Spoiler free Andor review spoils all of Rogue One at 1:10, lol. 7:10 I think it's interesting that Tony Gilroy says he's not a Stars Wars fanatic when he's obviously spent more time thinking about it than all of the other directors who have had a hand in modern Star Wars. The plot of Rogue One made all of Star Wars make more sense in ways that you won't get from someone who gets a Star Wars project dropped on their desk and hammers out a script in a couple months. So when he says he's not a fanatic, I think he means he didn't read the EU and get a Darth Maul tattoo, but he's clearly been thinking about Star Wars for a long time. 8:40 When George Lucas was drafting Star Wars he spliced in shots from an old war movie called Dam Breakers as filler for the Death Star attack, and the actual sequence is very much like what happened in Dam Breakers. I think it set the expectation for somewhat grounded believability in Star Wars that a lot of us have carried for a long time, but a lot of Star Wars has ignored. But Tony Gilroy doesn't do that, Rogue One was a lot like Where Eagles Dare and the first arc of Andor was a lot like the Dirty Dozen. Then it goes into spy mode and prison mode and you can tell he's taking a lot of real-world inspiration for these genre sequences. And the end effect, where you see Star Wars as a believable universe with practical limitations and opportunities and conflict, is super satisfying. 12:07 I don't think anyone in this show gets hit with a laser and lives. They're all instantly fatal. 13:50 This scene with Stellan Skarsgaard was amazing. It's so clever how they wrote the whole Lonnie bit to build him up as absolutely critical and give Luthen an excuse for monologuing about his whole perspective, which is totally against the nature of his character, but makes perfect sense in the context of trying to reestablish control over an important asset. So we get this great speech that in a worse series he would have dropped on his assistant for no reason and would have seemed way out of place.
Spoiler free Andor review spoils all of Rogue One at 1:10, lol.
7:10 I think it's interesting that Tony Gilroy says he's not a Stars Wars fanatic when he's obviously spent more time thinking about it than all of the other directors who have had a hand in modern Star Wars. The plot of Rogue One made all of Star Wars make more sense in ways that you won't get from someone who gets a Star Wars project dropped on their desk and hammers out a script in a couple months. So when he says he's not a fanatic, I think he means he didn't read the EU and get a Darth Maul tattoo, but he's clearly been thinking about Star Wars for a long time.
8:40 When George Lucas was drafting Star Wars he spliced in shots from an old war movie called Dam Breakers as filler for the Death Star attack, and the actual sequence is very much like what happened in Dam Breakers. I think it set the expectation for somewhat grounded believability in Star Wars that a lot of us have carried for a long time, but a lot of Star Wars has ignored. But Tony Gilroy doesn't do that, Rogue One was a lot like Where Eagles Dare and the first arc of Andor was a lot like the Dirty Dozen. Then it goes into spy mode and prison mode and you can tell he's taking a lot of real-world inspiration for these genre sequences. And the end effect, where you see Star Wars as a believable universe with practical limitations and opportunities and conflict, is super satisfying.
12:07 I don't think anyone in this show gets hit with a laser and lives. They're all instantly fatal.
13:50 This scene with Stellan Skarsgaard was amazing. It's so clever how they wrote the whole Lonnie bit to build him up as absolutely critical and give Luthen an excuse for monologuing about his whole perspective, which is totally against the nature of his character, but makes perfect sense in the context of trying to reestablish control over an important asset. So we get this great speech that in a worse series he would have dropped on his assistant for no reason and would have seemed way out of place.
Wow wow wee wow! Thanks for watching!
Excellent thoughts, Aaron. I agree with all of them. :)