Remember This: ‘Andor’ and the Lessons of Star Wars

Star Wars turns 50 subsequent 12 months. The timeless flagship of one of the most successful media franchises of all time, George Lucas’s 1977 masterpiece To New Hope has impressed lots of of books, movies, exhibits and video video games that prosper a half-century later. All of these tales construct on that first hero’s journey: Luke Skywalker and his conquer the Galactic Empire. Lightsabers and the Force; Jedi and Sith; X-Wings and TIE fighters. These are the underpinnings of the Star Wars iconography that has hardened since the franchise’s debut, capturing the creativeness of thousands and thousands for practically a half-century. These pictures usually are not, nevertheless, what constitutes the true cultural significance or essence of Star Wars.

Imagine a really completely different image: A thief disastrously crosses the legislation and, in evading the penalties, is recruited right into a nascent galactic resistance community that opposes the Empire, at present dissolving what stays of its democratic establishments and conducting a false-flag marketing campaign to justify resource-driven genocide. Astonishingly, this too is Star Wars.

The two-season sequence Andor (a prequel to the 2016 movie RogueOne that first launched viewers to the character of Andor) follows an ensemble solid, together with rebel-sympathizing imperial aristocrat Mon Mothma (Genevieve O’Reilly) and Gestapo-esque administrator Dedra Meero (Denise Gough), to the widespread thief Cassian Andor (Diego Luna). Andor doesn’t begin out as a hero, however is progressively radicalized by the ache the Empire inflicts on him and these closest to him, in the end becoming a member of the veteran Luthen Rael (Stellan Skarsgård)’s quietly rising galactic resistance.

Watching the present, nevertheless, belies little proof that it takes place inside the stereotypical Star Wars universe, not to mention performing as a prequel to the first installment of the whole franchise. There is functionally zero fantasy and hardly any science fiction current in the sequence in any respect. The sequence is a political thriller, and but it’s a flagship installment in the Star Wars canon.

What is it that makes Andor the most trustworthy Star Wars half since To New Hope?

Politics.

There will invariably be those that clamor towards the ‘politicization’ of their favored media, however to insist that these tales are in some way wholly apolitical works and have to be preserved in a vacuum of societal irrelevance past shallow appreciation of sound and visible results is to overlook the entirety of the exigence behind the works themselves. What unites To New Hope and Andor particularly is precisely their painfully related sociopolitical contexts.

In 1971, The New York Times printed the first excerpts of the Pentagon Papersrevealing the Johnson administration’s disappointment of Congress and the American folks in its prosecution of the Vietnam War. Trust in authorities was basically undermined, worsening in 1974 as former President Richard Nixon resigned amid the Watergate scandal. In 2025, the US Department of Justice performed the incremental launch of the Epstein Filespublishing lots of of 1000’s of paperwork pertaining to the baby intercourse offender’s myriad connections to rich elites, American and overseas. President Donald Trump’s reversal against his own party’s demands for transparency in the matter outraged Americans in search of the fact on either side of the aisle.

In 1975 and 2021, America deserted two disastrous, fruitless navy entanglements in Vietnam and Afghanistanrespectively, collectively spanning 40 years and spawning home unrest nationwide.

In 1973, Nixon requested $2.2 billion in emergency aid from Congress for Israel’s warfare effort towards longtime enemies Egypt and Syria in the Yom Kippur War, and between Oct. 7, 2023, and May 25, 2025, the United States has given $174 billion to Israel throughout the course of its warfare towards Hamas in addition to its assaults on surrounding Arab states. In 1973, that support resulted in an Arab oil embargo that devastated the international gasoline financial system, and in February 2026, the US and Israel launched a warfare towards Iran that resulted in an oil shock extra damaging than that of 1973, 1979 and 2022 (following the Russian invasion of Ukraine) combined. I’ll spare readers each the exhaustive checklist of similarities between these eras and the overused saying about historical past and repetition, and as an alternative apply these contexts to understanding the significance of each To New Hope and Andor.

George Lucas started writing Star Wars (later To New Hope) in 1973, and it debuted in American theaters on May 25, 1977. Despite its setting, Star Wars It is extra a piece of fantasy than science fiction, primarily involved with the battle between gentle and darkness. The important characters are area wizards; Obi-Wan and Darth Vader extra carefully resemble Tolkien’s Gandalf and Saruman than Captain Kirk.

What mattered greater than conformity to style was the story of anti-colonial, anti-authoritarian riot, as Lucas described in an interview with James Cameron. Despite the ethical message it provided Americans, Lucas at all times believed “[the Rebels] “They were Viet Cong.” Aesthetically, the Empire seems Nazi German, although to Lucas, the villain was at all times “the highly technical empire — the American empire” to be defeated by an underdog insurgency. Cameron famous that rebels seem in fashionable American notion fairly in another way: “we call them terrorists… Mujahideen… Al-Qaeda.”

Andor reiterates the story of riot, however strikes previous the superhuman, mystical Jedi to as an alternative inform a narrative of on a regular basis people’ small acts of resistance in the face of abject tyranny. Such a story couldn’t have come at a greater time. The United States is grappling with a massively corrupt president who wields misinformation as his major rhetoric, whose brokers kill American citizens in brazen intimidation operations aimed at controlling voters’ data and who seeks control over foreign land for pure assets.

In an period painfully much like 1977, we as soon as once more have the alternative to be taught from Star Wars. As on a regular basis Americans are as soon as once more confronted with imperious conceit, then the classes of Andor have to be heeded. The younger insurgent Nemik places it finest: “There will be times when the struggle seems impossible. Remember this. The day will come when all… these moments of defiance will have flooded the banks of the Empire’s authority… one single thing will break the siege. Remember this. Try.”

We should attempt.

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