Like a lot of wistful, wonderstruck viewers of Andor, I knew my watch wasn’t ended when I finished the series this week. To complete Cassian’s journey, there was one thing I had to rewatch: Solo: A Star Wars Story.
Sorry, wrong Star Wars Story. Rogue One! That’s the ticket. (I like Solo, though.)
The makers of Andor have teased how transformative it can be to revisit Rogue One after the prequel-to-a-prequel’s conclusion. As of last week, Andor creator Tony Gilroy hadn’t rewatched Rogue since finishing Andor, but he hyped the practice anyway: “Other people around me have done it. So I’ve been reassured. And I’ve seen bits and pieces of it; it comes on, and you’re like, ‘Oh my god, holy crap. Look what that does.’” Diego Luna was even more insistent. “I urge people to see Rogue One right after the end of Season 2,” the actor who plays Cassian said. “They’re going to see a different film.”
Who am I to ignore the creator and star of the best Star Wars series? So I got on program and fired up the spinoff that started it all—in my case, for the first time since I was prepping for the first season of Andor three years ago. Since then, we’ve been through a lot with Cassian, not to mention Mon Mothma, Ruescott Melshi, K-2SO and Co. It’s not as if Rogue One is totally transformed—it’s not literally a different film—but it does hit differently in some respects after 24 episodes of Andor. Here are five takeaways after watching Rogue One through Andor-pilled eyes:
Rogue One feels much closer to traditional Star Wars.
In 2016, Rogue One seemed subversive and bold: “Rogue One is brutal and different,” Sean Fennessey wrote for The Ringer. This was a war movie that happened to be set inside the Star Wars universe. Its story was far from a standalone one, but it did seem to stand alone tonally compared to, say, the unabashedly derivative (though fun) formula of The Force Awakens.
It’s a testament to how much further Andor subsequently strayed from the Star Wars script that Rogue One—a movie in which all of the main characters die—now seems somewhat safe and laden with Lucasfilm-pleasing cameos.
Ponda Baba and Dr. Evazan from the Mos Eisley cantina crash a scene for no narrative reason. Princess Leia and Grand Moff Tarkin appear in all of their uncanny valley indignity. (At least Leia is on screen only briefly, albeit for the last line; there’s a ton of Tarkin, and the tech is so distracting that I’d support a special edition just to give him a graphical upgrade.) Darth Vader swings his saber and does a Force choke after striding on screen to the tune of the Imperial March. R2-D2 and C-3PO show up solely to extend their streak of appearing in every Star Wars movie made to that point. Granted, Rogue is set closer to the original trilogy than even the end of Andor, but that’s a lot of legacy characters. Rogue was the first live-action Star Wars film not to be scored by John Williams, but while Michael Giacchino created his own themes, he didn’t break the musical mold the way later Star Wars composers (including Andor’s) would.
The word “Jedi” is never spoken in Andor. The only explicit references to the Force are one exchange between Bix and Cassian in Season 2, Episode 7, in which they refer to Maarva’s antipathy toward Force healers—or, at least, one particular Force healer—and a “May the Force be with you, Captain” from Bail Organa to Cassian in the last episode’s closing seconds, as setup for Rogue One. Meanwhile, Rogue gives us Chirrut Îmwe’s frequent Force prayers, the fallen sandstone statue on Jedha, and three “May the Force be with you/us” instances—plus a “The Force is with me” and a “Trust the Force.”
Put it this way: Rogue One seemed groundbreaking because a character said, “There are no Jedi here anymore.” Andor is such a Jedi-free zone that no one even calls attention to their absence. Similarly, while Rogue One tweaked a well-worn Star Wars trope when Cassian interrupted K-2SO in the midst of saying, “I’ve got a bad feeling about this,” Andor never would have had him start that sentence. When it came to forging a new path for the franchise, Rogue One walked so that Andor could run.
Rewatching Rogue will mostly make you miss Andor more.
“I normally like to keep my foot on the gas all the way through,” Gilroy told Variety about his approach to pacing in Andor. “We try to really haul ass all the time.”
Maybe so, but Rogue One seems like Andor on rhydonium. Rogue One isn’t a short movie, but the prequel series could have gotten a whole 12-episode season, at minimum, out of the movie’s events. After Andor, it feels too fast, at times, since the series allowed much more time for character development and world-building. At one point in Rogue, we get a fleeting glimpse of Galen and Lyra Erso having drinks with Krennic on Coruscant in a flashback. You know that on Andor, we would have had that whole scene, and the dialogue would’ve been better than any blaster-bolt exchange.
It’s strange to see planets identified on screen in Rogue One when our villains and heroes hop from place to place. And the writing isn’t as sharp, whether because Gilroy became a better writer while working on Andor—as he has repeatedly said—or because he wasn’t scripting the film from the start. Comedy and corniness occasionally undercut the drama. Would you like to know the probability that Gilroy didn’t write the Vader line “Be careful not to choke on your aspirations, Director”? It’s high.
Nor can most of the monologues—such as holographic Galen’s message for “Stardust”—measure up to Andor’s greatest oratorical hits.
The exception is Jyn’s speech to the “spies, saboteurs, and assassins” of Rogue One, which still summons chills. And though an out-of-focus Cassian—a killer with the face of a friend—merely hovers behind Jyn’s shoulder as she delivers that pep talk, he gets a great line of his own with “Make 10 men feel like a hundred.”
Rogue One’s production process caused consternation about tonal changes and reshoots, whereas Lucasfilm gave Gilroy free rein to follow his muse from the advent of Andor. The difference shows. Both Rogue One and Andor are top-tier Star Wars, and I wouldn’t want to lose either Bor Gullet or Gorst. All in all, though, Rogue One feels less like the unofficial finale of Andor than a backdoor pilot for it. And in effect, it was, even though Andor’s careful scene-setting culminates in the movie’s climactic heist. However, there is one aspect of Rogue One that even Andor can’t compete with.
The Battle of Scarif rules.
Andor has action and tension galore: the Aldhani heist, the Narkina prison break, the Ghorman Massacre, even the hospital infiltration and hallway fight in the three-part finale. But it doesn’t have a huge conflict fought on multiple fronts: land, air, and space. Most of Andor is about the prelude to full-scale war, and the origins of the Rebel Alliance, so the series tends to operate on a slightly smaller and more intimate scale (notwithstanding its sizable budget). Almost every Star Wars movie, by contrast, features a set piece that starts with “the Battle of,” from Yavin, Hoth, and Endor on. Rogue One has the Battle of Scarif, and that desperate fight for the fledgling Alliance’s survival stacks up favorably against any other series showstopper.
The last third of the movie—in which Cassian, Jyn, and K-2SO, pursued by Director Krennic, retrieve and transmit the Death Star plans; the rest of the Rogue One team, and the few rebel starfighters that slipped past the planetary shield, engage Imperial ground forces and fighters; and Admiral Raddus and the rebel fleet fend off fighters and Star Destroyers while trying to take down the shield—is as gripping as any sequence in Star Wars. In Andor, I wrote, “a single TIE fighter felt terrifying,” and that was thrilling in its own way. But the ending of Rogue One hits harder from an action standpoint than Andor ever did, which makes the movie an ideal complement to (and chaser) for the series—and reminds us why Star Wars still needs movies, too.
There are some “holy crap” moments.
Andor was so successful in large part because the series is its own entity. Although it’s deeply indebted to the trappings of the original trilogy, and obligated to lead up to Rogue One, it never feels like it exists for fan service’s sake, or to set up something else. And so, aside from some necessary pushing of pieces around the board toward the end of its second season, Andor rarely appears to be going to great lengths to lay groundwork for its big-screen “sequel.”
Even so, Gilroy is right: There are moments in Rogue One that resonate much more than they used to, whether because Andor’s dialogue or events intentionally teed them up, or, more often, because we’ve simply spent much more time with Cassian and the nascent rebellion than we had when Rogue One came out.
It’s not just the knowledge that one of the movie’s signature lines, “Rebellions are built on hope,” originated with a bellhop on Ghorman. Or how when Saw huffs fumes from his tank, we suspect he’s riding the rhydo. Or the way Cassian asks Tivik, “Galen Erso? Was it?!”, prompted (or so it seems now) by the earlier Death Star tip he’d received. Or Krennic calling, “Who are you?!” at Jyn, echoing Cassian’s devastating question to (and dismissal of) Syril Karn.
Nor is it just Cassian—who told Kino Lay that no one was listening on Narkina—saying, “I do. Someone’s out there,” in response to Jyn’s question, “Do you think anybody is listening?”
It’s the fact that when Vader tells Krennic that the destruction of Jedha will be explained away as a mining disaster, we think of the story the Empire supplied to explain the fate that befell Cassian’s homeworld, Kenari. Or how on Jedha, when Cassian says, “We have to hurry. This town, it's ready to blow,” we wonder whether he’s thinking of Ferrix before its revolt. Or the way we interpret his actions now that we know what he learned from Luthen. His execution of Tivik in the film’s first scene closely mirrors Luthen’s disposal of Lonni in Andor’s antepenultimate episode:
General Davits Draven orders Cassian to assassinate Galen Erso, too, completing a trifecta of informants offed by the very “good guys” they’re blowing the whistle to. Similarly, Cassian’s dressing-down of Jyn after their departure from Eadu—partly born out of guilt about contributing to her dad’s death—is Luthen through and through, calling to mind Luthen’s questioning of Cassian’s commitment at multiple points in the series. (Such as Season 2, Episode 6, when Cassian says, “I give you everything,” and Luthen asks, “This is everything?”) “We don't all have the luxury of deciding when and where we want to care about something,” Cassian says to Jyn. “Suddenly the Rebellion is real for you? Some of us live it. I've been in this fight since I was 6 years old. You're not the only one who lost everything. Some of us just decided to do something about it.” (Galen lost everything and decided to do something about it, too.)
When Cassian says he lost everything, we now know what he means. And when he joins Jyn after the council meeting on Yavin and says, “Most of us, we've done terrible things on behalf of the Rebellion”—well, we’ve seen him do more of those things. (Which makes it more touching when he stops Jyn from finishing off Krennic, knowing that vengeance takes a toll.) We’ve also seen him go rogue, so his unscheduled departure from Yavin in the movie feels like classic Cassian.
It’s a bit jarring to remember that Melshi makes next to no impression in the movie, and that Cassian is more of a deuteragonist than a protagonist—but not that jarring, because Cassian was rarely the most compelling character in his eponymous series, either. (He’s a great character, to be clear; it’s just a stacked cast.) Every now and then, there’s something that seems inconsistent: When Chirrut, Baze Malbus, and Cassian are captives of Saw, Chirrut says, “We’ve been in worse cages than this one,” and Cassian answers, “This is a first for me.” As we’re now well aware, this is far from Cassian’s first stint in a cell. Such could-be continuity errors are easily explained, though. For one thing, Cassian, like Luthen, is a liar. For another, he might mean it’s his first time kept in a cage by an ostensible ally. Or maybe he’s being sarcastic, and silently giving thanks that Saw’s holding pen doesn’t have electrified floors.
I never really viewed Cassian and Jyn’s relationship through a romantic lens, even though the two share some smoldering looks. There’s no point in shipping them, because they’re both doomed. Under less frantic, high-stakes circumstances, perhaps, sparks could have flown. But to me, theirs is more of a mutual attraction born of commitment to the cause and common origins than it is a physical infatuation. Both were uprooted, and essentially orphaned, at an early age. And both have had to tell their parents—biological or adoptive—that they understand.
To me, Cassian and Bix (along with their baby) is the one true pairing of Cassian’s story, which bolsters my previous sense of the Jyn-Cassian connection. And perhaps the most impactful punch Rogue One packs after Andor comes toward the end, when the shot of Cassian and Jyn about to be consumed by the Death Star’s blast—embracing, but not smooching, and facing in different directions—mirrors the framing of Bix and her (and Cassian’s baby) on Mina-Rau:
For Bix and the baby, it’s the sunrise Luthen knew he’d never see. For Cassian (and Jyn), it’s the sunset. “I'm beginning to think the Force and I have different priorities,” Cassian says in Rogue One, but in his last seconds, perhaps those priorities are finally aligned. Andor’s death scene was always a tearjerker, but now? Total waterworks.
It’s been a great run, but I’d really like to see Star Wars explore a new time period.
As soon as Andor’s credits rolled, I thought two things: first, “I want to watch the original trilogy”; and second, “I want more Andor—or at least something like it.” Yes, Andor delivered one of the best TV-viewing experiences ever, for Star Wars obsessives and non-nerds alike, but I’m greedy. Give me the Gilroyverse!
Here’s the thing, though: I deeply distrust that impulse, which is exactly the sort of sentiment that tends to get Star Wars in trouble. I don’t really want a Jyn Erso series. And much as I spent my Rogue One rewatch wondering what Andor’s survivors were up to during the movie’s events, I don’t even really want a Kleya-and-Luthen prequel series, or a Vel-and-Kleya series series, or the adventures of Bix and baby Cassian/Maarva. (Actually, if it’s a girl, I hope she’s named Kerri.) Granted, I didn’t particularly want a Cassian Andor series either, and look how that turned out. I’m not saying there’s a spinoff-from-the-spinoff-from-the-spinoff that couldn’t be done well. But Gilroy doesn’t seem inclined to do it—“I think I did my thing here,” he told Variety—and what I’m really pining for is more of his magic touch, not someone else’s take on the characters he created. Let Tony and Poe Dameron make their cello movie.
The most fitting tribute to Andor would be to do something different, as Andor did. At the moment, my most-anticipated Star Wars project is James Mangold’s movie on the origins of the Jedi, which is set a really long time ago. Escape the constraints of time and space! I want stories set in the distant past. I want stories set in the far future. I want stories set far from the bright center to the universe—but not on Tatooine. I want what I don’t even know I want. Whatever’s on tap for the franchise, we have a long ride ahead of us.
That said: I think I’m almost ready to rewatch Andor. And after my Andor do-over is done, I might just re-rewatch Rogue One.
