Andor is the best Star Wars since the original trilogy.

Has anyone ever guaranteed box office? Tom Cruise has had flops. Will Smith (pre-slap) has had flops. The Rock has had flops. Tom Hanks has had flops. Harrison Ford has had flops.

Maybe, but I quite like the first Avatar and feel it is often somewhat unfairly maligned. I don’t need the hard sell, just a little something to tell me it’s not the same thing again, but now with swimming.

No, the expectation is more of the same, but bigger. Not switching genre, or turning the bad guy into the hero.

At least two then. At 1:13 (as the “of a generation” card fades away), a human and a Na’vi are riding a banshee together.

I didn’t say clever. Nevertheless, both Aliens and Terminator 2 switched things up from their predecessors.

You have to assume they’re holding back some twist. Which, on the one hand, they should be applauded for not spoiling whatever it is in the trailers, but on the other, holy shit, the promotion for this film has been ridiculously mediocre thus far. There’s a fine line between showing too much and not showing enough,…

His schtick is so incredibly limited, and honestly, I’m not sure it was even that good in the first place — he just hit at the right time for it.

How is he hiding? By just being Some Dude™ (for the most part anyway) who’s really good at manipulating people to do the work for him.

I would strongly argue that it’s poor storytelling if you only know the goals from material outside of the show itself. I should be invested in these characters and their here and now, not just because I’m aware of what’s coming from the source material.

X-Ray is great when you want to know who that actor is or what song is playing in the scene (if it’s set up for the thing you’re watching anyway).

Andor is slow, yet praise around these parts has been superlative and near-unanimous.

It’s not exactly unique. There are endless Superman analogs out there.

The Girl in the Spider’s Web was not good either.

It didn’t help that one of the aliens spoke with a strong accent (and dropped in several alien words), whereas the other spoke only an alien language. It made it difficult to attune to it, I got about halfway through before I turned on subtitles and skipped back to the start of the scene.

Exactly. It was like a whole episode constructed out of scenes where we check in on what the supporting characters are up to elsewhere, and even Cassian’s scenes were of that style. It just lacked a central plot or theme or even the overriding tension of everything building to something specific that would have tied…

If you just want to see cool shit in a Star Wars milieu, stick to The Mandalorian. This show has been far more ambitious than that, and I will continue to offer mild criticism if and when I feel it doesn’t quite live up to the incredible heights it’s set for itself.

I thought it was a weird one — easily the weakest episode so far. Lots of good scenes, but it didn’t coalesce into a satisfying episode. It was all pieces being moved into position, which is presumably a necessary step toward the season finale, but given how incredible the show has been up to this point, it was…

“Story by” would generally mean they developed a treatment (a simplified version of a script, which may break it down into individual scenes, but wouldn’t generally be so detailed as to contain dialogue) for the narrative arc of the movie but didn’t turn it into a script.

There is a difference, yes, which is the reason for having a high bar. If you can’t show that the bulk of the work is your own (or rather, isn’t based on iterating ideas from an earlier version of the script), you won’t get a writing credit on the finished movie. Abrams does have a writing credit on The Force Awakens, …