Gorgeous looking as well.
Yes! I really, really liked the shot of the hustle and bustle of the city, complete with the Star Warsy aliens here and there. I enjoyed that very much.
I liked several things of the show… actually almost all of it :P but in special, I liked how grounded it starts, not only no jedis as we knew… also not even a stormtrooper. Which actually makes more sense of what we see in the movies, stormtroopers are military troops that can’t be present in all cities of all planets.
We only have corpo cops for now!, although after the “events” in the third episode, we can imagine they will come, much to the chagrin of the corpo cop boss which was missing doing a review. And I’m sure that they will play well that angle, how the appearance of a single stormtrooper squad in the city will be an important change (for the worse), unlike in the movies where a stormtrooper is just a temporal obstacle to evade/fool/beat.
The second thing I wanted to comment is how they handled the “but who the hell supports the Empire?” question that the audience could have in their minds. Lawful good/paladin type of characters with subtle fascist leanings like the young cop they shown, who from his own pov he is actually the good guy (btw, the comment about him having custom tailored the uniform was a masterstroke, showing how he is the kind of guy who is PROUD to be a corpo cop), or full fascists like the older cop.
The third is the writing, which is excellent, but in special I liked how Andor isn’t stupid and tried well enough to cover his tracks, it was only a series of coincidences (from having bad luck with the paladin cop to a misunderstanding with Bix’s boyfriend getting the wrong idea) that allowed them to follow his trail.
edit: one last comment, about the blue collar ‘solution’ we see on the third episode.
The context imo, it was another thing that went out of someone’s hands, very much like Andor killing the cop. We can imagine it was supposed to be a bothersome prank, done with a ‘fuck the cops’ attitude, but it wasn’t really intended to kill, the normal thing would have been to stop, land again, see what was happening, and break the cable. The worker who did it surely couldn’t imagine there was going to be a combat situation that would induce panic in the cops, that an inexperienced, nervous cop would pilot it and it all would end in a lethal accident. From here, maybe in the next episode we will see how they understood as the ‘enemy shot down the ship’, and they will request Imperial support, making things worse.
Ugh. I searched for ‘Andor’ in youtube to look at some reviews from today, that was a mistake. From the top 5 results, two were:
Yep. YouTube loves to say “oh, you watched the ‘Rings of Power’ trailer? Here’s dozens of clickbait racist and misogynistic videos about why it’s oh-so-terribly-woke. Enjoy.”
I spend half my time on YouTube clicking on “Not interested in this channel.” And the stuff gets tens of thousands of views. Humanity is broken.
Back on topic, looking forward to Andor! I didn’t love all of Rogue One, but I thought the last 1/3 or so was the best Star Wars in ages.
Watched it today and loved it so far. So I guess they took the notion of the Corporate Sector Authority (which was born way back in the Han Solo novels) and kind of expanded on that, so I suppose multiple corps run different sectors for the Empire. Makes sense, having the CSA just run it all would be too much.
— Alan
Really liking it so far as well. In terms of direction, cinematography and world design this looks way better than Obi-Wan or Book of Boba Fett, and I’m also appreciating that, 3 episodes in, we have not visited Tatooine or some other desert planet.
B2EMO, completely practical. So cool. Love that droid.
— Alan
I’ve been avoiding until release, so I just watched the trailer. Looks good, but uh . . . that first scene with the guy holding what is clearly an AK-47 or -74 really threw me.
So the MG3’s in Star Wars didn’t throw you?
— Alan
Don’t be disingenuous, comparing the recognizability of an AK to those is pretty darned silly. And the AK was essentially unmodified. If we’re going to accept a world in which there’s no recognizable text, weapons should be assumed. Might as well have a stock Toyota Tacoma driving across the sands. (HiLux for the European-challenged.)
I adore this show. All the acting is fantastic. The lived in feel of all the sets is classic 1977 Star Wars. It’s one reason all of it resonated with me as a kid. It just seemed so real and this show captures that.
Doesn’t hurt that they’re already telling a great story fleshing out a character I thought was already brilliant in Rogue One.
The droid is awesome. Like a trash can on tracks. Ha! Stellan Skarsgard’s introduction with the salesman is super. You can tell there is a lot of love going into this program. Wow.
Is there a ruin a tv show with just one letter? Because, you know, E…
I had to look it up to make sure they weren’t de-aging Kyle MacLachlan (and then post here.) Wow.
This show feels good so far, but I’m only that far in.
I’m not being disingenuous, and I don’t think there’s much difference between the stormtrooper rifles, Solo’s blaster, the guns in Andor, and the guns in almost any other Star Wars media (with the exception of the custom-made jobbies in newest trilogy) where they just bolted other parts to the weapon.
Who’s the worker that hammers the bell? I swear it looks like Clancy Brown but the show doesn’t appear on his IMDB so obviously not.
Boy, those episodes were fun. I feel at home in that world, with those characters.
Especially loved the soldiers running through the neighborhood like in '71. We’ve had Nazi empire; this is The Troubles empire. Good and bad people on both sides. Neighbors selling each other out. London is far away and doesn’t care about you and your squad crossing the peace line, so you’re a bit sympathetic even though you shouldn’t be there. Plus: car bomb!
I noticed some clothing being more like ours. A quasi-baseball-cap, a hoodie, a woman’s tank top. Same for a nudge towards Earth weapons, and the blue noodles being packaged like ramen. They nail the sets, the feeling of living in a frontier town, and the Star-Wars-i-ness of ruffians with hearts of gold (and their mothers!) and in exchange they are doing some different things with music, camera, props, sex…probably more. Some quality thinking has gone into what it really means to “be Star Wars.”
There is something missing for this to be really prestige tv, as in ‘HBO drama tier’. The duration! The episodes are notably shorter than the expected 50-65 minutes.
Yea…I was kind of excited for full hour shows but then thought, well, if they are 35-45 minutes and there are going to be 24 of them over 2 seasons, that is 12-14 hours which is quite a bit for a story focused mainly on one person. So, I was ok with it. But, yea, I like longer episodes for most shows.