Outcast from the franchise – Weekend – Kommersant
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Andor, a new offshoot of the obscenely overgrown Star Wars franchise, is coming to Disney+, and it’s unexpectedly human.
Through a dark city through a wall of rain in neon flashes, a short guy in a dark cloak and a hood pulled down over his eyes walks – or rather sneaks. Enters a brothel disguised as a bar and starts asking questions about some girl from the planet Cenar while two uniformed imperial cops glare at him (what did they forget in the expensive brothel?). The guy’s name is Cassian Andor (Diego Luna), and he doesn’t look for trouble on his own head, but, as usual, he finds: the cops will catch up with him in a dark alley to rob him. In self-defense, he would kill both of them and outlaw himself – but he was no stranger to it.
Meanwhile, the head of the Imperial police of the planet Morlana-1, where Andor did not part with the cops in a dark alley, would be glad not to give this case a go – no one needs extra control from the Empire. But his overzealous subordinate Karn (Kyle Soller) spins the case to curry favor. Andor, who has been pirating all his life and having robbed more than one abandoned imperial ship, runs to the planet Ferrix to sell a particularly valuable system unit from such a ship – the proceeds will be enough to lay low. But the police are already hanging on his tail, and the buyer is a stern and mysterious man Rael (Stellan Skarsgård) – he persuades the guy to defect to the rebels who are preparing to rob the imperial military warehouse.
If the word “Empire” had not flashed here and there in conversations, and a cute talking droid, similar to R2-D2, did not get underfoot, it would be easy to imagine this story as a continuation of “Blade Runner” with its wet streets and unheroic heroes. Star Wars has always been placed in the niche of a space western, and here we have a clear space noir – rainy and shabby, except maybe smoky, because Disney cares about our health. The show’s legs are growing from the movie Rogue One (2016) – this strange-sounding name was the call sign of the Rebel Alliance, led by Andor, who will steal the blueprints for the Death Star. But our guy will become a real rebel later, but for now he is only trying on the role of an outcast.
The recent film was itself a pariah in the franchise, a story that failed between numbered episodes, where, for the taste of many fans of the stellar saga, there was a little too much realism. In the series, this same “realism” also blooms in full bloom – everything here is somehow shabby, shabby, dear: you just expect that instead of the high-tech starships of the Empire, a pepelats rumbling with all gears will fly into the frame. This is not a saga of heroic poses, wise sayings and loudly boiling pathos, but an unexpectedly warm, grounded story about a little man stuck in the millstones of cosmic history.
Instead of ominous stormtroopers in sparkling white helmets, there are loose and dusty corrupt cops sweeping things under the carpet, and careerist imperial bureaucrats striving to sit each other out for an extra stripe. And instead of Sith, Jedi and princesses – ordinary people: girlfriend Andora Beaks (Adria Arjona), who works as a mechanic in a garage and sells counterfeit goods, a loyal comrade Brasso (Chook Sibtain), who works in a mine and drinks smuggled alcohol, and adoptive mother Maarva (Fiona Shaw), who once taught him how to rob Imperial ships. Let the space knights fight each other not for life, but for death and go to the dark side of the Force and back, but I would only live my little life – this is the message of this story. And the almighty Empire looks here not as a cosmic evil, but as an overgrown bureaucratic machine, which will be knocked down not by the fair forces of the world, but by bosses cut off from reality and local corruption.
Another thing is that a small person only for the time being manages to live his life under the iron heel of the Empire. Andor’s story is just about the fact that it will not work to sit out and fight off adversaries alone either – very soon our guy will join a detachment of the same poor fellows who are pressed and burned. The quiet charm of this series is that there is no one here who possesses superpowers, brandishing laser swords or talking backwards, but there are only people like us – may the Force be with us.
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