Obi-Wan Kenobi, the third and latest Star Wars TV series, released its first couple of episodes on Disney+ Hotstar and it began on a specific strain of melancholia seen often in cowboy movies (the Star Wars movies are essentially space cowboy stories, after all) — the plight of the retired or exiled gunfighter and what happens when circumstances force him to pick up his weapons again. You can see this formula at its finest in Clint Eastwood’s 1992 classic Unforgiven and down the years, this template has been adapted into a variety of genre classics, including the John Wick series.
Ten years after the events of Revenge of the Sith (2005), we find a deflated Obi-Wan Kenobi (Ewan McGregor) hiding out on the desert-planet Tattooine, where a young Luke Skywalker (Grant Feely) is being looked after by his step-uncle Owen Lars (Joel Edgerton). A group of Jedi-hunters led by the Grand Inquisitor (Rupert Friend) and his subordinate, the Third Sister (Moses Ingram) are prowling the cosmos on Kenobi’s trail, terrorizing small planets and their residents till one of them gives up Kenobi’s location. Meanwhile, The Big Bad of the original Star Wars trilogy, Darth Vader/Anakin Skywalker (Hayden Christensen) is the one pulling the strings all along, with a typically bloodthirsty plan in the works. “A Jedi is trapped by their compassion,” the High Inquisitor says at one point during the first episode—Obi-Wan Kenobi drops several hints throughout that this will be the overarching plot of the show, the story of a man who cannot help doing the right thing even in the face of clear and imminent danger.
For the last three years, Disney has set about expanding the Star Wars universe through TV shows: before Obi-Wan Kenobi there was The Mandalorian (2019-present) and The Book of Boba Fett (2022). All three shows are unabashedly fan service, of course, with the storylines dealing heavily in the nostalgia associated with the original Star Wars trilogy (1977-83). When you look at these three shows as a whole, you realise certain key narrative strategies Disney is employing for this phase of the franchise.
Old-school aesthetics, production design
One of the most common complaints fans have about the Star Wars prequel trilogy — The Phantom Menace (1999), Attack of the Clones (2002) and Revenge of the Sith (2005) — is that these movies diluted the intensity of the original trilogy. In this line of criticism, the visuals of the prequel trilogy are too cartoonish, with high-contrast colours and the action sequences being below par for their time. Most egregiously, these films diluted the ‘space cowboy’ element that is so central to the Star Wars universe.
You can see that Disney has addressed this section of fan criticism with the TV shows. From the first episode itself, Obi-Wan Kenobi has some gorgeous, luxuriously paced long shots of Tattooine’s desert landscape — in one shot, the carcass of a monstrous creature serves as the scaffolding for a network of tents. In another, Kenobi negotiates and makes small talk with a Jawa merchant, against the backdrop of some gorgeous dunes.
Some of the most impressive action sequences in The Mandalorian also take place in long, vast stretches of desert-adjacent nothingness. There are also plenty of tasty barroom sequences, echoing Han Solo’s (Harrison Ford) famous salon scene where he shoots under the table to win a quick-draw situation.
But it’s really The Book of Boba Fett that elevates this aesthetic, especially in its last few episodes. There’s a touching episode where Fett (Temuera Morrison) bonds with an alien tribe and takes part in an initiation ritual of sorts in the middle of the desert. There’s also a sensational, old-school cowboy duel sequence in the penultimate episode between Cobb Vanth (Timothy Olyphant in a brilliant, tense cameo), mayor of Tattooine’s “Freetown” and the dreaded assassin Cad Bane. That scene would not have been out-of-place in The Quick and the Dead.
These shows are meant to be throwbacks, providing a ‘lo-fi’ flavour to set it apart from contemporary science-fiction extravaganzas like, say, Tenet or Captain Marvel. The ‘less is more’ philosophy works well for them also because both humans and alien species in these stories are deeply impoverished, stuck in a seemingly endless war between the Galactic Empire and the Rebel Alliance.
George Lucas’s diverse and eclectic group of design influences—another key part of the original movies’ success — is reflected in some of the production design choices of these shows. Look at the biker gang’s space motorcycles in The Book of Boba Fett, the colours, the steampunk-in-space design; it’s pure Lucas and has been acknowledged as such by fans.
A new approach to VFX and green-screen
For The Mandalorian, showrunner Jon Favreau recruited the Australian cinematographer Greig Fraser. Fraser has enjoyed a very successful last couple of years, with his work on big-ticket movies like Dune and The Batman. A few years before The Mandalorian began shooting, Fraser had also used a new approach to incorporating mobile backdrops during his work on Rogue One (2016), another Star Wars movie. These were high-definition LED video walls with rapidly-changing digitally-produced backdrops on them. The whole thing was mounted on a unified platform which could be manipulated from either end of the shot. Lucasfilm's Industrial Light and Magic (ILM) division then fleshed out this idea and created 'StageCraft', the aforementioned technique used by Fraser in Rogue One and later, of course, The Mandalorian.
What are the advantages of StageCraft? For one it allows directors to shoot naturally, creating scenes with a mixture of natural and digitally produced backgrounds. As Matt Reeves, the director of The Batman will tell you this is something most directors prefer. Fraser’s virtuosity as cinematographer allowed Reeves to deliver some stunning scenes involving Gotham’s skyline by night. In both The Mandalorian and now Obi-Wan Kenobi, you immediately notice the sharply reduced number of green-screen sequences, especially when you compare it to the prequel or even the sequel trilogy of recent years.
This doesn’t mean that the VFX are uniformly excellent, of course. Quite a few action scenes in The Book of Boba Fett are strictly middling, with characters jumping their cues and not quite nailing the speed or the intensity of their physical movements. You can tell that this has been papered over in post-production, and as a result the ‘patch-up’ VFX leaves a ‘tell’ in the scene—a little glitch, a slight lack of continuity.
Unapologetic fan service
Obi-Wan Kenobi is perhaps also the best example of the Star Wars universe’s unabashed fan service. It has united the prequel trilogy’s two biggest characters, Kenobi and Darth Vader, roping in Ewan McGregor and Hayden Christensen to reprise their famous roles. While the first two episodes don’t deliver the Kenobi-Vader confrontation, we know that it’s only a matter of time before their paths cross.
To be fair, this is actually one of the less controversial fan service choices made across the three Star Wars TV shows. The Book of Boba Fett’s usage of a CGI Luke Skywalker is easily the most contentious one. To recap: Disney did not hire Mark Hamill or digitally ‘de-age’ him like De Niro and Al Pacino were in Martin Scorsese’s Netflix film The Irishman. Instead, Disney compiled audio recordings of Luke Skywalker from the old films and fed all of it into an AI system, which then ‘created’ Skywalker’s voice while his likeness was generated digitally. Basically, this is Luke Skywalker if a computer imagined him and aged him very slightly.
The results were mixed, to say the least. On the one hand, the move makes for a great publicity gimmick. On the other hand, CGI Luke comes across as curiously wooden and there are obvious constraints as to his mobility levels. Moreover, this strategy throws into question the future of Disney franchises in general—in theory, it could mean that no onscreen death means anything anymore. Characters can be killed off and resuscitated at the drop of a hat, thanks to increasingly sophisticated AIs. At a more philosophical level, it also means that actors in Disney movies run the risk of being frozen in stasis—with zero future participation, they can be confined forever within the universes they once helped bring to life. It’s a thorny debate, to be sure, and for once, it’s a relief to see that Obi-Wan Kenobi did not ‘assemble’ Darth Vader from the archives, choosing to let Christensen reprise his role instead.
For much of the 80-minutes or so of its first two episodes, Obi-Wan Kenobi is a well-meaning, well-made show, albeit one limited by its narrow focus on the ways of the Jedi and the mysteries of the Force. Stellar performances by McGregor and Edgerton, in particular, prevent the space opera stuff from overwhelming the character studies. Whether Christensen and others can capitalize on this early momentum remains to be seen, but for now Star Wars diehards are in for a treat.
Aditya Mani Jha is a Delhi-based independent writer and journalist, currently working on a book of essays on Indian comics and graphic novels.
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by Aditya Mani Jha
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