'Andor' shows how a resistance is built, one brick at a time

The Star Wars movies, TV dramas, animated series and sundry other content-shaped products have shown us some spectacular sights: underwater civilisations, planet-choking cities, mystic swamps, ice worlds and volcanic hellscapes fit to forge a demon.

Andor, whose second and final season began on Disney+ on Tuesday, has some of that world painting, too. But perhaps its most memorable, and certainly its most definitive, physical feature is bricks.

The brick walls on Ferrix -- the childhood home planet of the series's hero, Cassian Andor (Diego Luna) -- have a somber origin story, revealed in the first-season finale. They are the cremains of the dead, baked into stone and placed into edifices to support those who come after.

These bricks are the symbol Andor is built out of. Like many Star Wars stories, the series is about a battle against a fascistic empire. (In the melee that ends the first season, set at Cassian's mother's funeral, her brick is used to clock an imperial soldier in the head.)

From a street-level, brick-level perspective, Andor shows what resistance means, how it works and what it costs. It emphasises not just individual heroism but also collective loss and sacrifice. In Andor, rebellion is more than a joyride: It is a construction project.

A sense of tragedy is built into the series's premise. Andor is a prequel to the 2016 movie Rogue One, in which Cassian goes on a fatal mission to retrieve the blueprints for the Death Star, the planet-killer that Luke Skywalker destroyed in the original Star Wars (now known as A New Hope).

Prequels are often where dramatic tension goes to die: How invested can you be in a story whose outcome you already know? The genius of Andor, created by Tony Gilroy, is to make that knowledge an asset.

With some exceptions, like Mon Mothma (Genevieve O'Reilly), the senator who will go on to lead the rebellion, Andor is largely about characters who will never live to see victory. That we know this -- that on some level, they know this -- is the whole point.

Freed from the "what happened" of the rebellion, Andor becomes a space-opera entertainment about revolutionary praxis. What radicalizes people? (The loss of loved ones; the loss of agency and hope; the loss of anything further to lose.) How does a rebellion form and spread? How do you build a movement that unites establishmentarians and militants? What -- and who -- is an acceptable sacrifice?

All this unfolds in a universe that, excepting the occasional star cruiser, looks a lot like ours. Andor is grimy and real-world. No one uses the Force or whips out a lightsaber. The rebels take hostages; the imperial antagonists are pasty and arrogant. When they fight, you see anger and fear on their faces, and when they die, they look dead.

The conflicts too may seem familiar, even more so as the second season unfolds. Imperial troops search for the "undocumented" amid a security panic that is manufactured -- and amplified by media outlets -- to justify a crackdown. The Empire disappears people to prison gulags with no hope of return. It bullies a small territory, undermining its autonomy to gain control of valuable natural resources. Senators weigh whether it is safe to speak out against the growing civil-liberties violations.

You could see this as Gilroy and company importing current events into the Star Wars galaxy. But you could also see it as current events repeating historical patterns that -- swashbuckling and adorably memeable aliens aside -- Star Wars has been concerned with since its beginning.

A New Hope hit theaters in 1977, a popcorn blend of bicentennial rebel spirit and post-1960s anti-authoritarianism, about a feathered-haired farm boy flooring the pedal on his space hot rod and sticking it to the Man right in the exhaust port. As George Lucas said in a 2005 interview, he conceived his films in the Nixon and Vietnam years as a way of wrestling with the question, "How do democracies get turned into dictatorships?"

The films' politics were not necessarily sophisticated. (What can you say about movies that ask you to accept Jar Jar Binks as a legislator?) And since the franchise was acquired by Disney, its ideas were increasingly smothered by nostalgia and fan service. Series like The Book of Boba Fett and Skeleton Crew are the TV equivalent of watching grown-ups play with their vintage action figures in their childhood bedrooms.

But politics never really let go of Star Wars. The Last Jedi became another front in the conservative campaign against representational "wokeness" and was targeted by troll farms. During the 2024 election, Elon Musk, the richest man on Earth, posted a meme that identified himself with the underdog Star Wars resistance.

We all want to believe ourselves the hero of our own stories. Andor addresses this dynamic through Cassian's chief pursuer, Syril Karn (Kyle Soller). Syril, a frustrated imperial bureaucrat, is driven less by moustache-twirling villainy than by a striver's desire to please his bosses, his security-officer girlfriend (Denise Gough) and his mother (Kathryn Hunter).

In Season 2, as Syril's zeal shifts into the suspicion that the Empire is perhaps not the shining light he saw it to be, his arc may be the series's most fascinating story (far more so than the familiar cynic-to-rebel journey at its center; Cassian continues the grand "Star Wars" tradition of making the face of a story its least interesting character).

Conversely, in the realpolitik of Andor, the good guys don't have the luxury of being unambiguously good, particularly Luthen Rael (Stellan Skarsgard), the resistance leader who recruits Cassian. His machinations -- lying, withholding, sacrificing his comrades like chess pieces -- can seem callous and reprehensible. Yet without him, the series argues, we would never get to cheer Luke, Han and Leia as they save the galaxy.

As a '70s and '80s kid, I loved that original fantasy. But it is bracing -- and surprising in a way I had thought "Star Wars" could no longer be -- to see Andor frame it for grown-ups, in a roughed-up setting of hard moral choices that could almost be the Northern Ireland of Say Nothing.

So while the opening of the new season, in which Cassian flies off in a stolen TIE fighter, is as kinetic and thrilling as any classic Star Wars dogfight, it is also oddly conventional. But the season soon finds its grounding, centering on a resistance movement on Ghorman, a silk-exporting planet whose beret-wearing rebels are dead ringers for French partisans from an old World War II flick.

Luthen debates whether that movement can be useful to his rebellion; the Empire seeks to create a false-flag incident; and I think it's no spoiler to say this does not go well for the locals caught in the middle. As an Imperial bigwig blithely chirps, "Bad luck, Ghorman!"

Not every character is served well; Bix Caleen (Adria Arjona), Cassian's compatriot-turned-lover and a survivor of imperial torture, is defined mostly by her suffering. Maybe the best compliment I can pay Andor is that it's less interesting when it works to tee up the plot of Rogue One and thus becomes more ordinary and expository.

But taken as a whole, Andor is a striking and successful project of recontextualization. Its dark shadings color the disco-ball brilliance of A New Hope, through which so many of us were introduced to Star Wars. What was a two-hour ride of derring-do and triumph becomes a yearslong campaign of sacrifice and loss.

In an age of copycat IP cash grabs, Andor doesn't merely echo its source material: It also retroactively improves it. Sometimes, Andor suggests, the long process of liberation is harder than bull's-eyeing womp rats in your T-16 and less glamorous than a lightsaber duel. Sometimes it simply means grabbing a brick. And sometimes it means becoming one.