Andor Review: The Franchise Grows Up by Looking Away From the Jedi
★★★★★ 5/5
The finest thing the franchise has ever produced, and one of the great television dramas of its era — Star Wars second, serious cinema first.
A galaxy without magic
Tony Gilroy’s masterstroke is a subtraction. He removes the Force, the chosen bloodlines, the comforting metaphysics in which good is a birthright, and what remains is the machinery of empire as it is actually experienced: paperwork, checkpoints, the slow suffocation of the ordinary. Andor is Star Wars reconceived as institutional drama, and it is the first time the saga has felt like it might have something to say to adults about power rather than to children about destiny.
The architecture of oppression
Gilroy and his directors film tyranny spatially. The Imperial offices are all cold sightlines and open-plan surveillance; the prison of the second-season-defining arc is a white, gleaming panopticon where the floors themselves are the guards. Production design here is argument: totalitarianism rendered as ergonomics, evil as a well-lit workflow. When the series wants to show radicalisation, it does not deliver a speech — it shows a man discovering there is no unmonitored corner of his life left to stand in.
Rhetoric as action
And yet the show’s most electric weapon is language. Where the films distrust talk, Andor stakes whole episodes on it — a manifesto read in voiceover over a massacre, a prison agitator turning arithmetic into insurrection, Stellan Skarsgård’s spymaster delivering a monologue on sacrifice that reframes the entire moral economy of rebellion. Diego Luna anchors it all with a wary, closed-off interiority, a man being forged into a symbol against his own instincts.
The cost of the cause
What lifts Andor above mere prestige polish is its refusal to romanticise the resistance. Its rebels lie, betray and spend lives; its heroism is bought with compromise. This is a drama genuinely interested in the price of political violence, and it declines to pretend that price is clean. That it does so inside a multibillion-dollar entertainment franchise is close to miraculous.
Verdict
Andor proves that the most exhausted intellectual property can yield genuine art when a serious filmmaker treats it seriously. Tense, beautiful and morally unsparing, it works first as television and only incidentally as Star Wars — which is exactly why it towers over everything else flying that flag.