Can’t lie, that fleece looks so cozy. Buy me an Ahsoka fleece.
I left off last time equivocating over whether Ahsoka would achieve more in its eight episodes than a set of filmed warm-up sessions for some future cinematic release. Unfortunately, and really somewhat unexpectedly, it hasn’t. The events of the series, crafted to fill the moments immediately preceding the plot of an as-yet unfilmed movie, were circumscribed so closely that in the end you can list all in brief — Sabine is training with Ahsoka now, Thrawn has flown back from whale exile. Witches abound. Ray Stevenson’s character exists.
It’s clear in retrospect that nothing was permitted to happen that might close off a possibility for the upcoming movie and so all the big set-pieces only open up ideas and never close them off. The two rogue Jedi never explain their whole deal. The zombie Stormtroopers only really pop in to say ‘Hi’. The movie — ‘Heir to the Empire’, if you hadn’t heard — even has the option to leave the cast of this show entirely out of frame if Lucasfilm decide they’d rather have a fresh protagonist.
Look, I get that making them zombies has its own particular appeal but they’re already a faceless legion. Thematically I’m not sure what you’re getting here.
‘Less than the sum of it’s parts’ is my ultimate verdict, and the sum of the parts wasn’t all that grandiose in itself. A loose-floating prologue, dispensable on its own terms, a free comic book day introduction to a pre-existing character in the middle of an extended up. Superhero comics suggest themselves as an analogue — Star Wars’ own Countdown to Final Crisis. This is all a bit mean, but I think the ability to appreciate this show is dependant — much like a comic book — on preexisting familiarity with the characters. I don’t have it!
In a slightly laughable retread of the bleak final moments of Obi-wan, Ahsoka goes out with a lingering shot of Anakin Skywalker himself — an always-welcome Hayden Christensen once more — as a shimmering force ghost, casting a neutral expression verging on a smile at the departing Ahsoka. The cliffhanger ending — in case you don’t know — leaves all the main characters trapped out in space with no route home, awaiting the benevolence of a noble space whale, no doubt. But the viewer’s heart is warmed knowing that the ghost of interplanetary youngling murderer Anakin Skywalker is watching over them.
Look out! It’s history’s greatest monster!
Wait, what? It’s a curious move even for this show, where the title character spends most of their introspection time capital-C Conflicted over their relationship with the big guy and his authoritarian ways. The difficultly of reconciling the person you know with a horrifying act you discover they have committed is fertile fictional ground, but when Anakin made his appearance in the world of Ahsoka’s mind earlier in the season he was exactly that — in Ahsoka’s mind. It’s one thing to come to terms with the memory of the person you know, and another thing entirely to welcome their walking, talking ghost back on stage. How can Ahsoka possibly interact with this murderous spectre? What would she say? Is it possible for a Jedi to arrest a ghost? It’s baffling.
Same, Morgan. Also the show took a real turn into not looking great for these last two episodes.
That’s about all there is really. Morgan Elsbeth did nothing and went out like a chump. Every time a Jedi did a force push it looked utterly ridiculous. The David Tennant robot eventually did what he’d been threatening to do for seven episodes and became slightly grating to listen to. RIP Green Mary Elizabeth Winstead, she never looked good. They even ruined my theory that you couldn’t put an Andor actor into the same scene as an Ahsoka actor by having Mon Mothma turn up live for another of those interminable council scenes, with a special guest appearance from C3PO. I assure you that as a true blooded Star Wars fan I toasted the screen when he entered, in gratitude for getting to see the guy I already know.
So to revise my statement from the end of the first of these essays I wrote about Ahsoka, it does seem that there is no Lazarine return for quality Star Wars after all. The sickness, yes, is that unto death.
If you like my writing, watch my new video essay The Fanatic, available now with a short companion essay kindly published by Blood Knife. If you’re after more text, please follow me on Medium or subscribe to my Letterboxd reviews.
Last time we picked up the tale of Ahsoka Tano, former cartoon.
Hayden Christensen, star of Obi-wan, makes his on-screen return.
Look I’m sorry — I really am — but I’m struggling to care about Ahsoka. Despite my initial optimism, born of a desire to come to any work of art without preconception, in a state of pure innocence, my interest just hasn’t sustained. Part of this blame can rightly be portioned out to the show itself, which in a call-back to the dire days of Obi-wan spent a good three and a half episodes spinning its wheels (the plus points of those first two episodes quickly passing out of memory), followed by a passable but slight subsequent two and a half following. Part of it must sit with me.
The good then, in brief: Thrawn is a passable villain. He has been introduced far too late in the game, and yet we were never allowed to be unaware of him, muting the possibility of the other villains (and this show is stacked with them) taking the fore. The Lord of the Rings planet is novel and spooky, though the proto-Hobbits were laying it on a bit thick and the action scene where Sabine fought the space-Orcs was dry. The threat of additional space-Orcs is dryer still. And the laser sword fight between Ahsoka and Ray Stevenson was delightful — bizarre that it was in the same episode as the placid duel between Sabine (motivation: have her opponent hang around a bit) and Shin (motivation: have her opponent hang around a bit).
The bad, well: Let’s consider.
I’ve failed to mention of course the triumphant return of Hayden Christensen, who is apparently allowed to be in these things so long as he doesn’t hang around too much. His episode-long ‘A’-story in Ahsoka’s mind palace hits all the nostalgia notes for Episode II, and were I structuring these essays in a sensible and planned manner this would be a prime time to tackle that film and Christensen’s performance therein.
Hint I have however, with my use of the television-land language of ‘‘A’-story’, at what is ultimately bothering me about Ahsoka more than anything. It’s television. This is the most crushingly unfair of complaints, but at the root it’s what is turning me off. Obi-wan was never sure whether it was a diced-up movie or a cinematic miniseries, but Ahsoka is teevee, capital-T Television, with the ‘A’-story and the ‘B’-story and the self-contained episode plot always in an uneasy truce with the grand plot arc, in a way TV writers think was finally solved by Buffy the Vampire Slayer but it really wasn’t. Thrawn gets mentioned all the time because it’s foreshadowing, not because I should be expecting him to appear onscreen. There’s filler episodes because TV needs filler episodes. Ahsoka is what it aims to be and what it aims to be just isn’t for me. The same was true (but more recognisable) in Mandolorian. I’d be better off picking off standalone exceptional episodes than trying to take my medicine weekly like I have been.
To me, Star Wars is cinema — the grand image, the swelling score, the single most important story that has ever been told playing out on screen in front of you. There’s no room in my Star Wars for day-to-day trials and tribulations. There’s no room for forty minutes of Ahsoka training Sabine. When Sabine is finally reunited with her lost paramour Ezra (no relation), she seems… pleased. Andor fooled me into thinking that I could watch a Star Wars TV show by being not Star Wars and not being really a TV show. More fool me.
The show recognises that akin to Vader in Rogue One, Genevieve O’Reilly’s Mon Mothma can only appear in the same room as the cast of Ahsoka as an image, a representation, a spectre.
I have fairer complaints. Green Mary Elizabeth Winstead has graduated from pebble-in-your-shoe to millstone-around-your-neck in terms of frustrating characterisation. You fought a war, Green Mary Elizabeth Winstead! You should be able to compellingly navigate a bureaucracy! You should be able to put your own contact lenses in!
The decision to cast a different actor for young Ahsoka in the scenes opposite Christensen is really baffling. Dawson as Ahsoka hasn’t exactly been stretched by the demands of the role, among other tasks spending the entire Episode 6 reclined in a chair, so giving the scene with all the emotions to an (admittedly talented) newbie puts in a weird distance between the main actor and the scenes.
There’s some real bite in the images of fallen Clone Troopers here, which flow into the next episode’s guerilla Stormtroopers.
The space whales are a particularly baffling piece of errata brought over from the cartoon. Structurally in the episode, interacting with them is the reward of the wisdom Ahsoka gains from confronting her personal demons and facing Anakin/Vader. Why facing down Vader permits you to talk to a whale is left by the show as an exercise for the viewer. It’s a nice visual though.
I’m typing this out shortly before a new episode (7 of a total 8) is released. Perhaps it will sew this all together into one suitably grandiose narrative. Or perhaps it will cement my concern that this is all just marketing pre-roll for an upcoming return to movie theaters, with nothing of consequence being concluded: a final shot of a freed Thrawn vowing revenge on the galaxy, eight episodes to build what Rise of Skywalker achieved with a single Fortnite tie-in. Or perhaps it will be more jigsaw pieces settling themselves into the big patchwork board of Dave Filoni Star Wars TV shows, of interest to some (and very validly so, I should add) but maybe not, in the end, to me.
George would have fixed this in post, that’s all I’m saying here.
If you like my writing, watch my new video essay The Fanatic, available now with a short companion essay kindly published by Blood Knife. If you’re after more text, please follow me on Medium or subscribe to my Letterboxd reviews.
The goofy headdress gives her something of Vader’s profile at a glance.
It’s pathological at this point. I keep going back. Like every true Star Wars fan, all I want to talk about is this Star Wars that I don’t like (Obi-wan, you may recall). The signs were not promising here, as the next in a series of underwhelming Disney+ live action TV shows across all of their fetid intellectual properties, the trailer for Ahsoka made a baffling show of underwhelming face paint and robots fighting in a grey scrapyard. Regardless though, with the mood of a wayward child spitefully trekking upstairs to bed, I sat myself down and watched the first two episodes.
It’s a continuation — I understand — of the cartoons, which are an element of Star Wars I deemed far too ‘expanded universe’ for my tastes circa 2003, and I’ve still only seen half of the Tartakovsky series, as well as a handful of Clone Wars episodes when it was briefly available on UK Netflix. I am aware though basic cultural osmosis that there is a character named ‘Ahsoka’, a female Jedi with two laser swords who was Anakin Skywalker’s apprentice before he had to go back to be in the regular movies*. Ahsoka is an interesting protagonist, being introduced in a Raiders-of-the-Lost-Ark-esque sequence where she breaks into a tomb, solves a puzzle, then emerges with the prize to find her enemies waiting. You’d be forgiven at first for thinking her a bit of a generic badass, but once she has to interact with the show’s secondary characters the character gains some fun dimensions: she’s awkward, a touch cold, very direct, and easy irritating. She’s not making any quips, is what’s important — an invaluable trait that keeps the whole thing from feeling utterly trivial.
I was horrified in the opening scroll that this whole thing was going to be about tracking down this secret map-sphere, in the fashion of Force Awakens. Thankfully it is not.
Secondary protagonist Sabine, Ahsoka’s own disappointing protege, is exactly the quip-primed badass who plays by no-one’s rules you might expect of a modern Star War. The first episode smartly undercuts this by immediately making Ahsoka completely correct in her narrow estimations of the character — once Ahsoka’s Padawan as she was Anakin’s — as Sabine loses the priceless magic map-apple that Ahsoka grave-robbed in the opening. Green Mary Elizabeth Winstead, who seems oddly underserved by the smirk-heavy acting direction in these first two episodes, is the Zordon-like figure nudging these plucky kids around and David Tennant plays a camp robot in the finest Star Wars tradition.
Green Mary Elizabeth Winstead is about as far from Stellen Skarsgård as you can get, but they’re in similar roles.
It’s pleasant, it should be noted, to be enjoying a Star Wars property fronted by a series of women. Leia and Padme were great characters but often perhaps a tad outnumbered. The only other prominent male characters in these first two episodes are gravel voiced non-Jedi Ray Stevenson, and the guy who played Taub in House M.D., seen here playing a Taub-like character who apparently gets arrested at the end just for being a useless tit. Ahsoka, Sabine, Green Mary Elizabeth Winstead, tertiary antagonist Shin, looming primary antagonist ‘Morgan Elsbeth’ (might want to check if there’s an even more witch-like name in the back), it’s a bold move for a series that famously had executives twisting themselves into knots over whether The Last Jedi’s Rose Tico was permitted to appear in another movie.
It’s not Andor, of course, but it’d be weird if it was. This is Star Wars in the form of Star Wars, and there’s a pleasing charm to seeing the aesthetic elements that Andor turned to new ends played straight. Showrunner Filoni was deemed something of a designated heir to the setting by Lucas and by contrast to Obi-wan (and Solo, Force Awakens, Last Jedi) which seemed to fear the association of the prequels Filoni appears to have a grasp of what it all means, what it’s all supposed to convey. The New Republic here appears in the negative space left by the Empire it deposed, nerdy types in cosplay helmets standing in the formations previously held by Imperial Stormtroopers, or going back further Trade Federation Battle Droids. Antagonist Ray Stevenson and his apprentice are introduced in a delightful mash-up of the start of A Phantom Menace and A New Hope, announcing themselves as two Jedi and performing a daring jailbreak (full marks to the Captain in this sequence, who does a note-perfect impression of Picard at his most cavalier).
Nerd alert. Someone has put a plastic bin on that R2 unit.
Where Ahsoka fails to live up to Lucas’s sextet is only in the melodrama of it all — hopefully this will ramp up as the series goes on. Anakin’s troubles are all-encompassing, with the score swelling in the beautiful setting as he curses that he cannot love Padme. Luke’s longing to leave Tatoonine is inflamed as he stares at the double sunset. And so on. Ahsoka is ‘just’ TV, for its sins. Hopefully it can transcend. There’s more than enough in these first two episodes for me to keep watching, I think — the only other possibility is that this sickness for watching Star Wars is a sickness unto death.
If you like my writing, watch my new video essay The Fanatic, available now with a short companion essay kindly published by Blood Knife. If you’re after more text, please follow me on Medium or subscribe to my Letterboxd reviews.
(*) Is it congruent with Revenge of the Sith to suggest that Anakin trained an apprentice? It’s certainly a decision in the characterisation — solely watching the films, you might be tempted to imagine Anakin a sheltered youth, too long kept tucked under the wing of his teacher and master. The thought that he had his own run at being the teacher, while obviously doomed in any portrayal of the character (“Join me, and together we can rule the galaxy as father and son!”), makes him a decidedly more social animal.
At some point in the script this was a classic Star Wars de-hand and we have been robbed.
Blanc is meant to be at rock bottom here but damn if that doesn’t look like a good time.
Whenever someone asks me about Sherlock Holmes, I tell them the same (somewhat exaggerated) factoid: every single one of Doyle’s short stories about the famous detective concerns at least one character who has a dark secret from his or her time in the colonies. You can comically unravel a good number of the stories just by keeping an ear out for which character has been abroad and assuming that any mystery will have taken place therein. Why is Sherlock Holmes, a character who rarely if ever leaves England, so concerned with goings-on in lands far away? It’s because for all their pure-logic puzzle-box mystique, detective stories most often reflect the anxieties of the times and places they are written in. To have a mystery you must have secrets, and to have secrets you need anxieties. Sherlock fears the colonies, Poirot the precarious luxury of high soceity between the wars. Gervase Fen is very concerned about pylons and the electricity board.
So it is into this tradition that Rian Johnson’s Southern US detective Benoit Blanc steps with his duo of murder mystery films which reflect a modern anxiety: that the rich are going to kill us all. The first film, Knives Out, steps lightly as it weaves a (slightly) contrived story about ungrateful children and rightful inheritance. The naked inequality of it all is present but nudged to one side, and by constraining the world of the film to a single house Johnson is able to turn the world upside down at the climax, with struggling nurse Marta on top and the privileged rabble of disinherited children below. It’s neat, if fantastical.
The just-released sequel, Glass Onion, dives further into the mires of the present: it’s about an unfathomably wealthy tech entrepreneur and his chosen friends, it’s set in the COVID pandemic. It touches on the energy crisis, lingers extensively on social media and PR cycles, and has Dave Bautista playing a manosphere-aping supplement salesman.
He’s not quite as horribly tactile as Eisenberg’s Lex Luthor but Edward Norton’s variety of psychopath outfits are fun.
Edward Norton’s antagonist Miles Bron is a billionaire in the mold of Elon Musk or Mark Zuckerberg, someone with world-changing resources which he devotes to the expression of personal whims (c.f. child submarines or virtual reality headsets) in the face of the cosmic terror of actually changing anything. The story goes thus: six aspirational young adults used to meet in their local bar, sadly closed down by the present for undiscussed economic reasons, and talk about their individual dreams. Positive-vibes hypeman Miles Bron becomes the de-facto leader of the pack, who along with Janelle Monáe’s Andi Brand founded a generic tech megacorp the resources of which were siphoned into a level of success for the other four. Andi and Miles came into conflict over a dangerous new fuel research and Miles cruelly gave Andi the boot from the company she made great, by use in court of a crude facsimile of the bar napkin on which the company was conceived. Her friends all turned against her, Andi was set to expose the fraud with the discovery of the original napkin when she was murdered by persons unknown.
Already we have a fictional contrivance: the idea that for the creation of a tech company on the level of Facebook for instance there must have been someone who was uniquely talented. Andi Brand (a curious choice of surname) is the real talent in the duo, the true owner of the critical napkin that much of the plot revolves around. But the idea is ridiculous. Corporate creation myths are ridiculous. Facebook’s billion-dollar success story was fueled by a tech bubble and merciless exploitation of monopoly status. There are very few great ideas sketched out in margins, and none of them are about founding adtech firms — nobody ever scrawled ‘misrepresent video views’ on a snotty tissue. It’s interesting to note that this is the second film of the year with a scene where a money-making deal is noted on a napkin. In Elvis however, the napkin is representative of the scurrilous nature of the deal, the betrayal that must be hidden. Here it’s a case of good napkin v bad napkin.
Bad napkin.
Elsewhere in the story Johnson seems to understand this about the fabulously successful: that they write these stories about themselves. Bron’s affectation over the Mona Lisa is discussed in exactly these terms, as an attempt to mythologise himself and his ‘works’ by attachment to a recognised greatness. But in the case of the napkins, Johnson indulges himself, that fantastical climax from the first film reasserting itself in the suggestion that maybe everything would be fine if we had only elevated the right billionaire based on the right napkin.
Glass Onion has been lauded in some parts for its integration of COVID restrictions into the story, with some light, humourous character work around which characters are wearing which kinds of masks and how, as well as Blanc’s overall motivation being driven by lockdown-imposed boredom. I do think this is a bold thing to have attempted, although it’s a fool’s endeavour to try and view the events of COVID as if they are settled history: that time we all wore masks and some people continued to throw parties, ho ho. It could just as easily settle, as many do want, into a grand narrative about the unimaginably disgraceful actions of talentless governments, or else a story about wide, mass tragedy. It’s akin to watching early World War II movies which are unaware that the popular history of that war will yet be in large part determined by the events of the Holocaust.
Of course the movie also quickly sweeps the subject of the pandemic aside with some ambiguous super-vaccine technobabble in the opening scene. This isn’t really a story about that. It forms part of a conscious decision in the film to take aim at the stupidity of it all, the personal contemptibility and self-satisfaction of characters like Bron in place of a broader view of what actually makes them bad. It’s a focus on how Tesla’s “full self-driving” cars might throw themselves at cardboard children in the street while glossing over the more prosaic evil of torpedoing plans for public transport by turning up in the guise of Springfield’s Lyle Lanley and proposing all that money be spent on a ridiculous tunnel instead.
I’ve sold road tunnels to San Jose, Miami and Fort Lauderdale and by gum it put them on the map.
Curiously, Glass Onion is of a piece with The Dark Knight Rises in this regard: movies where billionaires have invented free energy but the ‘correct’ thing presented to do is to not use it to change the world at all. Probably a coincidence.
Coming back to the Mona Lisa, the painting is critical to where I think the movie fails on its own terms: at the climax. The film reaches a point where Blanc has successfully laid out the entire mystery, warts and all. We know who did what, and when, and why. In a callback to a point made earlier in the film though, Blanc and Helen Brand (the sister of the dead woman) have no recourse, no evidence, no legal route through which to see justice done. Solving the mystery does not provide closure or remedy the wrongdoing. This is a deeply unsatisfying way to end a movie however. So Blanc conspires with Brand to trigger an explosive climax: Using Bron’s new energy source, they cause a hydrogen fire at his Greek island estate, burning his possessions and the Mona Lisa along with it. As the characters painstakingly explain to us, this will permanently tar Bron’s name as the man who inadequately cared for a great work of art, a humiliation he cannot recover from. Seeing the wind change, his underlings abandon him.
Everyone knows it says “This is a fake” on the back anyway.
It’s artfully done but that doesn’t seem like much of a punishment to me. The oft-noted propensity for Teslas to catch fire hasn’t done much to blunt the enthusiasm of their owners for their chaotic CEO. Despite desperate attempts by culture war fanatics to make it so, Kim Kardashian damaging Marilyn Monroe’s famous dress hasn’t roused much career-damaging shame. The rotating door of treasured underlings cursing his name and accusing him of all kinds of crimes didn’t bring down the Trump White House.
There is an interesting conversation earlier in the film between Blanc and Brand which, in my opinion, hints at an earlier revision to the plot. Blanc emphasises the bloodless nature of the killing of Andi Brand, how there was no force and no violence involved. Any of the presumably-squeemish tech and politics nerds that make up Bron’s circle could have committed it. Helen Brand, by contrast, is not afraid to step into the tiger’s den — there’s a running joke about her getting drunk and doing something unwisely confrontational. The movie’s single pistol, which Bron used to try and murder Helen minutes before, is not present in the final scene. Personally, were I making the movie, I would give Helen more to do and say in the final seconds of the film than smashing a series of glass sculptures and accidentally making an incoherent reference to the Just Stop Oil protests.
I had totally forgot that Mark Gatiss is piloting a helicopter for some reason in this scene.
Another Sherlock, that played by Benedict Cumberbatch in Steven Moffat’s and Mark Gatiss’s modern-day adaptation, had a mystery with an ending not dissimilar to Glass Onion. At the end of the third season, Sherlock faces off against a Murdoch-esque newspaper magnate named Charles Augustus Magnussen, who taunts Sherlock at the climax of the episode in a similar way to how Bron taughts Brand and Blanc. Magnussen cannot be shown to have committed any crime, and his privilege and wealth will see him out of any embarrassment caused. Sherlock shoots him.
If Glass Onion wants to be a fantasy, it should provide a properly fantastical ending. Miles Bron should be convicted and go to jail. If you can’t provide that, Bron should be immolated in a fireball of his own hubris. If you can’t provide that, Brand should shoot him. As it stands, Brand lights the touch paper, the grand explosion goes off, and the film cuts back to the lounge, everyone in place. Only property is damaged. To punctuate the point, Bron’s car falls through the ceiling. Like a Marvel movie, the only damage has been to innocent cars.
RIP.
One last thing I want to turn over in Glass Onion is the most unfair: Miles Bron has no children in the film. The previous film considered entirely children, figuratively speaking, so I can see why Johnson wanted to avoid going over the same ground. But the idea of children is as central to billionaires and their quest for immortality of any kind as anything else. For hundreds of years the desire of those with power to retain it forever was sublimated into inheritance and bloodlines. Rupert Murdoch has six. Elon Musk has ten. Donald Trump has five. Even Mark Zuckerberg has two. For sure, they’re all banking on human brain interfaces and cryogenic preservation first, but as a backup they’re happy to rely on the old ways.
It’s odd that Bron has no aspirations in this department, nor any indication that he has considered it beyond his prominently-displayed heterosexuality-affirming affair. The question of immortality is inherently visceral, concerned with decay and rot. Even on fire, Bron’s estate is spotless. The shards from his glass onion form perfect beads on the floor. It’s all so very pristine.
The child-free nature of Bron’s crew in Glass Onion allows them an uncanny childishness despite their advanced careers, but you cannot become the most divorced man in the world without children.
