The Subversive Ordinariness of ANDOR and THE CHOSEN
This piece includes minor spoilers for ANDOR.
Sometime recently, I was bubbling over with praise once again for the new Star Wars series, ANDOR, and my wife said something that struck me: “it sounds like you like this show for the same reasons we’ve liked The Chosen.”
In the conversation at hand, I was talking about one thing that has really appealed to me about ANDOR: the grounded, tangible feeling of its filmmaking. ANDOR was made without the use of recent technology like ILM Stagecraft and has been very restrained in its use of other VFX, focusing on practical set-pieces, costumes, and a very earthy aesthetic throughout much of its runtime.
Ironically, these are many of the things that are also praiseworthy about Dallas Jenkins’ and Angel Studios’ smash-hit series The Chosen. The idea that The Chosen portrays a story of Jesus’ ministry that “feels real” has been a key part of its huge appeal, going so far as to show Jesus doing ordinary things like brushing his teeth, carving wooden toys, and struggling to get a campfire started. If some Bible adaptations have portrayed Jesus and His disciples as stone statues without much emotion or humanity, The Chosen swings hard toward depicting Jesus as someone you could really hug and share a joke with.
Over the years, the Star Wars saga has also shared a struggle with heroes who feel like stone statues from time to time. One of the common critiques of the Prequel Trilogy was that the Jedi characters felt like cold Shakespearean monks, whose resistance to emotional attachment made them cease to be relatable or believable as ordinary human beings. Star Wars, spare for the remarkable exception of The Last Jedi, has often been focused on characters with “royal” lineage, less concerned with ordinary folk who have no connection to a grand divinely-willed destiny.
The Chosen and ANDOR both make great strides toward a depiction of their subject matter that feels real. They both take a world of grand, near-mythic figures and bring them down to something relatable and specific. In The Chosen, Simon Peter is a poor fisherman with a hot temper, sarcastic sense of humor, and lots of money in debts. Matthew is a meticulous (and solitary) tax collector with a hint of autism. Mary is a former prostitute who is called out of her old life by Jesus in the first episode - but she still struggles with depression, traumatic memories, and destructive habits. Likewise, in ANDOR, there are no Jedi or Emperors or Sith Lords to be found. The main characters do things like sell scrap metal, work in factories and mines, and try not to call too much attention to themselves in a world dominated by The Empire. We’ve become so accustomed to Star Wars showing us who we should care about by giving that person a lightsaber or a connection to a mystical Skywalker bloodline that it’s almost surprising to see a story where the characters are just ordinary people, plain and simple.
But the similarities between the shows, and the shared appeal of them, go much deeper than their groundedness. ANDOR is no direct allegory for The Gospels, mind you, but it does share some surprising resemblances and even stronger spiritual subtext. And, to put it simply: it’s just really excellent television.
Read the rest at The Rabbit Room.