Andor is the Empire Strikes Back of This Era
In the years since The Empire Strikes Back was released, it’s been the benchmark for every subsequent Star Wars movie:
“Is it as good as ESB?”
“The best since Empire!”
“Where does this rank compared to Empire Strikes Back?”
The reason why that movie is held in such high esteem is not only due to how well it stands out on a technical and thematic level, but that it transcends the movies that bookend it in a way that expanded our understanding of that universe. Nothing since has ever accomplished the same feat, and for the most part creators and fans since then have just been chasing that dragon.
Until Andor.
Andor is the Empire Strikes Back of this era. To understand why, we have to flashback to 1979, after Star Wars had been released but before Empire came out. Everyone knows that Star Wars took over the culture for a couple of years back in the day. It was everywhere, and people thought they had a good idea of what kind of story it was and what it was all about. It’s a fairy tale in space; a story of high adventure with heroes and villains, wizards and princesses, and cool space ships. It was a great, swashbuckling movie, but it was also fairly straightforward and shallow.
If you look at all the surrounding media of the time, you can see how Star Wars was perceived. The look of it had captured the imagination of the masses, but all of the books and errata reflected the movie: they’re all straightforward adventure fare that, while enjoyable reads, are simple stories that trade on the look and feel of the movie.
And then Empire is released. You see, back then the idea of a movie sequel was just to remake the first movie but with a couple of tweaks. You gave the people more of what they knew, but with just enough differences to justify the ticket price. (Yes, I know The Godfather Part II exists, but that was just as much an anomaly as ESB. Godfather Part II is the Empire Strikes Back of the Godfather series. Okay, moving on)
The Empire Strikes Back is a whole different movie from Star Wars.
Gone is the menagerie of aliens from the first movie. We see only a couple here: Yoda and then the lizard man bounty hunter in a brief scene. And Yoda isn’t a carbon copy of Obi-Wan Kenobi. He has a vastly different characterization and relationship to Luke Skywalker. While Kenobi gave Luke a couple of bullet points about the Force and conveniently died, Yoda’s character expands upon the idea and forces Luke (and the audience) to consider it with a fresh perspective.
The movie itself is filmed in a much more grounded style. The shot composition is varied and interesting, the lighting is used to enhance the mood or theme of a scene, and the editing is superb. From a structure, production, and effects standpoint, it’s a superior movie in every way.
Unlike most sequels, the movie doesn’t copy its predecessor or follow its template in the slightest. The climactic battle is at the beginning of the movie and the protagonists lose. The structure of the movie is so completely different that it may has well have been an original movie of its own.
While the first movie is a fast paced (for its time) adventure that quickly moves from scene to scene, Empire takes its time. It borrows the characters and situations from the first movie and then takes them to places unimagined by everyone who thought they knew what Star Wars was about. At the end of that movie, you haven’t gone on a rollicking adventure, you feel like you’ve reached the end of a long, harrowing campaign.
Most people realize after watching Empire that Star Wars was just the appetizer, ESB is the main course. It altered and deepened the perception of what this universe is and expanded what it could be, both visually and narratively. You realize after the fact that Star Wars was merely peering at this universe through a straw. Empire showed that there was so much more to see.
And like that time in the years between Star Wars and ESB, we’ve been treated to ancillary media that’s just mimicked the style and tropes of the original movies. From video games to TV shows, and especially the new Disney era of movies, nearly all of it takes what everyone knows Star Wars to be and just makes more of it. Sure, there are enjoyable variations on the established tropes and themes, and that doesn’t diminish most of those projects at all, but just like sequels in the 1980s, it’s sailing the same known routes and playing the same old hits:
“Oh, it’s just like in Empire!”
“This here is a callback to Jedi”
“I wonder what the surprise twist will be!”
Andor arrived and does exactly what Empire did in 1980: it changes the way a Star Wars story is told and how it’s presented. It’s not concerned with aping a sequence from Return of the Jedi, or telling a story in the same way with the same cliches that’ve been used for the last too many years. It’s completely reset the table and shown us a new way that a story can be told in this universe.
The visual style and narrative are grounded. There are no space wizards. The menagerie of aliens is kept to a minimum. The story is told at street level with everyday characters who exhibit the heroism of ordinary people pushed to extraordinary extremes. The shot composition, lighting, and production design are far removed from its contemporaries. Its narrative, characterizations, and dialogue are superior to the current Star Wars offerings in every way, not only for the craftsmanship and skill of execution, but because they’re not chasing the same 40-year-old dragon.
But it’s still Star Wars. There are still cool spaceships. There are still Rebels and Imperials, but they’re provided a presentation that we’ve never quite seen before. The show takes what’s been shown and expands our perceptions of these people and their circumstances, sometimes in a whole new light and definitely with greater nuance than we’ve seen before.
The larger struggle is still of Light versus Darkness, but down at the ground level there’s a whole lot of gray area. There are decisions made by necessity that aren’t necessarily heroic. We get to see the inner workings and petty careerist politics of Imperials, as well as the absolute fear and desperation of the nascent rebels at both the highest and lowest levels of society.
But it’s still Star Wars. It’s just not the Star Wars inspired by Flash Gordon and The Hero with a Thousand Faces. It’s been taken out of the realm of space opera and placed firmly within the domain of science fiction. It’s holding a mirror to contemporary society, but in a way that’s obscured by its otherworldly setting. It’s familiar enough to be recognizable, but at a safe enough distance from us visually and narratively to not be documentary. It allows us to think and consider. It’s Star Wars inspired by John le Carré and the Communist Manifesto.
And the sad thing is that like Empire, we may never see something like Andor again. Other productions may try to imitate its style, but the rest will continue retelling the same stories and using the same cliches over and over again, always trying to chase that old dragon but never managing to catch it.
None of it will be new like ESB and Andor were.
But there’s always hope.
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