How am I supposed to go back to the Grogu/Ahsoka/Anakin Filoni fan service after this?
Hmmm, Andor sets standards that make other Star Wars projects look like your local village panto, BUT, there is sooo much great stuff across all of the TV shows - Andor shouldn't devalue all that.
Two things play in Andor's favour... it plays literally directly into core Star Wars (ANH va R1), we know the gravity of the situation, we know specifically how it ends, that gives it different opportunities to play in its own story compared to something that has to work towards a plot conclusion we don't know. The second thing is the political climate right now, Gilroy's already said this isn't a commentary on Trump or the rise of Fascism - because it was written years ago, but it's landed at a perfect time for really connecting with peoples fear, anger and frustration.
Disney just can't leverage that magic with every project.
Anyway,
With that said...
Andor did do some things really well... Genevieve O'Reilly, Denise Gough, Ben Mendelsohn, Anton Lesser, Kyle Soller, Forest Whitaker were all brilliant... getting people in that were so good in the roles was key to really helping those characters develop on screen. Kenobi got
Flea...
Cassian is probably one of the least interesting people in the series. He's our viewbox into the galaxy at this stage, nothing against Diego Luna, but I just didn't care about the character... throwing in the fact he has a kid at the end, was just weak sauce... same as Jacen Syndulla, a token effort that's not going to go anywhere - I mean maybe, it's some way of resolving things positively for Bix... but .. IDK.
The K2 origin re-write didn't bother me too much, but it was again pretty weak. The re-write of Mothma's speech was necessary, so I'm okay with that, but we have a live action Ghost crew from Rebels now, just one scene of them getting ready to transport Mothma would have been so, so good.
Obviously the production values were great, the scoring was surprisingly good (I remember Andor S1 not moving me at all music wise).
Sets, set design all that stuff was great. Compare it to Kenobi and it's just night and day, which makes me so sad. Kenobi often looked like a low-budget daytime network TV soap, but was such an important story. That disparity saddens me. The time, effort and thought that went into Andor appears to be top notch, I wish Kenobi had that. But again, Mando, Boba, Ahsoka, Kenobi, Acolyte and Skeleton Crew all brought great stuff- it just wasn't necessarily as well wrapped up.
