ANDOR

Let’s get the first thing out of the way: I am not a Star Wars fan. I’m more interested in stories that offer up commentary. Stories with complexity and teeth. Stories that have a strong enough message to offend. Sure, Star Wars has always featured a rebellion of some kind, but it’s often portrayed so simplistically, and somewhat offensively, that it rings hollow.
Andor does not ring hollow. It’s ironically more in line with universes like Star Trek or Babylon 5, where politics, philosophy, and social structure are part of the world building, not window dressing.

I’ve consumed a lot of Star Wars media, it’s so culturally ingrained that it feels like we’ve all absorbed it by osmosis. A lot of us born in the late 70s and early 80s were spoon fed Star Wars. We were told we were fans before we even understood what we were watching. A few of the films are fine. None are amazing. Ultimately, they’re fantasy stories… set in space.

Andor is as far from a fantasy story as this franchise has ever gone. It’s a political thriller, it is grounded, intelligent, and deeply human. It’s a story about systems of oppression, the machinery of fascism, and the slow, painful birth of resistance. It is a spy drama with the soul of a revolution, disguised as a prequel to a prequel (Rogue One) to the middle of a trilogy in a nine-part–for fuck’s sake, really?

How did we get here?
Rogue One should have been a much better film. The premise had real weight: a suicide mission to steal the Death Star plans, set during the early days of the rebellion. But the execution was a mess. The original director and writer fumbled it so badly the studio decided they needed to bring someone else in to fix it. Tony Gilroy, who has a co-writing credit, stepped in with re-writes, re-shoots and post-production editing marathons to fix (in his words) “all the confusion of it … and all the mess,” And to that end he managed to pull together an ending that sort of made sense. It was a hard movie to love, knowing what it could have been. And for the most part folks have fond memories of Rogue One. And it’s worthy of that fondness. It’s a flawed movie, albeit one with moments of potential and a final act that stuck the landing.

Tony Gilroy’s best decision was the fate of the main characters in Rogue One. A rare and refreshingly honest move in a franchise that usually bends the rules to protect the marketability of its heroes. Rogue One squandered actors like Diego Luna and Donnie Yen (what was with that cheesy-assed mantra they made him repeat over and over?), but it at least hinted at something grittier and more mature. Gilroy was responsible for that.

Tony Gilroy is best known for penning the early Bourne movies and for writing and directing the amazing film Michael Clayton. For me, the real highlight in his stack of writing credits is the 90s film, Dolores Claiborne, but that’s a bit off topic here.
What Gilroy does best is show the machinery behind ideology, and movies like Bourne Identity and Michael Clayton are prestige spy thrillers that definitely informed Gilroy’s choices in presenting the inner workings of what makes ideology become actionable.

Originally intended to span five seasons, Andor was ultimately trimmed down to two, 12 episodes each. Mostly due to COVID delays and the aging cast that had been asked to return some 6 years after the movie.
Gilroy crafted a meticulously structured narrative. The pacing is deliberate, and glacial, especially in the early episodes of each season. But there’s method in the slowness. The storytelling unfolds like a case study in radicalization, laying out the anthropology of rebellion step by step.

Diego Luna, who was robbed of any chance to shine in Rogue One, is phenomenal here. He comes across with an interiority that portrays Cassian Andor’s evolution as earned. Stellan Skarsgård’s Luthen is a standout, delivering one of the series’ defining monologues: a reflection on sacrifice that feels lifted from the pages of a Le Carré novel. Forest Whitaker is iconic in the role of Saw Gerrera. And Thierry Godard, who was great in the French series Spiral (Engrenages), quietly steals every scene he’s in.

There are no training montages here. No Jedi tricks. No “chosen ones.” Just people making hard decisions, inching their way toward a cause that becomes greater than any one person. The craft of the series, from its muted color palette to its sparse, pulsing score, is all in service of that grounded (but not defeating) realism. Even the time jumps feel natural, not cheap.

Andor uses the Star Wars universe as a familiar shell, but what’s inside is more The Lives of Others than A New Hope. Where Star Wars often deals in the broadest, generic strokes (light vs. dark, good vs. evil), Andor dives deep, it suggests and shows us that political resistance is usually murky, compromised, and slow.

The show is littered with echoes of real-world recent events and historical significance: fascist regimes, surveillance states, prison labor, propaganda, the quiet heroism of whistleblowers. It’s not subtle but it is serious.
Andor is about political awakening, it makes the great statement that regimes don’t maintain their domination by fear or force, but by inertia, by making people think resistance is futile. And then something shifts. Someone says “no”.
Andor is about that first “no.” It’s about the cost of waking up. The first sparks of resistance don’t look heroic. They’re awkward, they can be selfish, miscalculated, and painful. They matter. They compound. They lead somewhere.

In the end sticking it out will reward you with one of the best shows of 2025. I think especially so if you aren’t a Star Wars fan. If you are interested in a spy thriller with a prescient message, give it a chance.
Andor is a pretty great over achieving spy thriller… set in outer space.