Last time we considered whether Andor could save the world.
It does seem like the whole room was built just for this.
At the risk of eating my words in three weeks time, this felt like the odd one out in the season so far. Not, as I saw predicted, a self-contained story but a grouping of some excellent scenes that didn’t quite fit into any of the preceding episodes. It’s enough, I think, to say that the scene with Fiona Shaw was the absolute highlight, a heartbreakingly tragic farce where Andor’s actions in the previous six episodes have alienated her from him in a way he cannot explain. I had full expections that the show was going to go with the trite old ritual of “Oh, I’m secretly ill/infirm/otherwise unable to come with you by virtue of being old” and what happened instead was really good. Special mention as well to the Imperial bureaucracy scenes, a stunning mash-up of the original trilogy’s Imperial Officer scenes with a modern-day KPMG internal presentation.
The whole building bears a passing resemblance to the ancient club Luthen keeps handling.
With that out of the way, we can get down to the one absolutely critical question this episode raises (and a minor corollary to it). That is: when are we going to see Senator Binks?
Jar Jar Binks was so ferociously maligned on the release of the Phantom Menace that his role in the subsequent prequels was trimmed down considerably, but Lucas did retain for him a critical role. Binks is the Senator who — in a repeat of the events of Phantom Menace where Padme played this role — proposes that the Senate grants the Chancellor emergency powers, that he then uses to create the Grand Army and ultimately elevate himself to the position of Emperor.
Small cog, big machine.
Since Mon Mothma’s original intrusion into this series the Coruscant content has only been creeping up. We’ve seen the Senate, the speeders, the endless political hokum. Not noted enough is how much this content, which is of a high quality with much of the rest of Andor, draws almost exclusively from the prequels. Indeed, the spectre of the Emperor which hangs over many of the Coruscant-set scenes can only be understood as the conniving, sophisticated Chancellor Palpatine rather than the seething space wizard from Return of the Jedi.
Andor does diverge — as noticed in droll fashion by twitter commentators — from the stage-like dialogue style of the George Lucas films, instead going for a somewhat naturalistic style, though far from the hyperactive modern blockbuster sensibility the sequel films ended up with. It would be hard to imagine Anakin and Padme’s romantic exchanges intercut with scenes on Ferrix. Jar Jar however, despite having his own dialogue controversy, does not speak in particularly romantic terms. Indeed, given what would be his now long departure from his home world of Naboo for the life of the senator, a broadening of his speak would make sense — one fewer ‘meesa’ here and there.
Below-level Coruscant looks a lot like Heathrow airport, the quintessential British dystopia.
If you’re wondering how the character of an aging politician who has done little in their political career other than inadvertently vote for terrible things might be portrayed, might I suggest the array of colourful characters in the British Parliament.
But perhaps that would be too cynical for poor Jar Jar, who retains a childlike innocence through his appearances that parallels him with Anakin, the other ‘stray’ adopted by Qui-gon Gin during the course of The Phantom Menace. Both Anakin and Jar Jar have a wide-eyed approach to politics that allows them to be manipulated by Palpatine, and while we know that Anakin is enmeshed into the Imperial apparatus long into the future, it would be very neat to see a comfortable Senator Binks do the grunt work of the new Emperor in the Senate — perhaps engaging in some light menacing of Mon Mothma. Alleline, the US-aligned up-and-comer who takes over MI6 in Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy isn’t a villain — just someone too unaware to know when he’s being played. That’s how I’d fit Jar Jar in here.
Mon Mothma’s husband is a fascinating character. I hope he ends up doing a Mishima coup or somthing.
Anyhow, idle thoughts.
The corollary is (of course) are we going to see Sheev himself? But I think the answer to that one is “probably, yes”.
Dragging ourselves miserably back to the world of Star Wars, it would be remiss not to mention that having showed us that it could be a better Obi-wan, Andor doesn’t miss a beat in showing us that it could be a better Solo — the tight-knit group of proto-rebels lifting improbably defended Imperial resources being the middle act of that film. It’s a very well executed heist movie, giving us the full Ocean’s 11: here are the cast, here are the pieces, here’s half the plan and here’s one or two wrinkles.
In a fashion that feels ludicrously expensive, the show introduces more new characters for this run of episodes than appeared in Obi-wan in total: for our heist squad, there’s the bossy one, the uptight one, the sleazy one, the intense one, the double agent, and the communist. For the opposition: the double agent (again), a rake of subordinates, the squalid provincial governer, a prestigious colonial administrator on a visit, and a plucky comms officer who is going to be in exactly the wrong place at the wrong time.
Stay outdoors, my dude. Going back to your station is not going to go well for you.
Some interesting formalisms at play too, with episode 5 following the spread of different characters through a single extended day, breakfast to dusk — all apparently in the service of a pretty good joke where off-the-board player piece Karn, the antagonist of the first run of episodes, appears to spend the entire day miserably eating one bowl of cereal. Karn’s position in the plot is usurped by a run of scenes of bureaucratic intrigue in the Imperial Spy Ministry (or some such), a larger, snobbier version of Karn’s treasured corporate police.
In an impossibly charming move (in a show that is coming to be defined by the quantity of charming moves it cares to pull off in each episode) the scheme is explained to us over a scale model of the target base, which gets a ceremonial burning the night before the mission that manages to evoke Darth Vader’s funeral pyre.
Interesting is the extent to which the show is happy to play on our pre-knowledge of the character of Andor — obviously as the protagonist he was always going to be likely to have some kind of heart of gold, but the specifics go further. The scene where he reassures the other proto-revolutionaries that tensions always run high the night before a mission seems almost to position Rogue One prior to Andor in the running order. We know this character has experience with rebel missions: we’ve seen him steal the Death Star plans. Cassian’s run of shooting first continues unabated too, all the more pointed with the similarities to Solo.
Skarsgard gets to flex his acting muscles and his facial muscles in his mirror life as the smiling curiosity shop owner — the show again cannily shying away from exactly why such a profession might be prudent for a rebel agent. These scenes introduce Mon Mothma, a vintage Star Wars character who has never really had one, except possibly in the extended universe of books that I never read. These scenes are also set on a returning Coruscant, speeder cars and dining chambers looking every bit as grandiloquent as it was depicted in the Prequels. There’s even a scene in the Imperial senate, which was always an incredible bit of visual design and I was thrilled to see it return. We don’t see who is in position on the centre podium, alas.
Last time turmoil engulfed the Galactic Republic as we discussed episode -3 of Obi-wan, The Phantom Menace.
They better not try and make a big thing out of that Quake logo Rebel Alliance symbol again. I will snap.
So once again we return to these damn Star Wars. It does feel like a joke. Following Obi-wan I swore blind that I was done dipping my toes in the Disney Star War pool, the life-giving waters were certainly all dried up and gone by the time I watched Kenobi face Vader on the exceedingly dark planet of the stalagmites. The problem — it seemed — was that there was simply nothing more to say on the subject of Star Wars. You can pass some time making do-overs, like the sequel trilogy, you can last a while doodling in the gaps as with Solo and Rogue One, and Mandalorian probably warranted a look-in from me eventually but there’s an awful lot of it. Disney’s four-billion-dollar purchase was running along on borrowed time. At some point they were going to try something — like interpolating an alternative follow-up to the prequel trilogy where Vader has some kind of evil daughter who menaces baby Luke — and have it just not work. And so it was.
I found Andor to be a baffling announcement for a series anyway, in the fashion of Michael Bluth hearing about his son’s girlfriend. Really? Him? Don’t get me wrong, Diego Luna was perfectly pleasant in Rogue One, his chemistry with protagonist Felicity Jones papering over any number of cracks in the shooting script. Despite that, he wasn’t an obvious candidate for the extended universe treatment, not just because — spoilers abound — he pops his clogs in the climax of that film, sacrificing himself to the rebel cause. There’s little obvious scope for expanding his story in preference to any of the rest of that cast, many of who were underserved in Rogue One. It almost seemed ridiculous to hope that, even absent the pressure of dealing with a prominent legacy character like Ben Kenobi, the series might flourish. The most we could hope for was that in a post-Obi-wan world, it might be a safer bet to take on characters and relationships that aren’t dripping with potential — if only to save us all the heartbreak.
Him?
I speculated in writing on that series that Obi-wan was an attempt to make a new sequel to Revenge of the Sith in the way that Rogue One had been an attempt to make a new prequel to A New Hope. The insertion of Andor into this genealogy forces us to consider Rogue One insteadas a new Return of the Jedi, the terminal end of a series that’s about to be filled in backwards. This is, inarguably, a George Lucas move. From the prequels to the Clone Wars to the Young Indiana Jones Chronicles, George Lucas loves nothing more than starting a series in the middle somewhere. Could this be an authentically positive omen for Andor?
Getting it out of the way straight off, it’s good. I hate it and I wish it weren’t the case but it’s really good. The genius of Andor, at least in this first trilogy of episodes, is that it doesn’t even try. It’s barely Star Wars. Where it could reference Star Wars it often doesn’t — when antagonist Arnold Rimmer addresses a crack team of extremely unpleasant security agents in the second episode, it could be a pastiche of Darth Vader addressing the bounty hunters in Empire Strikes Back, but it isn’t. Instead its Lieutenant Gorman from Aliens trying to give a pep talk to the cops from The Fifth Element. The first episode opens with the titular Cassian Andor (last seen sleepwalking through that terrible reshoot scene for Rogue One where he lets a man climb halfway up a wall before shooting him) in a greasy, grimy neon city that’s Blade Runner by way of Attack of the Clones but separate and distinct from both.
This feels mean.
It seems implausible that we actually see less of this future neon city than we do the party drug planet from Obi-wan given how much more vibrant and coherent it feels — in what will become a running mark of quality, there’s an extended scene of the club bouncer patting Andor down and giving him the house rules before he heads in. These small moments and subtle characters count tenfold in making the setting compelling, and Andor has them in spades: the busybody on the space transport who thinks everything’s crooked, the town bellringer who takes immense pride in his work without saying a single word, the guy who Cassian owes money to who has hired a local shark man to lightly menace him (yes, a loan-shark). These things could all easily be on the cutting room floor, and a persistent complaint I had about Obi-wan was that they invariably were, giving the impression of a world where people only ever talked when they wanted to muse about starting a rebellion.
This is just Wall-E.
The introduction sequence ends with the inciting incident for the plot of this run of three episodes: Andor shoots first. Framed for a crime he totally committed, he desperately tries to get off-planet while paying his debts and looking after his suspiciously sassy mother. A droid that looks like Wall-E to such an extent that Disney would surely sue if this weren’t being made by Disney pleads with him to stay, but no dice, he’s getting his friend who works on pod race engines to ring up Stellen Skarsgård immediately. Interspersed are flashback scenes in which we see that Andor himself comes from a tribe of presumably-indigenous humanoid scavengers on an Imperial planet. That is to say, he is an Ewok.
The antagonism is provided by Inspector Karn, who as I’ve mentioned draws on no-one so much as Red Dwarf’s Arnold Rimmer, a cripplingly insecure, incredibly tedious busybody who serves as deputy inspector for the sub-Imperial corporate police force. He is an absolute delight in every scene, especially once paired with Alex Fern’s toadying fascist sergeant. I can only assume we’re going to see him get promoted to the highest ranks in the course of his Javert-like pursuit of Andor (who, I should note again, is totally guilty).
Boo! Hiss!
It’s not all roses (well, it’s mostly roses). The 40-minute episode format, while I personally prefer it to the prestige TV standard hour makes little sense for a set of three episodes that feel like nothing more than an episode of Sherlock, a show that hugely benefitted from its feature-length runtime. The ending of the second episode is particularly odd, showcasing some dramatic walking that has the air of being test footage. I’m going to try and consider the show to be a run of movies as best as I can, a series of four features. If they’d released it all at once I’d probably have gone back to my old tricks and started at the end.
The action sequence that takes up most of the third episode falls a little flat in places, such as the multiple uses of “a rope coil has suddenly detached from a pillar” maybe making sense from a logical point of view but perhaps not a dramatic one. Much in the tradition of classic Doctor Who however, the bread and butter of the acting is just good enough to make up for it. Watching Skarsgård and Luna bicker over who gets to be mysterious and aloof to who is well worth the price of entry.
Not another one!
The ending of the third episode, where Andor leaves with Skarsgård, is somewhat muted only because we’re having such a great time with the characters established on Ferrix (the name of the planet). I didn’t want to see them go, but I also can’t see how the plot could return to Ferrix without being contrived. We’ll see. Plenty of time to mull things over in the weeks to come.
The tricky thing with Star Wars is, everyone wants to have a lightsaber. You want to have a lightsaber. I want to have a lightsaber. The people making Andor want to have a lightsaber. How long can they maintain the trapeze act of making Star Wars that isn’t primarily influenced by Star Wars? That’s what we’re going to find out, I guess.
I had something of a moment watching Thor: Love and Thunder, and it wasn’t in reaction to any of the gags or tonal shifts that have enraged other reviewers and commentators. I have no particular distaste for the screaming goats, or the musical cues, or the subplot about Natalie Portman’s character’s illness. They’re all fine, occasionally humourous elements of what is ultimately a comedy film, and if they’re let down it’s by ropey, undercooked visual effects and a crushingly conservative edit that takes away much of the time in which an audience might laugh. There was a point in the film though that brought my objection into sharp focus, and I would like to describe it to you.
Following along with the aforementioned plot concerning Natalie Portman’s character, Jane Porter, we see Jane learn that she has a fatal prognosis and turn to the mysticism of Thor’s hammer to escape from her certain fate. This fails, however, and Porter continues to suffer after reuniting with Thor himself and coming along to face off against Christian Bale’s villain, Gorr. Portman is taken to the “New Asgard Infirmary”, the local medical unit for the relocated Asgardians of Avengers: Endgame, which we assume will be able to take a knowledgable eye to Porter’s condition. Sadly they have little insight other than to inform the audience that if Porter continues to use the hammer, she will perish. Porter bravely sacrifices herself thus in the climax, earning a place in Valhalla.
Portman does a good job despite, well, most things.
Hence follows a brief gag in which Thor — unfamiliar with the concept of a vending machine — steals some snacks to give Porter. The machine is located outside of Porter’s room and is a standard glass-front vending machine showing an array of items in rows and columns, with prices and a coin slot. The provenance of the machine, though obvious, is conveyed through branding on the glass: “New Asgard Infirmary”.
This small detail displaced something inside me. The idea that the magic hospital of the gods charges you for a bag of crisps is so unfathomably depressing that it thrust me back down to earth like a reforged flying hammer. That Jane Porter, given her diagnosis of magic space hammer sickness, would nonetheless have to pay two dollars twenty five for a Diet Coke is a joke on another plane of existence to anything else in Thor: Love and Thunder.
And that’s the moment it dawned on me: nobody in this film believes anything at all.
A scene early on in the film that has received some criticism but mostly bafflement is the one in which Valkyrie, as King of Asgard, attends the opening of a chain Thanos-themed ice cream parlour. Much has been made of the idea that the people of earth would want to joke about a traumatic event in which half the population were briefly believed dead, or whether the image of Thano’s gauntlet would have such penetration in a world in which he was a spectral villain who committed a great evil and not the motion-captured star of a major motion picture. So far as I am aware no Mayor of New York ever attended the opening of an Osama Bin Laden Pizzeria, though I may be mistaken.
It’s not the Thanos-themed ice cream that I find most grotesque in this sequence though. More distressing is the spectacle of the King of Asgard reduced to commercial endorsements: Valkyrie was raised to the position formerly held by Odin himself at the end of Avengers: Endgame, a slovenly Thor not considering himself worthy of the role. King Valkyrie was supposed to be worthy of leading Asgard — worthiness being a major concern of Thor films until that point — and her leadership would restore Asgard to some semblance of glory in exile. In this sequel we first see her cutting the ribbon on a theme park concession.
This is a real-life news report on the fictional ice cream shop.
Asgard in the previous movies was a city of the gods, a heavenly utopia in which immortal beings considered the cosmos. I don’t want to suggest by any means that this should mean they can’t be mocked or made fun of, but there’s something fundamentally perverse about having them appear in this film completely subsumed into a capitalist existence. King Valkyrie has, fundamentally, failed. The film can only gloss this over because Disney films are the only media in existence which do not consider being transformed into a Disney version of your own history to be a living nightmare.
And that’s what New Asgard is — a fixed, calcified history of itself, the Disney cruise ships lurking ominously in the background of the establishing shot. The monument to Thor’s ruined hammer an open-air Tower of London Crown Jewels exhibit. Valkyrie appears in the advert linked above prowling the streets for petty criminals, a King who has become little more than a street warden. It’s not that we should revere the provisionally imperialist, revanchist state that Odin oversaw in Thors 1 & 2, but to see not just the governance but the culture scrubbed clean like this is halting.
The people of New Asgard have completely foreclosed not only on restoring any semblance of their own society, but on any semblance of a society better than that of Earth — of ‘Midgard’. The society in which Thor’s mother once passed away on a luxurious wooden bed surrounded by silks being waited on hand and foot can no longer even provide a complementary bag of crisps in the hospital waiting room. And they aren’t even unhappy about it — they aren’t unhappy about anything.
Gorr is visually compelling, even if there’s some suspicion that all those shadows are hiding some dubious renders.
The children of Asgard are stolen, and Thor traces their theft to a white-cloaked man called Gorr the God-Killer. Gorr, as we see in the pre-credits sequence, is a man who has suffered a personal tragedy at the hands of his God, a stocky bearded man who would rather cavort with nymphs than rescue a man’s dying child. Gorr takes up a magical blade and kills him, beginning a crusade of assassinations against all Gods that culminates in using the children of Asgard as a lure to secure Thor’s help in using a thematically repetitive wishing device at the centre of the universe to finish the Gods off once and for all. This is the central conflict of the film, and the problem is that Gorr is unequivocally right.
The Gods as depicted in this film are capricious, indulgent lordlings, the picture of feudal sloth. Thor visits the City of the Gods, a second Asgard, where he witnesses Zeus engage in tedious despotic displays of self-aggrandisation to a bored audience. Asking for assistance in retrieving his missing children, Zeus cruelly and selfishly dismisses Thor, who with his companions fights his way out of the council chamber (a visual callback to the Star Wars prequels, with Zeus in place of Palpatine, no less). As a parting blow to the puffed-up imbecilic overlord Zeus, Thor uses a lightning bolt to shoot him through the heart. Zeus falls, dead, from his carriage — he later appears alive again in a post-credit scene, apparently to scrub Thor’s conscience for those of us worried about his immortal soul.
Zeus, shortly before being righteously gunned down. Mas Amedda just out of shot.
Gorr is correct about the Gods, and Thor agrees with him. They are both at this point God-Killers, dismayed with the corruption of a treasured institution. Fundamentally they do not disagree. They could team up; unique among the Marvel Cinematic Universe’s villains, Gorr does not go out of his way to reinforce his evil credentials, beyond some half-hearted child-menacing. Surely he could be persuaded, or redeemed, or fully embraced. Could the suffering peasant take his place in the reformed city of the gods-on-earth, in New Asgard? He cannot. Gorr dies, death being the penalty for his belief. The ‘necro-sword’ that embodies the idea that a man might slay a god is — conveniently — corrosive and fatal to those that wield it. We may eschew the sword entirely: believing in an idea is corrosive and fatal in the world of Love and Thunder. All we can hope to achieve is looking cool and kicking ass and impressing our dying ex-girlfriend. Thor adopts Gorr’s daughter, granted life by Gorr’s dying wish, and teaches her the vague interventionist values he lives by — without ever changing anything.
In the final post-credits scene, Jane Foster reaches the Halls of Valhalla, where the greatest heroes who fell in battle live on. Foster and Gorr suffer identical deaths. Foster is present, the Gorr is not. Valhalla doesn’t really believe in the cosmic resonance of individual valour — it’s just a place some people end up.
You could continue in this vein; the people Thor assists with the help of the Guardians of the Galaxy at the start of the film see Thor destroy, through carelessness, their greatest city and holy site, but they don’t really care. They still like him. They didn’t really believe in it at all.
What Thor chases throughout the film is meaning, but meaning is never located in actually achieving anything. Meaning is friends, family, love. Thor can tell Jane how he feels but he cannot save her. He cannot really even try.
The political theorist Mark Fisher described his concept of ‘capitalist realism’ as “the widespread sense that not only is capitalism the only viable political and economic system, but also that it is now impossible to even imagine a coherent alternative to it”. It is obviously too much to expect Thor: Love and Thunder to dis-spell capitalist realism for us. It is likely too much to expect for Thor: Love and Thunder to even mildly critique capitalist realism for us. But it could offer us crumbs of idealism. It could offer us a free bag of crisps. It could offer us a paradise on earth that isn’t framed by cruise ships. It does not.
