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I watched it for the first time immediately after finishing Andor. Definitely better than the other Star Wars films but definitely not as good as Andor. (I'm aw

I watched it for the first time immediately after finishing Andor. Definitely better than the other Star Wars films but definitely not as good as Andor. (I'm aware the showrunner of Andor co-wrote Rogue One, but Andor really seems like a different tier.)

mcv 1y ago
Andor is by far the best Star Wars. Rogue One is very good, and the only movie that's in the same league as the originals, but Andor is so much better. I don't think we'll see anything on the same level as Andor again; they already cut the original plans from 5 seasons to 2; it's simply too expensive and costs too much time to do it this well. But I do hope that future Star Wars shows will try to follow at least some aspects of its example: better writing, more human stories, focus on core themes, not on fan service or milking established characters. Of course production values will be lower, but I can live with that if they get the other stuff right.
- meowface 1y ago
  >they already cut the original plans from 5 seasons to 2 Wow that's a shame. I had no idea. Assuming they could've kept up the quality, that would've been amazing for their reputation and retention.
- carrychains 1y ago
  That "cut" happened before they even started working on the show. Despite the original thought of 5 seasons, it was essentially planned for 2 seasons right from the start.
  - kranke155 1y ago
    From Gilroy’s own telling, it happened during the filming of Season 1 in Scotland? That seems to be what he told Happy Sad Confused on their recent interview. He realised that everything, absolutely everything in Star Wars needs to be designed, that it took ages to do, and that it would be forever to make 5 seasons. So he pitched to Diego to only make one more.
- boppo1 1y ago
  >5 seasons Thank god. There's not enough meat on the bone, the writing would never have been good enough to support this. We need more excellent, tightly spun stories.
  - colordrops 1y ago
    3 seasons would have been perfect. Season 2 was too packed.
  - manmal 1y ago
    Really? I was a bit annoyed about the multiple „1 year later“ jumps. There‘s plenty that happened in that time that we haven’t seen.
    - LaGrange 1y ago
      It built tension by itself. Time skips reinforce the idea that things are _moving fast_. If we didn't have them, it would turn it into a drag. A dramatic year looks much more impressive when you compare it to what was a year before, than when you look at it day by day.
  - mcv 1y ago
    I was actually hoping for 4 seasons. Considering how they put 4 different, excellent stories in season 1. Season basically told a single story (the Ghorman massacre) spread out over 4 years. There were many moments where I'd hoped they'd dive a bit deeper into some other aspects, like what would become of the Maya Pei Brigade, the stolen TIE Avenger, other missions where we see Andor grow into the expert spy that he's clearly become. And of course more about how they bring the various parts of the rebellion together, the move to Yavin, etc. I think there was more than enough room to fill at least another season. Maybe two. But hey, I'm more than happy we got this much.
- andrepd 1y ago
  The originals are also very mid-tier, especially the last one. It survives on nostalgia mostly.
  - mcv 1y ago
    Return of the Jedi does have the most important scene in all of Star Wars: the confrontation between Luke and the Emperor. The rest of the movie has plenty of shortcomings, but that scene more than redeems it.
- techpineapple 1y ago
  This explains one of my criticisms of the show, which is I would have really like to see more of the development of the rebellion on Yavin, as it stands they sort of hint at it, but I was somewhat unsatisfied by the explanation or fabric of that evolution. Lots of core plot progression are showed through images, when the whole point of a tv show is that you should be able to show it more gradually. These I think were 12 episode seasons, maybe five 8 episode seasons would have been better.
- rockemsockem 1y ago
  > hey already cut the original plans from 5 seasons to 2; it's simply too expensive and costs too much time to do it this well. From some of the interviews I saw it seemed like the time aspect was the big driver. One in particular Diego Luna was talking about a conversation he had with Gilroy and Gilroy was like "God it'd take us 10 years to make this". I get that logistically that can be a tough thing to do with actors, and also it'd be a bit odd to have Diego Luna be very noticeably older in Season 5 than he is in Rogue One.
apples_oranges 1y ago
You guys are excluding the George Lucas movies from discussion right? In my opinion nothing ever came even close and I gave up on SW after the second Kylo Ren movie. Rouge one was cool though, also first episodes of Mandalorian.. Should I really try Andor after all the bad stuff Disney made? A few days ago I watched the new LILO and Stitch and that was great, so maybe good people still work at Disney …
- sylens 1y ago
  Andor is the best Star Wars that Disney has made
- drunkonvinyl 1y ago
  To your second question, yes. Andor would be exactly the wrong one to bail on if you’ve made it through those others.
  - lupire 1y ago
    Andor bailed on a Bail, ended up having Bail on twice.
- baq 1y ago
  The only Star Wars worth watching as an adult is Andor.
- lucideer 1y ago
  > Should I really try Andor after all the bad stuff Disney made? It's difficult to articulate Andor's quality to someone who hasn't seen it & is framing it in the context of things like Mandalorian. I can't stress enough that it's absolutely not just a "better" tv show than Mandalorian, &c. Not only is that an understatement, but it's also a fundamentally different beast to those shows. It's in a different category of quality.
  - isleyaardvark 1y ago
    It's the first "prestige" Star Wars TV show.
Spooky23 1y ago
I think for older fans we don’t get it. My son is 15 and grew up with the animated series, for him that’s peak Star Wars and I think he’s right. His buddies really loved Rogue One. The magic is its simplicity. I think like the Asimov books, Star Wars is best as fantasy history. The forward looking ones (that horrific “final” trilogy) are just awkward stories.
- ghaff 1y ago
  While you can't dismiss New Hope as it was just breathtaking at the time of its release, Empire Strikes Back was arguably peak, and you needed to wrap it up with the third movie, there's a good argument that Rogue One was the second best film after Empire. And probably Andor as a series after that. Unlike a lot of people I don't mind series wrapping up after a season or two. Even in the best cases I'm starting to lose interest by season five in a lot of cases. (I think the prequels were worse than the sequels but they're collectively pretty unmemorable.)
  - Spooky23 1y ago
    I agree with you 100%. I found it interesting that in this particular circle of kids, they rate the attack of the clones much higher, as the animated series is kind of a “Star Wars home” to them. Any way you cut it, it’s really cool how people consume them in different ways, and there’s enough material that over time we can just discard garbage like 8 hours of walking through the desert.
    - ghaff 1y ago
      Attack of the Clones is IMO not bad. Had Phantom Menace (and Jar Jar) not poisoned the well so to speak, I'm not sure the prequel trilogy would be as vilified as it is. Have never watched the animated series.
      - fernandopj 1y ago
        Personally, I rate the midichlorians much higher as poison than Jar Jar, who could be safely ignored in subsequent movies anyway.
peeters 1y ago
They did a really good job tying Andor into Rogue One, but yeah Andor is just far better in terms of pacing, etc. And because they have to rush the plot in R1 (meet Jyn, she doesn't care about the rebellion, oops never mind now she's leading the rebellion) it ends up seeming much shallower emotionally. They also seemed to have to have a bit of fan service. Rogue One was my favourite Star Wars production before Andor, now I wish they could throw it away and remake it as Andor Season 3. It deserves to be told in full.
- modeless 1y ago
  If by fan service you mean the scene where Darth Vader is at his most terrifying in the whole franchise, I think it was handled perfectly.
  - czottmann 1y ago
    Here's a few instances of fan service in that movie: - Andor running into Pigperson and Grover on Yedha - That entirely random 20-sec scene with C-3PO and R2-D2 - "Red Leader, standing by" was archive footage from A New Hope (and arguably a tribute to the late actor)
    - toyg 1y ago
      Rogue One was the first standalone movie in the Star Wars universe. There was a lot of uncertainty about how it would be received. I don't blame them for ham-fistedly shoving in there some extra linkage to the main canon... and even with that, it made much less than the "regular" sequel trilogy.
  - peeters 1y ago
    Not referring to that actually, I think that was actually a great bridge to Ep 4 that helps put the story in context for casual fans. More the presence of the Force and Jedi lore. They were so close to not having that be part of Rogue One but were still forced to include the mystical super beings in some way. Andor was able to fully detach from that baggage, focusing on the little people doing their part. And when they did bring in the Force healer in the second season, it was exactly how you'd expect average people to respond to a mystical power that you didn't directly witness. Hope, faith, skepticism, denial, rejection. As far as Vader goes...it does make you wonder if he's just toying with Obi-Wan when he meets him like 3 days later...

mcv 1y ago

Andor is by far the best Star Wars. Rogue One is very good, and the only movie that's in the same league as the originals, but Andor is so much better. I don't think we'll see anything on the same level as Andor again; they already cut the original plans from 5 seasons to 2; it's simply too expensive and costs too much time to do it this well. But I do hope that future Star Wars shows will try to follow at least some aspects of its example: better writing, more human stories, focus on core themes, not on fan service or milking established characters. Of course production values will be lower, but I can live with that if they get the other stuff right.

meowface 1y ago
>they already cut the original plans from 5 seasons to 2 Wow that's a shame. I had no idea. Assuming they could've kept up the quality, that would've been amazing for their reputation and retention.
carrychains 1y ago
That "cut" happened before they even started working on the show. Despite the original thought of 5 seasons, it was essentially planned for 2 seasons right from the start.
- kranke155 1y ago
  From Gilroy’s own telling, it happened during the filming of Season 1 in Scotland? That seems to be what he told Happy Sad Confused on their recent interview. He realised that everything, absolutely everything in Star Wars needs to be designed, that it took ages to do, and that it would be forever to make 5 seasons. So he pitched to Diego to only make one more.
boppo1 1y ago
>5 seasons Thank god. There's not enough meat on the bone, the writing would never have been good enough to support this. We need more excellent, tightly spun stories.
- colordrops 1y ago
  3 seasons would have been perfect. Season 2 was too packed.
- manmal 1y ago
  Really? I was a bit annoyed about the multiple „1 year later“ jumps. There‘s plenty that happened in that time that we haven’t seen.
  - LaGrange 1y ago
    It built tension by itself. Time skips reinforce the idea that things are _moving fast_. If we didn't have them, it would turn it into a drag. A dramatic year looks much more impressive when you compare it to what was a year before, than when you look at it day by day.
- mcv 1y ago
  I was actually hoping for 4 seasons. Considering how they put 4 different, excellent stories in season 1. Season basically told a single story (the Ghorman massacre) spread out over 4 years. There were many moments where I'd hoped they'd dive a bit deeper into some other aspects, like what would become of the Maya Pei Brigade, the stolen TIE Avenger, other missions where we see Andor grow into the expert spy that he's clearly become. And of course more about how they bring the various parts of the rebellion together, the move to Yavin, etc. I think there was more than enough room to fill at least another season. Maybe two. But hey, I'm more than happy we got this much.
andrepd 1y ago
The originals are also very mid-tier, especially the last one. It survives on nostalgia mostly.
- mcv 1y ago
  Return of the Jedi does have the most important scene in all of Star Wars: the confrontation between Luke and the Emperor. The rest of the movie has plenty of shortcomings, but that scene more than redeems it.
techpineapple 1y ago
This explains one of my criticisms of the show, which is I would have really like to see more of the development of the rebellion on Yavin, as it stands they sort of hint at it, but I was somewhat unsatisfied by the explanation or fabric of that evolution. Lots of core plot progression are showed through images, when the whole point of a tv show is that you should be able to show it more gradually. These I think were 12 episode seasons, maybe five 8 episode seasons would have been better.
rockemsockem 1y ago
> hey already cut the original plans from 5 seasons to 2; it's simply too expensive and costs too much time to do it this well. From some of the interviews I saw it seemed like the time aspect was the big driver. One in particular Diego Luna was talking about a conversation he had with Gilroy and Gilroy was like "God it'd take us 10 years to make this". I get that logistically that can be a tough thing to do with actors, and also it'd be a bit odd to have Diego Luna be very noticeably older in Season 5 than he is in Rogue One.

apples_oranges 1y ago

You guys are excluding the George Lucas movies from discussion right? In my opinion nothing ever came even close and I gave up on SW after the second Kylo Ren movie. Rouge one was cool though, also first episodes of Mandalorian.. Should I really try Andor after all the bad stuff Disney made? A few days ago I watched the new LILO and Stitch and that was great, so maybe good people still work at Disney …

sylens 1y ago
Andor is the best Star Wars that Disney has made
drunkonvinyl 1y ago
To your second question, yes. Andor would be exactly the wrong one to bail on if you’ve made it through those others.
- lupire 1y ago
  Andor bailed on a Bail, ended up having Bail on twice.
baq 1y ago
The only Star Wars worth watching as an adult is Andor.
lucideer 1y ago
> Should I really try Andor after all the bad stuff Disney made? It's difficult to articulate Andor's quality to someone who hasn't seen it & is framing it in the context of things like Mandalorian. I can't stress enough that it's absolutely not just a "better" tv show than Mandalorian, &c. Not only is that an understatement, but it's also a fundamentally different beast to those shows. It's in a different category of quality.
- isleyaardvark 1y ago
  It's the first "prestige" Star Wars TV show.

Spooky23 1y ago

I think for older fans we don’t get it. My son is 15 and grew up with the animated series, for him that’s peak Star Wars and I think he’s right. His buddies really loved Rogue One. The magic is its simplicity. I think like the Asimov books, Star Wars is best as fantasy history. The forward looking ones (that horrific “final” trilogy) are just awkward stories.

ghaff 1y ago
While you can't dismiss New Hope as it was just breathtaking at the time of its release, Empire Strikes Back was arguably peak, and you needed to wrap it up with the third movie, there's a good argument that Rogue One was the second best film after Empire. And probably Andor as a series after that. Unlike a lot of people I don't mind series wrapping up after a season or two. Even in the best cases I'm starting to lose interest by season five in a lot of cases. (I think the prequels were worse than the sequels but they're collectively pretty unmemorable.)
- Spooky23 1y ago
  I agree with you 100%. I found it interesting that in this particular circle of kids, they rate the attack of the clones much higher, as the animated series is kind of a “Star Wars home” to them. Any way you cut it, it’s really cool how people consume them in different ways, and there’s enough material that over time we can just discard garbage like 8 hours of walking through the desert.
  - ghaff 1y ago
    Attack of the Clones is IMO not bad. Had Phantom Menace (and Jar Jar) not poisoned the well so to speak, I'm not sure the prequel trilogy would be as vilified as it is. Have never watched the animated series.
    - fernandopj 1y ago
      Personally, I rate the midichlorians much higher as poison than Jar Jar, who could be safely ignored in subsequent movies anyway.

peeters 1y ago

They did a really good job tying Andor into Rogue One, but yeah Andor is just far better in terms of pacing, etc. And because they have to rush the plot in R1 (meet Jyn, she doesn't care about the rebellion, oops never mind now she's leading the rebellion) it ends up seeming much shallower emotionally. They also seemed to have to have a bit of fan service. Rogue One was my favourite Star Wars production before Andor, now I wish they could throw it away and remake it as Andor Season 3. It deserves to be told in full.

modeless 1y ago
If by fan service you mean the scene where Darth Vader is at his most terrifying in the whole franchise, I think it was handled perfectly.
- czottmann 1y ago
  Here's a few instances of fan service in that movie: - Andor running into Pigperson and Grover on Yedha - That entirely random 20-sec scene with C-3PO and R2-D2 - "Red Leader, standing by" was archive footage from A New Hope (and arguably a tribute to the late actor)
  - toyg 1y ago
    Rogue One was the first standalone movie in the Star Wars universe. There was a lot of uncertainty about how it would be received. I don't blame them for ham-fistedly shoving in there some extra linkage to the main canon... and even with that, it made much less than the "regular" sequel trilogy.
- peeters 1y ago
  Not referring to that actually, I think that was actually a great bridge to Ep 4 that helps put the story in context for casual fans. More the presence of the Force and Jedi lore. They were so close to not having that be part of Rogue One but were still forced to include the mystical super beings in some way. Andor was able to fully detach from that baggage, focusing on the little people doing their part. And when they did bring in the Force healer in the second season, it was exactly how you'd expect average people to respond to a mystical power that you didn't directly witness. Hope, faith, skepticism, denial, rejection. As far as Vader goes...it does make you wonder if he's just toying with Obi-Wan when he meets him like 3 days later...