I thought it was intriguing, and slower than I anticipated until the very end. Seems like a middle ground in tone/pacing to the other Mando-verse shows and Andor. I didn’t see a post here so I figured, why not?
I’ll be back tomorrow after I sleep to chat more.
I won’t write the show off based on one episode but there’s definitely room for improvement. The pacing was really plodding. This has been a recurring problem with recent live action SW but it’s also streaming in general. No set time slots have lead some to slacken their narrative discipline. There’s no reason this couldn’t have been 45 minutes.
Also I’m not convinced this had to be live action. I spent a lot of time this episode mentally adjusting to thinking of these as the same characters from the same story. Sabine was perfectly cast, but I’m not sold on the others. Rosario as Ahsoka looked good on paper but feels wooden on screen. Hopefully Feloni didn’t inherit George’s facility with actors.
Andor also proved to me that they need to stop leaning so heavily on the Volume. The sets on Andor had that classic Star Wars lived in futurism, the sets here felt mostly sterile and empty. But then Andor spoiled us on a lot of things.
I’m rooting for Filoni and want this to succeed so I hope it gets better.
I didn’t feel like the pacing was bad, it was just slow, especially in comparison to a show ostensibly aimed at kids like Rebels was. I also think this show is starting out better than Kenobi or Mando s3, for instance.
I also felt the Volume a lot more in Kenobi.
I’ve heard of the concept in the streaming space of “number of minutes watched”, like there’s a different way of judging success. This has me wondering if there’s a demand from up top to make these shows longer in order to increase that metric. I say this because while slow pacing can be an artistic choice and I’m perfectly fine for it for the right story. I lapped up Oppenheimer, and movies like Only God Forgives.
When it works, it works. Ahsoka felt like it was stretched way out of pace, a 25 minute show elongated into an hour. Every. sentence. was. laborious. and. plodding. when. it. didn’t. have. any. reason. to. be. Not to mention the delivery of the lines felt so wooden and forced, and I think if you’re going to build around a slow paced story, then you need to lean on the emotion and body language to fill it out. This had none of it.
Yeah the pacing should be tighter, it’s Star Wars, not a Tarkovsky film