflicts, not just one war.

Cloning, especially for military purposes, is generally considered unethical. However, chancellor Palpatine shows a remarkable interest in the technology. Shortly after the discovery of his own DNA in a cloning laboratory on enemy territory – which proves to the Jedi he has been orchestrating the war all along – he manipulates most of the Republic military into turning against the Jedi and declares himself the Emperor. All (or nearly all) of the cloning facilities are however destroyed during this period. Palpatine’s possible Force-sensitivity is suggested, but is never confirmed.

Most of the antagonist figureheads – some of whom are Force-sensitive – are interested in the cloning technology as a means to achieve immortality. Others are however motivated mostly by ideology or greed.

The Jedi are not celibate monks and they don’t wear Tatooine hermit robes. Leia’s mother doesn’t die immediately after giving birth. No Boba Fett origin story and no Chewbacca. The Jedi are very much present throughout the prequels, but many of the main characters are not Force-users – there’s the military, politicians, and common people of many different trades and convictions. Bail Organa plays a prominent role.

Excellent. I agree with all of this.

NFBisms said:

Vladius said:

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.