”Share a Disney quote that sums up how you’re feeling right now!”
That’s what Disney posted on Threads the other day, and people immediately replied with lines from Star Wars, The Hunchback of Notre Dame, and even Mary Poppins. The throughline between all the quotes: they were pretty pointedly anti-fascist and clearly aimed at the current administration
Isn’t all of Star Wars about fascism?
Andor is much more about anti-fascism than other Star Wars pieces. But in a more adult and realistic way. That one has to get their hands dirty and give up some ideals.
On the other hand it shows good people meaning good things are still doing bad things simply because they are part of a fascist regime of which they might not even be aware of (because fascism is about manipulation and propaganda).
Yeah I’m not into that kind of thing. Rogue One was weird enough trying to be Saving Private Ryan while having the toys I played with as a kid on the screen. And I find it kinda find it boring when shows spell out what they’re about instead of having a deep subtext so I tend just get annoyed by plot holes since there’s nothing else to think about.
Andor isn’t nearly that straightforward about it. It’s complicated and messy, with self-interested people juxtaposed against the idealists. Most of it is character-centered, soul-sucking spycraft tension like The Lives of Others or Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy, but then also exasperating bureaucracy as in Chernobyl–and Stellan Skarsgard is equally phenomenal in Andor. Your toys aren’t here either; no lightsabers, few scenes with the old droids, very little time in space. Most of the time you need the architecture and the stormtroopers and Imperial dress whites to recognize it as a Star Wars setting.
It’s completely different than any Star Wars screen production before it.
The rest is pretty cartoonish Bad Guys Bad, Good Guys Good.
Andor was way more nouanced.
Further Andor showed the machinery of Fascism from the inside and had various different kinds of people with different levels of commitement and reasons for participating in it.
You could really feel the machinery of Fascism slowly closing its maw on people who were just pro-Obbey-The-Rules rather than pro-Fascism and either coopted them or crushed them. Meanwhile in the rest of Star Wars the Empire was pretty much just is Big Powerful Evil For The Sake Of Evil Guys + Mindless obedient human puppets.
For the Empire side Andor showed people under Fascism, the rest Star Wars just shows the symbology of Fascism (down to the detail that all the members of the Empire are human, never other species) but not the human side of it or the machinery influencing and even forcing them to behave as they do.
If you think Star Wars does it bad - which I’m not entirely disagreeing with you on - dear god never watch Rebel Moon
Single worst piece of scifi I’ve ever seen in my life, and I’ve seen so much scifi. I watched all of Dark Matter for some reason, and Rebel Moon is so much worse. Why did they give the Big Evil Fascist a Fascist Shillelagh? I don’t fuckin know man it’s the worst movie ever.
Slow. Motion. Corn. Harvest
To add to what Aceticon said, Andor also shows the random evil of fascism, where people who just want to live their life and have no motivation to rebel are easily sucked into the insanity and given no chance to live their lives under the radar.