Andoro is the latest piece of the Star Wars mythos, and it seems to have turned one of its short-lived characters into a new action hero. The first few episodes were full of laser shootouts and complex intrigue, but the violence on display has taken a somewhat new direction from the franchise.
The Star Wars franchise continues to experiment with full-length projects steeped in genres it had previously only dabbled in. Both of the franchise’s previous live-action Disney Plus series have gone deep into the space western genre, Rogue One was the first real war film, and Andoro is a full-fledged spy series.
The entire Star Wars franchise features one version or another of a weak underdog rebellion battling a vast technologically superior empire. The Wars in the Stars contain most of the traditional features of armed conflict in the real world. The original trilogy borrows a healthy amount of historical and contemporary shorthand to codify the on-screen aggression. World War II is the most common point of reference, with its massive land battles and focus on aerial supremacy, but there is a lot of Vietnam influence in the Battle of Endor. These movies were mainly based on a war that ended thirty years before their release, but the war changed and the franchise changed to reflect that. War doesn’t look like it did in the 1940s or 1970s, and war movies wanted to keep up with the times.
Many war films inspired the original Star Wars. The 1955 movie The Dam Busters provided entire lines of dialogue and informed the film’s dogfight scenes. The 1961 movie The guns of Navarone inspired much of the central Death Star plot. The film is also borrowed from westerns such as the seekers, and their connection to the work of Akira Kurosawa is well established. War movies released after the original trilogy were very different. Steven Spielberg’s 1998 Movie Saving Private Ryan changed the landscape and set the tone for countless other war films. Films portraying modern conflict took the immediacy, the pulse-pounding action, and the human drama and applied it all to ongoing conflict around the world. Andoro is the first Star Wars project to borrow more from today’s combat than the old favorites.
The first major action scene in Andoro is an urban engagement with countless civilians in the immediate line of fire. A violent takeover by a law enforcement agency that results in the deaths of several innocent bystanders. It all starts because a couple of cops threaten and attack an innocent man for the apparent crime of being somewhere they don’t want him to be. They even ask him if he has “swum over”. It would be hard to be more blatant. Andoro draws a series of direct lines between the Empire’s troops, invading armies and the modern police forces acting like them. Where Endor was a battle between native rebels aided by the jungle and a violent occupying force, Andoro his first conflict revolves around a pair of heroes who bravely defy oppressive state power.
Military types have been saying that the city is the modern battlefield for years, but the franchise with war in its name has only just caught up. The big fight scenes in the latest trilogy still feel largely dominated by massive World War II battles. AndoroShifting the scale down a few degrees and re-centering the action in a more contemporary setting manages to feel so much more immediate. It’s ripped from the headlines of sci-fi action in a way Star Wars hasn’t been since Return of the Jedi. The biggest risk of this strategy is that the franchise has always been fantastic and escapist. Adding lasers and hoverbikes to a story that’s a little too close to home doesn’t make it whimsical. In this way, Andoro seems to be going for a new gritty take on the material, but without all the edgy baggage that term usually carries. The latest Star Wars series seems to be taking its unique new approach to violence to add to its story, and it’s a brilliant evolution of the format.
Andoro could be considered an outlier in the franchise, but it could also be the new direction breathing a much-needed new life. The Mandalorian was the last Star Wars project to garner near-universal praise, and it did so by leaning on its genre, its strong new cast, and its radically different tone. The show about the steel-clad space bounty hunter and his adorable adopted son can’t be described as particularly realistic, but the tone is a bit morally grayer than the typical Star Wars project. It seems like Disney is never 100% sure what it’s doing with this long-suffering franchise, but if… Andoro given as an example, there may still be beautiful things on the horizon.
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