Andor is one of the most gripping and grown-up stories set in the Star Wars galaxy. In fact, it's one of the best recent pieces of television, full stop. But it's a bit bleak, isn't it?
The second series of Andor, now streaming on Disney Plus, is critically acclaimed for its unflinching look at the politics of Star Wars – and by extension, the real world.
If it's got you in the mood for more Star Wars, Disney's streaming service has plenty of movies and TV shows to choose from. The obvious follow-up is Rogue One, the standalone film that first introduced Diego Luna's galactic guerilla Cassian Andor in 2016. It has been given a greater resonance by the TV series, but still feels a bit half-baked, and is also pretty downbeat.
So, if the combination of Andor plus everything going on in the real world has got you yearning for some action in a galaxy far, far away that leans more towards cosmic capers than deeply upsetting fascism, I'm here to remind you about the other standalone Star Wars movie that you probably completely forgot about.
Yes, I'm talking about Solo.
Solo recounts the origin story of everybody's favourite galactic smuggler, Han Solo. Starting out as a lovelorn thief on the mean streets of Corellia, the young Han bounces from laser-blasting escapades to hyperdrive escapes, picking up his buddy Chewbacca and his iconic ship the Millennium Falcon along the way.
It's an entertaining adventure full of shootouts and one-liners, with a cast of stars having a ball playing Star Wars.
Released in 2018, Solo: A Star Wars Story fell between the divisive Last Jedi and nonsensical Rise of Skywalker, a run of disappointments which helped drive Star Wars off the big screen.
Solo's box office was almost certainly affected by the news that the original directors – Phil Lord and Christopher Miller – were fired mid-shoot, to be replaced by Ron Howard.
But now we're a few years past all that mess, Solo is a lot of fun. If Andor foregrounds the political subtext of the Star Wars galaxy and its imperial bad guys, Solo leans more towards the other big influence on the series: old-timey adventure serials.
It has cliffhangers, quips and western-style shootouts, and it definitely doesn't take itself too seriously. The origin story distractingly explains every facet of Han Solo's personality – and chucks in at least one cameo too many – but aside from that, it's that rare Star Wars adventure that you can just watch on its own.
Alden Ehrenreich plays a younger version of the cocky character made famous by Harrison Ford, which was always going to be a thankless task. It derailed his career, but Ehrenreich's actually pretty charming as a younger, perkier Han Solo who hasn't quite become the jaded smuggler we know and love.
After Rogue One’s deeply unsettling CG versions of long-dead actors, not to mention the sight of Ford playing himself as a CGI-ed young man in the lacklustre Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny, it’s interesting to see an actual human actor giving a different take on a character.
It probably didn't help Ehrenreich's case that he's surrounded by a great cast all apparently trying to steal the film from under him, but that does make it all the more fun for us.
Woody Harrelson as a space pirate! Paul Bettany as a suave space gangster! Thandiwe Newton as, er, another space pirate! Best of all, there's the incomparably smooth Donald Glover as a younger Lando Calrissian, the best-dressed man in the galaxy.
Glover makes a great double act with Phoebe Waller-Bridge, who's an absolute hoot as irreverent droid L3-37. And lest you think Solo has no depth whatsoever, the scene where she leads her fellow droids in a revolt against slavery is one of the most explicitly political scenes in Star Wars up to that point.
OK, it's no Andor, but what is?
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