How ILM Films Star Wars Motion Control Spaceships!

I'm not sure what's more disturbing here...the use of a chatbot to imitate a dead man's voice, or the way his family seems okay with it, so long as the money keeps rolling in.

So a bunch of stuff...first off thanks to Linda in dumping a bunch of articles in here to keep the thread somewhat alive. just based on the thread lengths, it seems like SW has a lot less appeal here than Star Trek.

As a result of a change in my cable package, I ended up getting a 6 month free package to Disney +, and have been working my way through the various and assorted "Disney-verse" of Star Wars entertainment, with the big one of course being the recent series finale of Andor.

Of the 3 series I've made it through in the last month - Mandalorian, book of Boba Fett, and Andor - Andor is hands down the best TV of the three. I find the Filoni stuff shallow, mind numbing entertainment, completely dependent on easter eggs and references. And I know there's a lot more of it out there, which I'll probably get to.

But for today, I really wanted to come in here and praise Andor for its execution. Because while the way the series needed to end was never in doubt, the ability of the team to create logical and emotionally fulfilling outcomes for almost all of the main characters of the series puts it a step above of most TV I've seen recently. And while I don't know if it would have been as good had it not been set in the Star Wars universe, I still think it would have been a good tv series in any sci-fi universe. The themes are universal, the realistic insights into the nature of empire were on point, and the execution spotless.

Technically, the casting, writing, and cinematography were brilliant (the score was good, but only good; John Williams wuz here).

Some general observations, without spoilers:
- I love the fact that for the villains, the rule of two applied at even the most junior level. The personality quirk governing the most powerful villains in the SW universe also apply to ambitious Lieutenants looking to climb the bureaucracy
- Just because someone is rebelling against fascism doesn't make them morally good, and not all rebels are the same. wow is this a timely message for today's world.
- For almost everyone who fell - they fell because of their flaws. And while I was really surprised there were as many survivors as there were, the major downfalls were due to their character, and not just the script
- the incident in the Harvest episode went about as far away from SW as I would have wanted, but it was anything but gratuitous; to not have a scene like that in this series would have been sanitization gone too far.
- the episodes of the Ghorman massacre continued to reinforce the genius of Victor Hugo, and the creative team behind Les Miserables. I suspect the similarities were intentional.
- the most jarring thing for me was probably a continued unwillingness to treat the sexes equally when it comes to killing them on screen. If I look at the IMDB page, most of the female cast survive through the end of Rogue One; only a couple of the men do. And very similar to the Wheel of Time novels, I think some of the women end up incurring fates worse than death as a result. I know this is rooted in our cultural history so much that its impossible to root out, but it still leads to some cliched outcomes.

Now, there is a question to consider that springs out of this - namely, is Andor good Star Wars? Well, that mainly falls on whether or not you believe Star Wars is a setting, where lots of different types of stories can be told, or a genre - specifically space opera. And I guess for me - while I lean towards the genre, not just the setting - I find Andor is to SW as GotG is to the MCU. Yes, it differs in tone, but it is still reverent to the sandbox that it plays in, and demonstrates that execution matters so much more than message. It succeeded in what it was doing way more than the Mandalorian does with its Lone Wolf and Cub approach.

And finally, I do encourage anyone who watches season 2 to go immediately into Rogue One; it does change the feel of the movie a lot. It doesn't change the fact that - for me - it's still the 4th best SW movie, but it did reinforce that Rouge One might be the 3rd best movie set in the SW universe. Damn Ewoks.