Obi-Wan Kenobi: A Review

My take on Obi-Wan Kenobi, on Disney+. Not good, though not as thoroughly awful (yet) as The Book of Boba Fett. Lots of people have said such things already, but I thought I’d offer a negative review that is not based on the toxic, racist, chauvinist horribleness that seems to dominate Star Wars fandom.

NOTE: there are “spoilers” here. I put that in quotation-marks because I don’t think there’s much freshness in the series to spoil, but it’s up to you.

PREMISE

The basic premise of the series was always going to be a problem: Obi-Wan Kenobi goes into hiding on a nothing planet and waits roughly 20 years for Luke to grow up. We know that at the end he’s alive, basically forgotten by the Imperials, not especially ground-down or depressed, and a capable manipulator of the Force, particularly when it comes to mental effects. Meanwhile, at the end of the prequel series, he was a compassionate, decent, occasionally fatuous, understandably-shellshocked master fighter who’s just lost a war.

This is not a story arc that lends itself to action-adventure. To be honest, if you wanted to do this thing deeply, and you didn’t care a whit about making something entertaining, you’d just have Obi-Wan sit in a cave and meditate. There isn’t much to say: he meditated, got himself in tune with the Force, and came out wise and even-keeled, as in Star Wars (which I refuse to call A New Hope).

Instead we get this series.

PLOT

Let’s start with some glaring problems—many of which are endemic to this franchise.

The Inquisitors, Imperial Jedi-hunters, come to Tatooine looking for Jedi. Why Tatooine? It’s supposed to be an impoverished, nothing planet on the Outer Rim, in the middle of nowhere. Having come to Tatooine, why do they happen to land so close to Kenobi, given that they have no clues about his whereabouts and are actually looking for someone else? Come to think of it, why does there just happen to be some low-level Jedi hanging out within walking distance of where Kenobi his hiding? I mean, this galaxy supposedly has millions of planets, and very few Jedi, right? Answer: because in this franchise, Tatooine is not a planet but rather a smallish town, and it’s also the center of absolutely everything. You’d think that somewhere along the line Vader/Anakin would have realized that the place he grew up is essential to everything happening in the entire galaxy and look into it, but no, he’s oblivious.

(Aside: this Tatooine thing is, to my mind, the most glaring of the many, many bits of laziness that have ruined almost everything after the original trilogy. In Star Wars, the droids crash-land on Tatooine for no particular reason but Fate and the Force... and lo and behold they stumble on Luke and then Ben Kenobi. I’m okay with that: coincidence is fine. But when somebody mentions to Darth Vader that that’s where the droids crashed, surely even an evil supervillain of the most modest intelligence would think, “Tatooine? Where I was born? Where they killed mom and I went berserk the first time? Hang on. And wait, it’s a gold protocol droid and an R2 unit, like my old ones? Ready my ship, I’m heading down, because that’s way too many coincidences.” This is only a problem because of the prequels’ stunning laziness.)

When Leia gets kidnapped by bounty hunters on Alderaan, you have to wonder why the Organas don’t do anything to find their daughter other than call Obi-Wan out of retirement, contrary to their one agreement at the start of all this. As Kenobi says, “Maybe a bounty hunter?” Good call: a Mandalorian would be a great choice, and surely the Organas have the cash. And since in fact Obi-Wan is entirely correct, and the whole thing is a trap meant to catch him personally, and the people who kidnapped Leia are, in good franchise fashion, just a couple of mediocre toughs with minimal brains, whose boss Reva isn’t actually paying almost any attention to what they’re doing—note the long chase scene where it turns out that despite using Force powers constantly and running like hell, Reva never actually manages to catch up to a 10-year-old, in part because apparently she decided that the best plan was to head to the far end of the city to wait for her trap to be sprung—it does seem as though the rich, powerful Organa family could have taken more effective steps. Couldn’t they hire a bunch of top bounty hunters and try to get Obi-Wan? I mean, why wait? What are the Alderaan police doing? Don’t the Imperial police frown on the kidnapping of senators’ families by random thugs?

Time and again in this show we get what a friend of mine likes to call the Writer-Friendly Solution. We need Obi-Wan to go haring off after Leia, so rather than work out something that makes sense and drives itself organically, we just shove it through with coincidences and hope it’ll work. This is a constant problem with this franchise: it’s as though the producers and writers think if they just do enough fan-service, we’ll all be so starry-eyed about the glories of the Star Wars universe that we’ll overlook shoddy craftsmanship.

STYLE AND PACE

This series is, in franchise terms, Big Stuff (tm). It’s all about The Important Story (tm). And that means, as we all know by now, that it has to be Taken Very Seriously (tm). No humor, no lightness, no recognition that this is basically pulp space opera and as such intrinsically silly. Everyone loves to rave about how The Empire Strikes Back was the best of the films, but for my money it’s second: Star Wars was the best one, for a lot of reasons, but above all because it seemed to be aware (certainly the cast were) that this whole thing is silly and a ripping good time. Are there plot holes? Sure—and who cares, really? Plot holes like that don’t make a difference unless we’re taking things Very Seriously. Remember the gang sitting around on the Millennium Falcon talking about Chewie ripping people’s arms off? You won’t get that kind of humor in almost any other entry of this franchise—the most notable exception being The Mandalorian, which was a return to pulp space opera, humor, and fast pace... and not coincidentally a return to high quality.

In any case, Obi-Wan Kenobi is deadly, deadly serious. Unfortunately, the writers of this franchise have, with rare exceptions, been terrible from the get-go (George Lucas not excepted), and this series is a chip off the old block (mostly the writers of The Mandalorian were better, which is interesting by itself). And for bad writers like this, especially as overseen by the committee of death and the producers who run this franchise, Serious and Important have exactly two implications: no smiles and no pace.

Ah yes, pace: it’s grindingly slow. Opening episode of The Mandalorian: Mando has a bar fight, captures a guy, and then he and the bounty are nearly eaten by a space walrus. Mando gets a weird job from an ex-Imperial, and checks in with his even weirder cult hiding in the sewers. Mando goes to a desert planet, almost gets eaten by a featherless space turkey, gets rescued by a kind of squashed Nick Nolte, has an enormous shootout with bandits but wins with the assistance of a mad gun-droid, finds Baby Yoda, blasts the droid and heads off. 37 minutes including credits. Opening episode of Obi-Wan Kenobi: recap of the prequels, some inquisitors come to town but aren’t looking for Kenobi, Leia is kidnapped and Kenobi reluctantly agrees to help. Run-time 56 minutes including credits. You get the point. The pace is exceedingly slow, and when action does happen it’s spent on what are presumably supposed to be tense, gripping moments of stasis, but actually just feel like waiting around for something to happen.

If you insist on doing a show with a pace this slow, you’ve got very little for your viewers to think about, and a lot of time to think about it. So we wonder: given an entire planet (not to mention a whole galaxy) to hide in, how come Kenobi and this other Jedi happen to be in the same little town? How come the guy doesn’t recognize one of the senior masters of the order? How come the Grand Inquisitor puts up with constant backbiting and insubordination from Third Sister Reva: this is stuff no real military officer would put up with, and these guys are supposed to be evil! (That’d be quite a good bit of characterization, in fact: give us a spitting, hissing, backbiting inquisitor, set them up to be an important character, and then have the Grand Inquisitor kill them painfully just to make a point about command-chains, or even just because he thought it’d be fun.)

Which brings us to...

CHARACTER

It’s important to separate writing from acting here. The acting in this series is fine, occasionally good, rarely actually bad. But the writing is awful.

Ewan McGregor does a good job, though I still think his Alec Guinness impression is mediocre at best. He’s given few lines, oddly enough: it’s probably a good thing, though, considering how bad the lines are in this show.

Vivien Lyra Blair does a creditable job as young Leia. She’s dressed and shot oddly, though, because she is actually 10 (like Leia) and sure as heck doesn’t look it: she looks about 7, right down to the slightly waddling child-gait. Her lines are fairly terrible, though they could be worse: writing believable children is not something too many Hollywood types have ever been good at, and while this series is no exception, we’ve all seen lots worse. The problems surrounding this character are more about the ways the show tries to make her seem vaguely heroic and just end up with idiotic pseudo-action.

Moses Ingram as Third Sister Reva gets a lot of hate from the toxic fanboys; they’d love to say that it’s about other things, but it’s really about a black woman in a major and indeed powerful role. That’s crap, it’s disgusting, and it’s emblematic of everything wrong with the fan culture of this franchise. Yes indeed, there is certainly an enormous problem here, but it’s not Moses Ingram. As an actor, she manages to exude spitting rage and hate very effectively, which is especially impressive considering that her lines are truly wooden, just clunker after clunker—at least as bad as the lines given to Ming-Na Wen, the assassin Fennec Shand in Boba Fett. She’s given no opportunity to reveal why she’s like this, what she’s so pissed about; all we know is that she seems to hate her boss, which is understandable enough, but why should we care? Maybe she’s got a personal animus for Kenobi that hasn’t been explained in two long episodes? If so, why wait? God knows we could’ve used some actual content here.

Rupert Friend as the Grand Inquisitor: again, not the actor, really, though I do think he spends all his screen time coming perilously close to scenery-chewing. The stupid outfit doesn’t help. I think he’s supposed to be villainous and terrifying or something, but to my eye he comes off as vaguely insane and dreadfully cliché, one very short step from old-fashioned bad-guy chortling. The other inquisitors are just boringly weird, with no personality whatever. Once again, they’ve gotten decent actors and given them nothing to work with.

Beyond this, well, there really aren’t any other characters to speak of. There’s lots of people, and lots of them say things, but there aren’t many characters. The exception that proves the rule: there’s a good bit of all-too-brief characterization in Part 2, with Kumail Nanjiani as Haja Estree, a street-con who pretends to be a Jedi and turns out to have a heart. If past history with this franchise is anything to go by, this character will reappear throughout the series, because there’s no way they bothered to do this much characterization on a throwaway. Incidentally, that kind of throwaway characterization was something The Mandalorian did constantly, and a great deal of why that show was so wonderful. Remember the episode at the end of Season 1 with the two stormtroopers arguing about looking at baby Yoda?

Let’s face it. I sort of know why Kenobi acts like he does, but that’s because of backstory. Leia gets a pass: she’s 10, and maybe she’s going through an especially difficult phase, so whatever. But the inquisitors and most of these others are acting in strange, outlandish ways, but we have no idea why, and they’re all so odd that we don’t care either. Jimmy Smits as Leia’s father is at least likable, but that’s Smits—it sure as heck isn’t his wooden lines.

SAVE THE KIDDIES

Last but not least, there’s the underlying problem that has plagued this franchise right from the start—and yes, it’s entirely Lucas’s fault. (This, by the way, against all that fanboy nonsense that says the franchise collapsed when it stopped being Lucas. Lucas really got his way and showed what he wanted to do with The Phantom Menace, and it was terrible. I have come to believe that the main reason Star Wars was excellent was that Lucas was struggling desperately to make the thing work, so he had to hand off a lot of things to other, far more talented people. The more he had enough money and production leeway to do what he wanted, the more the franchise collapsed.)

Anyway, the basic principle (for Lucas) has always been that these productions are for children. Put kids front and center, they’ll like it (viz. Anakin). Put funny aliens doing silly things, they’ll like it—and buy the toys. (Jar-Jar, anyone? Or how about the Star Wars Christmas special? Don’t tell me this is a new direction.) Keep the stories as simple and unsubtle as possible, because kids are stupid. This is why Rogue One and The Mandalorian are among the best entries: they’re really not aimed at kids. Yes, The Mandalorian has baby Yoda, but there’s a lot of truly nasty stuff going on, including a heroic main character who’s largely a thug for hire and who kills an awful lot of people without apology. And this is also why Return of the Jedi was the beginning of the end: the space battles and action are all very well, but when push comes to shove, the Ewoks were the signal that this whole franchise was headed for the kiddie-flick shredder.

CONCLUSIONS

In the end, contrary to what seems to be popular opinion, what makes the Star Wars franchise work is a combination of three things: a grandiose space-opera universe, lots of fast-paced space-opera action, and good characters. The plots, the Skywalker soap-opera, the Force mysteries and backstory, all that stuff is incidental and mostly mediocre. Over time, the franchise has lost sight of what matters apart from the universe—and even there, they’d rather recycle Tatooine for one last gasp than invent something new. Instead, they’ve focused on fan-service, an enormously inflated sense of epic story, recycling, and pandering to children.

The Book of Boba Fett was horrendous because (apart from the couple of episodes that were actually second-rate episodes of The Mandalorian), there was Tatooine instead of the universe, a small amount of rather slow-paced action (remember the walking-speed chase scene with the modded Power Rangers?), and almost no characterization at all. Instead the whole notion was fan-service (everyone adored Boba Fett, I have no idea why), the character arc was notionally a grandiose storyline, almost everything in the show was recycled, and there was a great deal (like the Power Rangers and the friendly rancor) thrown in quite obviously to appeal to young viewers.

Conversely, The Mandalorian had constant new places and scenery, an incredibly rapid pace of near-constant action, and intense characterization. The only real bits of fan-service were baby Yoda and the final appearance of Luke Skywalker. The storylines were basically small, and the overall arc (at least for the first season) was small as well. Very little was recycled, apart from the totally-unnecessary use of Tatooine. Last but not least, the show was violent, brutal, and at times cruel, so not especially kid-friendly.

Thus far, Obi-Wan Kenobi bids fair to be marginally better than Boba Fett, but not by much. We’ll see whether it picks up, but I can’t say I’m hopeful.