If the stars burn: the second season of "Andor" dispenses with the Jedi
The story of Cassian Andor, the hero of the Galactic Resistance, continued on Disney+. The first three episodes were released online immediately after the release on April 23, and they already have a Russian translation. A new look at "Star Wars" is making the series look forward to awards from the Emmy to the Golden Globe this season, and shocked critics are having a hard time choosing epithets for their admiration. Izvestia evaluated the available episodes of the second season and came to the conclusion that it should be watched even by those who have never heard of Star Wars.
Who is Andor?
Once upon a time there was Cassian Andor, a Rebel hero, nimble, fearless and cunning. He had to find and hand over to the Rebels the plans for the Empire's superweapon, the Death Star. He completed this task and died heroically, but his life saved the Galaxy.
We learned about all this from the movie Rogue One: Star Wars. Stories" in 2016, a prequel to the main plot of "Star Wars". Despite his official role in relation to the franchise, the picture turned out to be so successful that the brand's copyright holder, Disney, returned to this character many years later and launched the "prequel to the prequel", the TV series "Andor" from two seasons.
A shot from the TV series "Andor"
The first of them was released in 2022, and even against the background of other fairly strong Disney series, it stood out for its excellent quality and depth of drama. And Diego Luna was even nominated for a Golden Globe for his role as Andor. Fortunately for Disney and for all of us, the Moon has the amazing property of not aging: compare it in "Andor" with it in the cult movie "And your Mother too" in 2001, the Moon has managed to practically not change since then. Maybe we'll see him back in the "prequel to prequel prequel" as a young Andor.
A shot from the TV series "Andor"
But these are all jokes, and the reality is that the first three episodes of the second season of Andor, which aired on Disney+ on the night of April 23 and immediately appeared online, demonstrated that the owners of Star Wars were not mistaken in betting on this character and his story. It's not even very convenient to call it a series: the second season will be released in blocks of three episodes each week, and it's not so much 12 episodes as four full-length films, each of which shows what happened a year after the previous one. Western critics were shown the entire season, and there is no limit to their delight: 97% of "Tomatoes" call the series the best of what has been done on "Star Wars" for many, many years. Moreover, they write that the middle and the end of the season are stronger than the beginning. It's still difficult for us to judge all this, we can only evaluate the first three episodes. Or, following the logic suggested above, the first full meter out of four.
A shot from the TV series "Andor"
Here, several storylines are developing in parallel, scattered on different sides of the Galaxy. In one, Andor, who has hijacked the latest imperial fighter jet, is held captive by wild rebels in a swampy jungle. In another, friends are waiting for Andor in a huge cornfield, hiding from farmers right under the noses of the Imperials. In the third, the galactic aristocracy holds a dynastic wedding ceremony, where intrigues and long-standing ties are broken between feasts, balls and walks through the mountainous landscape.
Why are there no Jedi in the TV series "Andor"?
The favorite words "Jedi", "Force", "Darth Vader", "Death Star" are never heard anywhere. It's like it's not from here at all. "Andor" is a series about people, weaknesses, betrayal, treachery and desperate exploits, mostly doomed to oblivion. Everything in the "Star Wars" saga was left behind the scenes, because the genre obliged. There was a fairy tale, an epic, a myth. "Andor" is a political thriller, it's realism, it's the underside of the revolutionary struggle. It's all built on the details, on the emotions that could actually be in these circumstances.
A shot from the TV series "Andor"
The opening scene is about a simple woman in the ranks of the Imperials who helps Andor hijack a fighter jet from a space base. Plump, angular, she seems to be a pawn in this game, but for the authors of the series she is a person. And screen time is devoted to her fear, her understanding that she may not live to see the morning, that she will definitely be discovered, because the internal security service of the Empire is working flawlessly. There is no turning back, but ahead of us, we need to make sure that Andor is not exposed ahead of time, and for this we will have to pretend that they have a date, lie to our comrades, blush, giggle. And — to be afraid. How pathetic and false everything Andor was trying to comfort her was! Yes, he understands this himself, but in the interests of the revolution, he and she must be willing to sacrifice.
A shot from the TV series "Andor"
There is an episode here where an imperial careerist introduces his girlfriend, one of the most dangerous antagonists of the series, to his little talkative mother. And we see how the steel monster woman trains to smile before that, how she tries on outfits, how embarrassed she and her boyfriend are in front of a shrewd mother who doesn't care about the gray imperial uniform and all the death stars in the universe when it comes to her dear son. And then there's the scene where the Imperial tries to rape the rebel, how awkwardly she resists, as he moves closer and closer with a grin. Has this happened before in Star Wars? Anyway, what do they have to do with it? To be honest, the computer-drawn scenery here doesn't look quite organic, because what kind of Galaxy is there if it's clearly in front of us?
Earth!
A shot from the TV series "Andor"
Here is the world of the heroes of Marquez or, say, pre-revolutionary Cuba, where there are peasants living half-starved, there are guerrillas who squabble with each other and periodically start shooting at their own, and there is a bourgeoisie that pits the poor and thinks how to become richer. Thus, the core of the plot of the second season is the Empire's desire to carefully, "velvety" conquer the planet Gorman. The local aborigines, 800 thousand inhabitants, do not suspect what an important resource for the Empire is stored in the bowels of the planet. And here, perhaps, for the first time, we are shown that the Empire is not the powerful Sith, Palpatine and stormtroopers, but a very fragile entity that critically lacks resources, and cannot be captured directly, we must look for workarounds. And there's no one to trust, and there's no one to entrust, and there's not enough brains, and there's not enough technology—there's just not enough Empire. It's just a matter of inflating your cheeks, but not everyone understands it for the time being.
A shot from the TV series "Andor"
Like Marquez, young girls and boys barely have time to kiss before they have to grab guns and run to their deaths so that the survivors can give birth to their next future fighters. Few of them see beyond their noses — this, by the way, was brilliantly shown in the first season of "Andor", when the perverted prison — factory workshop in the finale turned out to be one of the gathering points of that very Death Star, but no one saw it.
The main question, of course, is whether all this will be understandable to those who don't know the Star Wars universe well or not at all. And so we can say that the second season of "Andor" can be watched by any neophyte, because everything is clear there, there is the history of the first European colonialists, there is the twentieth century — and our XXI century too — fully armed. Everything here is familiar and everything is enlarged, enhanced, one scene was even shot with a long frame with distorted optics, so that we would stop thinking in terms of a tale about the Jedi and adjust to a different perception, harsh, often joyless and, of course, tragic, because Andor is inexorably moving towards death, calmly accepting it and even rushing the slow A death that would never reach him.
Переведено сервисом «Яндекс Переводчик»
