Category: 53.3

Review of Neptune Frost

Özgür Çalışkan

Neptune Frost. Dir. Uzeyman, Anisia & Williams, Saul. Swan Films, 2021.

Neptune Frost is often described in reviews as an afrofuturist musical science fiction film. Opening the door to a fascinating world where art, technology, and revolution merge, the visually and narratively stunning film, directed by visionary duo Anisia Uzeyman and Saul Williams, is an exciting production that defies convention and immerses audiences in an afro-futurist dreamscape. In the ever-expanding and prominent world of Afrofuturist cinema, this film shines as a visual, poetic, and aural jewel weaving black identity, gender, and cosmic wonder. The narrative unfolds nonlinearly, seamlessly blending elements of science fiction, magical realism, and social commentary. Neptune Frost explores the boundaries of gender and sexuality, the power dynamics between oppressor and oppressed, and the potential for technology to be a liberating or controlling force.

Neptune Frost tells the story of the journey of two bereaved characters and the crossing of their paths after their journey. Matalusa (Bertrand “Kaya Free” Ninteretse), after the death of his brother Tekno in the coltan mine, embarks on a journey and decides to go to the city and questions his identity from a class perspective with the death of his brother. On the other hand, twenty-three-year-old Neptune (Cheryl Isheja and Elvis Ngabo) embarks on a journey to resolve her sexual identity confusion after the death of his aunt. Both characters’ journeys are patterned with obstacles. The dreams the two characters encounter for the first time, equipped with cables and illuminated with neon lights, where time-space is complicated, fuel the transformation of both characters. Through Matalusa and Neptune, the film explores the tension between digital existence and the longing for worldly human connections. This exploration raises profound questions about the role of technology in shaping our identities and the need to strike a delicate balance between progress and the preservation of cultural heritage.

Digitaria, where the journeys of the two characters reach, is the place of those who try to stay out of the political and world conflict and rebel against exploitation. The film’s other characters, Innocent (Dorcy Rugamba), Memory (Eliane Umuhire), and Psychology (Trésor Niyongabo), finally come together. Neptune brings power, energy, electricity, or whatever is missing to Digitaria because in a world where television, radio, and the Internet are cut off, access to them is a right. This idea is embodied in the phrase “we mine, but we do not own what we dig,” closely linked to the unchanging history of colonialism. The people of Digitaria, pondering concepts such as oligarchy, patriarchy, tolerance, wisdom, self-control, ignorance, and understanding, manage to hack into the world system through connections with Neptune’s ability and gain access to the Internet. As a result, all these social and political abstract concepts are concretised in a revolutionary struggle.

Neptune Frost unfolds in a neo-African society where the tangible and the virtual merge seamlessly. Uzeyman and Williams bring to life a world where Afrofuturistic elements are intertwined with ancient mythology, where tradition and technological innovation merge in an enigmatic environment. One of the most important factors in creating this environment is the aural space of the film because the soundscape is as vital as the visuals.

The film’s haunting and ethereal soundtrack, composed by Saul Williams himself, envelopes the audience with the fusion of electronic Afrobeats, African rhythms, spoken words, and experimental sounds, creating a mesmerizing sonic landscape that mirrors the film’s otherworldly setting. The music serves as a conduit, connecting the audience to the characters’ emotions with evocative lyrics and the film’s larger themes, elevating the film to a transcendent realm where sound becomes its language.

The film’s directors stated that the film’s influences date back to 2016 and events like the conflict between ethnic groups in Rwanda, student protests in Burundi, the Arab Spring, and hacker movements. These influences explain why the plot and layered narrative of the film combine different subjects. The subtext of the film’s story is a powerful exploration of cultural resurgence and the preservation of African identity in an increasingly globalized and technologically driven society. By elegantly weaving together the wisdom of the past, folklore, and the struggles of a community, the film paints a vivid picture of a people reclaiming their heritage and resisting cultural erasure. It does so by taking Afrofuturism beyond mere aesthetics, utilizing the genre’s core themes of identity, empowerment, and cultural preservation to present a narrative of hope and reclamation where Afrofuturism and technology collide. The film transcends the constraints of earthly conventions by embracing the cosmic diaspora of identities that exist beyond binary structures.

Compared to other Afrofuturist films, Neptune Frost uses a more vernacular and interrogative language and exemplifies the multifaceted evolution of storytelling as a source of inspiration that echoes the timeless legacy of the Afrofuturist and Afrosurrealist works that came before it. Different than the earlier examples such as Space Is the Place (John Coney, 1974), Daughters of the Dust (Julie Dash, 1991), The Last Angel of History (John Akomfrah, 1996), or recent ones such as Black Panther (Ryan Coogler, 2018), Sorry to Bother You (Boots Riley, 2018), and A Wrinkle in Time (Ava DuVernay, 2018), Neptune Frost ventures into new territory, combining technology and heritage to illuminate the rich tapestry of black identity and techno-centric resistance. Neptune Frost charts the path of its resistance, adding a new chapter to the genre’’s ongoing cosmic symphony.

WORKS CITED

Uzeyman, Anisia. “Neptune Frost, the Afrofuturist Musical Imagining Life Beyond Capitalism.” Interview by Xuanlin Tham. AnOther, 03 Nov 2022. https://www.anothermag.com/design-living/14495/neptune-frost-afrofuturist-musical-anisia-uzeyman-saul-williams-interview.  Accessed 14 Dec 2022.

Williams, Saul. “Neptune Frost, the Afrofuturist Musical Imagining Life Beyond Capitalism.” Interview by Edson Burton. The Bigger Picture, 26 Oct 2022. https://www.the-bigger-picture.com/articles/when-traditional-myths-and-afro-futurism-combine-an-interview-with-neptune-frost-director-saul-williams/.  Accessed 14 Dec 2022.

Özgür Çalışkan, Ph.D., completed his BA degree at Bahçeşehir University, Department of Cinema and Television with a full scholarship, MA degree at Digital Culture Program, Jyvaskyla University in Finland, and Ph.D. at Anadolu University, Department of Cinema and Television, where he has been working since 2012 and is currently an assistant professor. Çalışkan has participated in exchange programs at the University of Ulster and the University of Ljubljana and has been a guest lecturer at the Polytechnic University of Valencia. Since 2012, he has been a member of the Executive Board of the International Eskişehir Film Festival. He publishes and lectures on cinematic narrative, screenwriting, film genres, science fiction, identity, and digital technologies. His most recent work is Retro Dystopia in Turkish Cinema: A Mouthless Girl in the Shadows Speaks Through the Antenna, published in Science Fiction Film and Television.

Review of The Peripheral, season 1

Ian Campbell

The Peripheral, season 1. Amazon Prime, 2022.

Amazon Prime has done a very good, though not masterful, job at something I’d long thought next to impossible: adapting a William Gibson novel for the screen. They accomplish this by essentially turning the novel inside out, giving us the same story but filming the bits that Gibson leaves implied in the text and leaving out much of what Gibson focuses on. It’s a remarkable exercise in adaptation, and it very much does what Gibson clearly wants to do in the 2014 novel: to show how the seeds of the “Jackpot”, the looming and multi-pronged anthropogenic disaster facing us, are already present, and what of our humanity must be sacrificed in order to survive.

The remainder of this review will contain spoilers for both book and show. The essential structure of the story remains the same from novel to series: communication is established between a parallel-world early 2100s London and what is said to be our own world in Appalachia of 2032. A somewhat less openly toxic faction of the klept, Gibson’s word for the mostly-Russian mafia that dominate the future, makes use of the video-game skills of Flynne Fisher (Chloë Grace Moretz) for what seems to be a trivial job; other factions discover this and try to dominate Flynne’s world, which they view as a “stub”, ripe for exploitation; Flynne and her friends prevail upon what remains of humanity in the first faction to help them defend themselves. The 2030s characters “travel” to the future by means of inhabiting android bodies through “quantum entanglement”: these bodies are the titular peripherals.

Showrunner Scott B. Smith and his team deserve our attention and praise for transforming a long prose poem into television compelling enough to deserve a renewal for Season 2, to be aired in early 2024. [EDIT: on 18 August, the series was cancelled due to the ongoing writers’ and actors’ strike.] The production, settings, acting and episodic structure are all remarkably well-done. Especially notable is Moretz, who is a fantastic actress: she uses an entirely different set of body language and facial microexpressions when she plays Flynne in 2032 and when she plays Flynne inhabiting the peripheral in 2100, even though the peripheral is a direct copy of Flynne in appearance—even better, she plays the uninhabited peripheral on standby in a different manner. 2032 Flynne is looser and has a much greater range of expression than the inhabited peripheral, which is much more poised, and the uninhabited peripheral, which is nearly robotic. The effect of this is to subtly underline the inhumanity of the future: everything we see in 2100 is very beautiful—though much of this is in fact illusion—but has been stripped of its human warmth by the adjustments necessary to survive the Jackpot.

Nearly all the particulars of the story have been changed, however, and this is where the show and its adaptation of the novel become most interesting. In the novel, Aelita West is murdered because Wilf Netherton wants to impress her sister Daedra by giving her access to Flynne’s world; in the show, Daedra is entirely missing and Aelita and Wilf grew up together as orphans in the worst of the Jackpot. Aelita is a socialite in the novel, but works for the Research Institute in the show—its existence, like so much else, is only implied in the novel—before stealing access to Flynne’s world in order that it not be used as fodder for experimental drugs or warfare. In the novel, the threat to Flynne and her friends in their own world is shadowy, corporate and unclear; in the show, the threat is concrete, in the form of a human assassin hired by the Research Institute (and played very well and creepily, by Ned Dennehy). Local drug lord and car dealer Corbell Pickett (Louis Herthum) is mostly an implied menace in the novel, but very present in the show, and his wife Mary (India Mullen) is a welcome presence. Deputy Tommy Constantine (Alex Hernandez) gets his own plotline instead of being only a supporting character, and his romance is with Flynne’s friend Billy Ann Baker (Adelind Horan) rather than with Flynne herself. The effect of all this is to concretize what Gibson leaves implied: the novel gives us everything in 2032 from Flynne’s perspective, whereas in the show, she’s much more part of a group that has already organized for self-defense in a collapsing society and is thus prepared to defend itself from an incursion from an alternate future.

Whereas Gibson focuses his prose on details not germane to the plot such as what’s embedded in the resin coating the inside of Burton’s Airstream trailer as a means of showing the passage of time, the show drops most of this and introduces the technological changes between 2022 and 2032 directly. For example, in the book, we’re told that Burton and Conner were in Haptic Recon, and left to infer most of what that might mean; in the show, at the first opportunity we’re shown that Burton, Conner and their other friends have enhancements that allow them to access one another’s perceptions. In the novel, we’re left mostly to infer the political structure of the 22^nd century; in the show, this is spelled out explicitly as a duumvirate between klept and Research Institute, with the Metropolitan Police as mediator/enforcer. The most moving chapter of the book, “The Jackpot”, tells the story of the catastrophe, but through multiple filters: the narrator summarizes what Wilf, through a screen and between universes, is telling Flynne. All of this has the effect of rendering it something of a fairy tale, as a way of showing how removed Flynne currently is from something that will affect her and everyone else she knows. In the show, by contrast, Flynne in her peripheral is taken to a cemetery in London where the events are shown to her. These events are much more specific than they are in the book, as well. Much of this rather different formation of “show, don’t tell” is quite effective and just as moving, but with the added advantage of being easier to access for viewers unaccustomed to SF, unfamiliar with the looming catastrophe—I should note that I write this on the fourth consecutive day announced as the world’s hottest day in 125,000 years—or with Gibson’s poetic and challenging writing style.

What the show does best is focus on how empty the post-Jackpot world is. In the novel, like so much else, we’re left to infer this, but one of the first things Flynne says in the show when she visits 2100 is “Where are all the people?” Nearly everything is silent in the future; nearly everyone is an autonomous peripheral; Lev’s house seems homey because there are at one point five actual humans in it. All of this is allowed to hit home well before Flynne is shown what the Jackpot was (will be) like.

Nearly everyone reading this review is going to have spent most of their life reading SF, likely including at least Neuromancer from Gibson’s œuvre, so we’re accustomed to having to sort our way through the words on the page to get to what’s really going on behind the scenes, and we don’t always take into account how difficult this actually is. There are points where the show goes a little too far in the other direction: the final episode’s depiction of how Flynne cuts off access to her own “stub” borders on deus ex machina, for example. Yet Smith and Amazon have provided us with an adaptation that has the potential both to bring far more people into contact with the scope of the Jackpot we’re all about to experience and also with SF as a genre.

Ian Campbell is the editor of SFRA Review.

Review of Everything Everywhere All at Once

Jeremy Brett

Everything Everywhere All at Once. Directed by Daniel Kwan (關家永) and Daniel Scheinert, A24, 2022.

Since premiering on March 11, 2022, Everything Everywhere All at Once (EEAAO) crushed all critical and popular expectations by becoming, according to IGN, the most awarded film of all time, with over 150 accolades that put it far ahead of the previous winner, The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King. Furthermore, it was afterthat figure was announced that EEAAO won seven Academy Awards, including Best Picture, Best Director, Best Actress (Michelle Yeoh), Best Supporting Actor (Ke Huy Quan), Best Supporting Actress (Jamie Lee Curtis), and two additional honors. Moving from a small independent film into a phenomenon so global that the film seemed to be fulfilling the promise of its title, this was no small achievement for a film that defies easy explanation, analysis, or traditional linear progression. We could easily imagine somewhere out in the multiverse, a world in which a fantastical film with an almost entirely Asian-led cast, one that mashes science fiction, fantasy, surreal imagery, martial arts, and an immigrant mother-daughter emotional conflict at its heart, would be released, spend a few weeks as a curiosity, and then sink into the box office depths.

But we live in this particular reality, where the film hit a number of deep emotional chords with a wide range of viewers, not least, perhaps, because at the movie’s core is an intensely widespread concern—the weight and outcomes of decision. The multiplicity of timelines featured throughout the movie all spring from individual decisions made by Evelyn Wong (Yeoh) at one time or another in her life, and, as the film demonstrates, these decisions have universe-changing consequences. All our fates touch each other, as they, and we, can be everything, everywhere, and all at once. The film is an important addition to the sf canon that involves the multiverse concept, not least because it centers on the idea of choice as a determinant in creating alternative timelines. Of course, the multiversal concept is not a new one in sf: the idea of infinitely overlapping and concurrent parallel worlds was brought into the modern day by Michael Moorcock in his expansive sf/fantasy cycle, taking on new imaginative life by Marvel Comics and DC Comics in their ongoing attempts to give structure to over eight decades of competing storylines, occurring recently in the anarchic nihilism of Rick & Morty, and lately becoming the movie buzzword of the moment with the introduction of the multiverse to the Marvel Cinematic Universe. Where EEAAO is singular is in adding an additional layer of emotional complexity these earlier instances lack, namely the presence of both regret and curiosity about one’s life and the choices one makes in determining the course of that life.

Evelyn is the stressed, un-notable matriarch of a Chinese-American immigrant family in Los Angeles, running a laundromat, having trouble relating to her depressed lesbian daughter Joy (Stephanie Hsu), and facing possible divorce from her loving-yet-frustrated husband Waymond (Quan). Like many immigrants, Evelyn exists in a liminal space between worlds (explicitly signified in the film by her and Waymond’s switching—and code-switching—back and forth between Chinese and English), struggling to get by without really living (Evelyn’s emotional distance from Joy and Waymond is palpable). In addition, she faces a loss of her usual taut self-control and position as director of events when the family is called to the local IRS office for a business audit. The water is rising ever up above her head, when she suddenly comes into collision with the realization that both she and the universe are bigger than she could ever have imagined. The multiverse is in existential peril because of a choice that a different Evelyn made, and the entire film follows from that individual choice. The Evelyn from what the film terms the ‘Alphaverse’ was a brilliant scientist who discovered a way to access unique skills from alternative selves, but in doing so she released the film’s adversary Jobu Tupaki, an agent of pure chaos seeking to destroy the multiverse. In a world where multiversal media tends to focus on the weirdness or humor of superficial surface differences between worlds (look at films like Doctor Strange and the Multiverse of Madness or the J.J. Abrams Star Trek reboot series), EEAAO instead examines the power of people to effect significant life-altering changes for themselves and others—though the consequences can and often are dire, the film is ultimately positive in its depiction of an empathic humanity and of the strength of familial bonds.

The intersecting and myriad timelines of the film make the plot challenging to recount; suffice it to say that Alpha Waymond makes Evelyn aware of the looming multiversal catastrophe and provides her with the technology necessary to jump universes and access skills and knowledge needed to fight Jobu—much humor, by the way, is mined from the lunatic triggers often required by verse-jumpers to obtain this knowledge. In an ironic twist that reflects the inherent power of choice, Alpha Waymond has chosen Prime Evelyn as the one best suited to stop Jobu because she has “failed” in so many other universes to live the life she wants, that she now has a surfeit of untapped potential. In the course of the film, as Evelyn moves towards her ultimate confrontation with Jobu, we watch her experience a number of variant lives, many of which contribute to her defensive arsenal of skills—a mystical kung fu master, an international film star (both of these, of course, being riffs on Yeoh’s real-life career), a sign spinner for a restaurant, a singer, the loving domestic partner of IRS agent Deirdre (Curtis) in a world where everyone has hotdog fingers, a chef, and even a rock existing alongside Rock Jobu in a moment of calmness and peace on a lifeless Earth. Many of these lives provide Prime Evelyn with cinematically exciting things like fighting abilities, but along the course of her journey these alternate worlds give her moments of emotional wisdom that help her to realize her true empathic self. This is the self that will save the universe from the chaos she brought into being—the film turns on the revelation that the superpowered, reality-manipulating Jobu is, in fact, Alpha Joy (Hsu), who had been pushed by her mother to explore the multiverse and whose mind became hopelessly fractured by the infinitude of possibilities.

Jobu’s appeal to existential despair causes Prime Evelyn to waver in her course, to lash out at the people in her various lives and to nearly join Jobu in the latter’s plan to end everything and finally bring peace. But before the multiverse can collapse, Prime Evelyn takes to her heart the voice of Waymond, who combats Jobu’s bleak nihilism with a cry from the heart—across multiple lifetimes—to human goodness and love. In the film’s pivotal scene, two Waymonds make that argument (the first one to Film Actor Evelyn, the second to Prime Evelyn and the verse-jumpers seeking to take her and Jobu down) in an alternating chorus:

Alternate Waymond: When I choose to see the good side of things, I’m not being naive. It is strategic and necessary. It’s how I’ve learned to survive through everything.

Prime Waymond: I don’t know. The only thing I do know… is that we have to be kind. Please… be kind… especially when we don’t know what’s going on.

The appeal to empathy works, and Prime Evelyn makes her final choice, to embrace Jobu with caring and kindness and to fight for the connections between people that unite us as human beings. In her final exchange in the film with Joy, she says:

Maybe it’s like you said. Maybe there is something out there, some new discovery that will make us feel like even smaller pieces of shit. Something that explains why you still went looking for me through all of this noise. And why, no matter what, I still want to be here with you. I will always, always, want to be here with you.

And when Joy responds: “So what? You’re just gonna ignore everything else? You could be anything, anywhere. Why not go somewhere where your daughter is more than just this? Here, all we get are a few specks of time where any of this actually makes any sense”, Evelyn responds simply and beautifully, “Then I will cherish these few specks of time.”  It is a moment of sublime connection, a quiet moment of beauty that caps a wild multiversal ride.

Everything Everywhere All at Once is a singular film in the multiversal sf subgenre in presenting the multiverse both as a learning opportunity and an arena for exploring the complex range of human emotion: from mutual mother-daughter love and frustration, to husband-wife estrangement, to daughter-father exasperation, to the fear and confusion generated by immigrants trying to cope with American government bureaucracy, to the unexpected reach and ultimate power of empathy as a refuge and safety. That all goes a long way towards explaining much of the film’s popular, runaway appeal. The best genre films, like EEAAO, touch the heart and mind alike, and call into question our preconceptions about who and what we are and the world in which we live. They make us imagine different and better futures, whether in this universe or another.

Jeremy Brett is an Associate Librarian at Cushing Memorial Library & Archives, where he is both Processing Archivist and the Curator of the Science Fiction & Fantasy Research Collection. He has also worked at the University of Iowa, the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, the National Archives and Records Administration-Pacific Region, and the Wisconsin Historical Society. He received his MLS and his MA in History from the University of Maryland – College Park in 1999. His professional interests include science fiction, fan studies, and the intersection of libraries and social justice.

Review of Andor

Jamie Woodcock

Andor. Dir. Tony Gilroy. Lucasfilm, September 2022.

Andor is the fourth Star Wars live-action television series, continuing the development of the franchise following the purchase by Disney. The first season (released so far) takes place across a single year, while the second season is expected to cover a further four years leading up to the events in the film Rogue One. Broadly speaking, the series follows the early stages of the rebellion against the Galactic Empire. In particular, it follows Cassian Andor (Diego Luna) as he becomes a revolutionary, leading up to his death in Rogue One while stealing the plans of the Death Star.

The series ties directly into the later film, meaning the audience already knows the end before the first episode starts. From the very beginning, it is clear that this series is a different kind of Star Wars. In the first episode, we see Cassian shoot two corporate security guards. There is no question, unlike in Star Wars: Episode IV – A New Hope’s multiple remasterings, of who shot first. From here, the plot first follows Cassian as he tries to sell stolen Imperial technology and then becomes embroiled in a heist and later the rebellion. Second, it follows Syril Karn (Kyle Soller) as he tries to trace Cassian for the murders and then comes into contact with the Imperial Security Bureau (ISB). The first season follows the early stages of the rebellion, the lives of those living under the Empire, as well as those trying to suppress opposition.

Andor takes a notably darker tone than either The Mandalorian (2019-present), Obi-Wan Kenobi (2022), or The Book of Boba Fett (2021-2022). The other three take more of a space-Western setting, covering the outskirts of the galaxy. In Andor, the focus conveys an impression of a franchise less driven by Grogu (“Baby Yoda”) merchandise sales. The closest to product placement we get in Andor is the Kalashnikov-inspired blasters of the rebels.

Andor goes in a much more deliberate political direction. Instead of the usual themes of Star Wars, it is much more about the work of imperialism and the rebellion against it. There are no lightsabers or Jedi superheroes ready to fight the Empire. On both sides of the rebellion, there is a sharp focus on the daily lives of people in Star Wars. As Tony Gilroy explained in an interview: “If you think about it, most of the beings in the galaxy are not aware of Jedi, and have never seen a lightsaber [… ] It’s like, there’s a restaurant and we’re in the kitchen. This is what’s going on underneath the other stuff” (quoted in Hiatt). There are scrap metal workers on Ferrix dismantling ships, prison labour, and the secret work of starting a rebellion—both with the organisation of a heist, as well as the manoeuvring of Mon Mothma (Genevieve O’Reilly) in the Senate.

Similarly, there are no visible Sith Lords seen running the empire. Instead, there is the bureaucracy of the ISB. The staff meetings focus on reports and following orders, not taking initiative. They are also an arena in which ISB supervisors Dedra Meero (Denise Gough) and Blevin (Ben Bailey Smith) go up against each other. They clash over protocols, a power struggle that is more Kafkaesque office politics than a Sith punishing failure with a force grip.

The significance of this is that Andor draws attention to the life and activities of the rank-and-file: those trying to rebel, the ISB and the army against them, and those caught in the middle. Andor has, given the name of the series, the potential to focus on Cassian’s actions. However, Cassian is often not the person leading the action, nor could he (or anyone else for that matter) do it alone. The hero’s journey, even when it involves trying to overthrow a totalitarian government, can often reinforce conservative themes. For example, in films like In Time, Equilibrium, and Dune, there is one special person (and it often is a young man) who leads everyone else to victory.

Andor subverts this hero’s journey. Cassian runs away from Ferrix after being pursued for the killing of two Pre-Mor Security Officers. The Imperial Army establishes a garrison and occupies Ferrix. Early in the season, there is evidence of collective organising in the community, with the banging of pots and pans to warn of the Pre-Mor tactical team. At Maarva (Cassian’s mother)’s (Fiona Shaw) funeral, she posthumously gives a speech via holorecording calling for the people of Ferrix to revolt against the empire. Maarva had been part of an organisation called the Daughters of Ferrix and there is further evidence of organising behind the uprising. Cassian uses this as cover for a rescue, neither inciting nor leading the action.

The first season also later features Cassian being imprisoned on Narkina 5. The representation of prison labour is another departure from the usual Star Wars. Here, the series shifts to a direct portrayal of the Empire’s power. In summary fashion, Cassian is sentenced and shipped off to a penal colony. It is a criticism of the prison-industrial complex, with prisoners making parts for the future Death Star. However, the prison is also part of the Empire’s attempts to maintain order. Knowledge of the prison is kept from the general population, providing a way to both suppress dissidents and information. The prison itself is designed to prevent collective organising, and is overseen with repressive technologies, internal competition, and separation from other prisoners. This is organising against all the odds, with a panopticism that Foucault would have been impressed with. However, inmates find a way to overcome this, with Kino Loy (Andy Serkis) turning from floor manager to worker militant.

The Star Wars franchise has, of course, been concerned with many of these themes before. The original film trilogy reflected on the Vietnam War and Nixon’s presidency. George Lucas modelled the Empire on both the British and American Empires, drawing on Nazi imagery to reinforce the criticism. The story follows the rebellion, albeit focusing on the hero’s journey of Luke Skywalker and other characters. The Prequel films address the rise of fascism and the collapse of democracy. These are more firmly space operas, providing social commentary alongside them. However, subsequent entries in the Star Wars series have not moved this critique much further, other than perhaps the focus on average citizens found in The Clone Wars and Star Wars: Rebels.

This different vision of rebellion and Empire is in part due to Tony Gilroy’s background in spy thrillers as well as his interest in history—and particularly historical revolutions. For example, Gilroy explains the heist subplot was inspired by an account of Stalin’s bank robbery in 1907 (Hiatt). The series often focuses on the dirty work needed for a rebellion. The representation of the rebels themselves is not as clear-cut as in earlier Star Wars. There are political divisions and tensions with a heavy emphasis on the need for sacrifice. There are powerful examples of this throughout including the climax of the prison break with Kino revealing he cannot swim, Luthen Rael (Stellan Skarsgård)’s speech to keep his ISB source in line, as well as Cassian’s future death which looms over the series. This is not a straightforward hero’s journey.

Andor refreshes Star Wars as a social commentary on authoritarianism, empire, and the possibility of rebellion—if not revolutionary change. It is a much more politicised entry into the Star Wars canon, which at the same time centres on the lives of ordinary people. Andor takes Star Wars in a new direction which raises avenues for further academic research on the politics of rebellion, organising, and social change.

WORKS CITED

Hiatt, Brian. “How ‘Andor’ Drew from… Joseph Stalin? Plus: Inside Season 2 of the Revolutionary Star Wars Show.” Rollingstone.com. 10 November 2023.