Star Wars: Skeleton Crew
The existential question plaguing Lucasfilm since the purchase by Disney has been “what is Star Wars?” Founder George Lucas, of course, had a clear (if changing) answer to that which he was unafraid to pursue to the frequent consternation of the fanbase. Disney’s need to appease that fanbase lead to much tortured soul searching as the initial plan of “give them copies of the movies they said they liked” quickly ran into inevitable diminishing returns. What audiences want, in the long run, is always some familiarity to what came before but somehow made new and different to throw off the feeling of having seen everything before. Continuation, not replication.
Achieving some success at that with The Mandalorian, making use of Original Trilogy era mise en scene but focusing on different types of characters than previously used, the company has cast about for more and more ways to do the same and come up mainly with unmade films and disparately received television series. What they are trying to do is hard. It requires a creator to be able to answer that first question – “what is Star Wars” – something so far only one person has ever been able to do.
After trying various remixes of the various existing Star Wars formulas, the newest brainstorm is steal some inspiration from The Duffer Brothers’ Stranger Things, and mine the detritus of Star Wars close cousin: 1980s Spielbergian Kids Adventure. For the aging 80s audience so much of modern Star Wars is aimed at, the two go together like peanut butter and jelly so it seems like a natural fit except for one being consigned to American suburbs and 10-year-olds and the other to space wizards and star ships. Creator Jon Watts (Spider-Man: No Way Home) has shrugged his shoulders at the potential disparity and decided to just proceed with the mash up, giving us young Wim (Cabot-Conyers) and his best friend Neel (Smith) living their perfectly normal lives taking the bus to school, riding bikes through the woods, arguing with other kids and not always getting along with their parents. If some of the kids weren’t aliens and the bikes weren’t hover bikes you might never know what it is supposed to be. At least, until the kids discover an ancient spaceship buried behind their neighborhood and are suddenly transported away from their planet with no way to get back.
As much of a risk as it could seem to reduce the grand space opera to mere afterschool adventure, the initial conceit is easily disposed of as the children find themselves dealing with a cantankerous droid (Frost), wandering through a pirate space port and quickly discovering how dangerous their adventure is and how far from home they are. A home they soon learn is considered a myth to the rest of the galaxy, a sort of Star Wars-ian El Dorado, which no one knows the location of and the only hope they have is a conniving con man (Law) with an agenda of his own.
Keeping a firm child’s eye view of the world, even as they venture into increasingly dangerous corners filled with life threatening dangers, Skeleton Crew is easily the most kid-oriented addition to the franchise since the old Ewok TV movies, gorging on a sort of boys (and girls) own adventure the original films never had but everyone seems to remember them having. It stoutly refuses to be ponderous or self-important even when engaging with life-or-death struggles or the anguish of parental loss, a choice which keeps things breezy and easy to watch in the early going but may be a problem by the end.
It’s a difficult tonal needle to thread which Watts, working with a murderer’s row of episode directors including David Lowery (The Green Knight), The Daniels (Everything Everywhere All At Once) and Lee Isaac Chung (Minari), manages with aplomb, avoiding landmines as nimbly as Law refuses to answer any questions about himself and leaving plenty of places to go – will the kids get home, will anyone else find their planet and why was it hidden in the first place? And most importantly, will this be settled in one eight-episode season?
I for one hope it will and am eager to find out. It may be too light for those to whom Star Wars is and has always been serious business. That would be too bad. It’s too early to say whether anyone has found an answer to that overarching question – “what is Star Wars?” – and there’s probably too much fidelity to what has come before and too little risk to try something new, but Skeleton Crew at least has its own identity and knows what that is which already puts it ahead of many of its brethren.
7.5 out of 10
Starring Jude Law, Ravi Cabot-Conyers, Ryan Kiera Armstrong, Kyriana Kratter, Robert Timothy Smith, Tunde Adebimpe, Kerry Condon and Nick Frost. Created by Jon Watts.