Tony Gilroy, Andor’s maestro, adapted action movies I love—the Bourne trilogy, Armageddon, Michael Clayton and The Devil's Advocate. He made Rogue One too. And I didn't like that as much as others did. His pops, Frank, adapted a movie into a Pulitzer and Tony award-winning play—The Subject Was Roses in 1965. His brothers Dan and John can Kool and the Gang get down on it too.
But then I saw Gilroy put his back into dialogue got snappy. Nazis SS officers in white—excuse me, Imperial Security Bureau officers—at a round table started trading repartee like a blueberry hooligan after two shots of whiskey, hopped up on the cocaine holding down the trigger on the Sweet Business feeling no pain. If you don’t get that reference, just no I play a lot of Destiny 2 while listening to Jacob Bryant.
Then Fiona Shaw, as Maarva Andor, stood next to a stuttering red personified personhood that looks less like a fire hydrant and more like trash compactor—laying into her adopted son, Cassian, played by an understated Diego Luna, about how she ain't goin’ out like no punk to the imperialists.
I watched a torture expert do the Elmore Leonard and tell me a story in dialogue about the dying screams of a race of massacred people weaponized to oppress even the most unwilling and stubborn amongst us. And then Andor used our imaginations to bring us that pain.
Perhaps the most underused tool in the writer’s book bag is their ability to allow the reader, the viewer, the audience’s imagination to do the work for us. Like a revolutionary counting on an emperor’s overreaction to a bank heist, we create our own worst nightmares.
The Jacobins, the Decembrists, the Bolsheviks, Russian and German Jews are all represented alongside the cost of their resistance. I saw Stellan Skarsgard deliver the monologue he likely took this role for, and I could see—immediately—he must have asked to do it again and again.
Gilroy and company bent film to their will, maximizing their gifts in a medium where—unlike stage play—you can get it right the first time for someone else who never saw you do it live the first time. If you have $250 million to make 12 one-hour movies—that’s $21 million per one-hour film—get your money’s worth.
Then I saw Beau Willimon throw down on the page what Gilroy didn't himself. Not once did I see colorful flashlight fights, references to space monks and space chi or an anointed savior.
I saw characters who could be real people, anchored in their time, pushed toward choosing the best of the worst decisions and laid composer Nicholas Britell going in his bag underneath it. I saw a man forced to choose a side in a war he wanted no part of.
I saw prison presented as I know it to be true, gulags as we know them to exist, hope like a candle dancing in the dark as we clench our eyes shut so as not to be infected by what might soon kill us sooner rather than later—a light we cannot possess. I was reminded of the cost of revolution.
I shouted in an empty room for at that moment I realized the many who created Andor had succeeded. Succeeded in telling a story in this mostly trite, benign and vexingly edging toward brilliant property over 44 years that reaches the high bar of critically-acclaimed, emotionally moving, intellectually, inspiring, innovative art in storytelling: I'll tell my friends about it. Consider yourself told.
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