‘Star Wars: Skeleton Crew’: The 1980s Nostalgia Empire Strikes Back
Early in the new Disney+ series Star Wars: Skeleton Crew, we meet our young hero, Wim (Ravi Cabot-Conyers). He is in a bedroom that looks an awful lot like one you might have found in any suburban house here on Earth in the Eighties, and he’s playing with a pair of dolls that are roughly the size and design of the action figures that Kenner released around the original Star Wars film trilogy. Wim and his best friend Neel (Robert Timothy Smith) have mock lightsaber battles while waiting for the bus to school. And when Wim asks Neel, “Don’t you ever want to do anything exciting?” he may as well be cosplaying as Luke from the early scenes of the first movie.
In those scenes, Skeleton Crew creators Jon Watts and Christopher Ford are making their intentions plain: to tell a story of what it would be like if some devout young Star Wars fans circa the original trilogy somehow wound up on an adventure very much like the ones that dazzled them on the big screen. It’s not exactly author-insert fan fiction, because Skeleton Crew doesn’t involve any of the Skywalker Saga characters, and because Watts and Ford are far from the only grown-up versions of Wim and Neel out there. And it’s not even the first Star Wars project to be framed this way, since Rey in The Force Awakens was very much presented as a fan who was thrilled to meet Han and Luke. But between Wim’s unblinking belief in the old legends, and various undisguised Eighties pop-culture Easter eggs, Watts and Ford lean into the nostalgic fantasy as hard as any pop-culture property has since at least 2011’s The Muppets, where Jason Segel imagined a world where both he and a thinly disguised Muppet version of himself got to team up with Kermit, Fozzie, and friends.
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This isn’t inherently a knock on that idea, whether in general (I mostly like The Muppets), or as specifically executed in Skeleton Crew, which is a solidly crafted piece of all-ages entertainment, with good direction from Watts (Spider-Man: Homecoming) and David Lowery (The Green Knight), and some fun set pieces. It’s telling an actual story, and telling it well enough that it doesn’t feel like a glorified version of a Star Wars theme park ride. You just have to be prepared going in for things like Sam and Neel’s neighborhood being blatantly modeled on the one from E.T.: The Extra-Terrestrial; for there to be early scenes of kids on bikes in the woods (a la E.T. and The Goonies); and even for the title font to, like the one from the similarly Eighties-obsessed Stranger Things, evoke the books of Stephen King. It wears its influences with obvious pride, hearkening back to a slightly-less-long time ago, and a cul-de-sac within fairly close proximity.
Like The Mandalorian, still the most popular of the Disney+ live-action Star Wars shows, Skeleton Crew takes place during that gap in between Return of the Jedi and Force Awakens. As the opening title crawl explains, the Empire is gone, and the Republic is back in charge, but struggling to maintain orders, especially on the fringes of the galaxy, where pirates are preying on ships just trying to get their cargo from one point to another. Wim, Neel, and their classmates Fern (Ryan Kiera Armstrong) and KB (Kyriana Kratter) don’t seem to know much about current events, having grown up on a planet called At Attin, which has a barrier around it so thick, the night sky doesn’t even have stars in it. Neel seems perfectly content to do well in school, Wim dreams of adventure, and Fern and KB continually ditch class to race Fern’s speeder bike around town.
Like suburban tales from any era or star system, the kids come from a variety of household types: Wim is a latchkey kid raised by his overworked father, Wendle (Tunde Adebimpe); Fern is a troublemaker who has to act squeaky-clean in front of her politician mother, Fara (Kerry Condon); and Neel has a huge supportive family. If Neel didn’t have blue skin and an elephant-like trunk, and if KB didn’t wear a Geordi LaForge-looking cybernetic visor, and if their school wasn’t partially staffed by droids, most of the early scenes could actually take place on contemporary earth. And even the inciting incident of the show comes from an incredibly mundane situation: Wim oversleeps, misses the bus, and uncovers what he thinks is a Jedi temple while trying to take a shortcut to school.
The early scenes do an effective job at establishing the temperaments of the four kids, and the sheltered nature of the world they inhabit. But Skeleton Crew doesn’t really take off, in either a literal or figurative sense, until Wim inadvertently gets the quartet stranded a long way from home, with only an abandoned pirate droid, SM-33 (voiced in appropriately gruff fashion by Nick Frost), to help them survive territory far more hostile than anything they’ve even imagined, let alone experienced. Watts, Ford, and Lowery all have good instincts about how much danger feels both plausible and appropriate, given the age of our heroes, and how to keep escalating the fish-out-of-water dynamic. And once Jude Law shows up late in the second episode, as a man whom Wim assumes is a Jedi, he adds a necessary ingredient of mystery and cynicism that the better Star Wars projects know to include.
The storytelling is sturdy enough to prevent Skeleton Crew from ever fully descending into shameless fan service. Even a sequence where Fern and Wim have to man a starship’s gun turrets during a dogfight is more about them being understandably overwhelmed by the peril and responsibility of the moment than it is about seeing them placed in a similar circumstance to one we’ve seen Luke and Finn occupy in the movies.
As we near the 50th anniversary of the first film, it’s harder and harder to find new places to take Star Wars. Even the best of the TV series, Andor, is on one level about filling in gaps between films; it’s just approaching that task in a more thematically ambitious way than the franchise normally allows. In its own very different way, Skeleton Crew is also trying to see this territory through new eyes — in this case, four younglings who should probably be in science class and not figuring out how to get a ship into hyperspace. If we can’t go somewhere new, Skeleton Crew makes it all feel effectively new for Wim, Neel, Fern, and KB.
The first two episodes of Star Wars: Skeleton Crew are now streaming on Disney+, with additional episodes releasing weekly. I’ve seen the first three episodes.
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