First off, I should say that I didn’t think the first episode of Obwi-Wan Kenobi was bad. I was set for worse after The Book of Boba Fett. After all, Ewan McGregor was the only positive thing that stuck in my mind from the prequels. Obi-Wan’s story before the events of the original trilogy has potential: a suicidal man hiding on the underbelly of this universe, torn between guilt over his failure and the duty to protect Luke and Leia, is compelling material.
The bottom line is that the series is definitely not a total failure, like Boba’s soporific treading water recently. I actually really liked some things, like the Inquisition, which has been desperately looking for Obi-Wan and the remnants of the Jedi for ten years. There is a lot of menacing unpredictability, especially from the Third Sister. That made for a few exciting scenes, especially when she blackmailed Joel Edgerton’s (whom I love to see) Owen Lars into delivering Obi-Wan to her, which was well done.
I also like to put up with a few leaden, stilted lines of dialogue that nobody would say like that. You can almost hear Harrison Ford shouting “George, you can write that shit, you can’t say it!” as the Third Sister says “Don’t worry, Obi-Wan, you won’t die…” to then a whisper “today” afterwards. Any normal Jedi hunter would say “I will not kill you”. But okay. that belongs, see Ford, to Star Wars since the beginning of time.
What sucks is that this third new series takes a few TV-esque shortcuts and clichés and mixes them with the convenient coincidences that have always made the world of Star Wars seem smaller than it needs to be. That tore me out of the actually excellent scene design again and again. It’s just little things, but they add up.
Characters constantly stumble upon the right information and people at the right time, I don’t need kung fu in my Star Wars, and sometimes it even got really silly: For example, when three adult criminals tried for a long time without success to capture a ten-year-old girl in the forest. For eye rolling.
Anyway, young Leia was a good argument as to why convincing CG child actors can’t come soon enough. And I say that as a father of two children. In some scenes she played decently. In others, it was as if they had been sent home after the first take and left it at that.
And yet: All in all, it was quite interesting to watch, not least because it was actually about something that the characters had to fight in internal and external conflicts. Star Wars Obi-Wan makes it clear from the start what the stakes are for everyone here – and that’s why you know why you’re watching. Here, too, it flashes, the old magic, because of which one once loved the first films. I only felt them briefly in the past few years. In the best scenes of The Force Awakens, Rogue One or The Mandalorian, but she always took a backseat. Most recently, in The Book of Boba Fett, she gave way to an apathy that I usually only feel with anime (sorry, Ana!). On the other hand, I would have actually continued watching Obi-Wan Kenobi if more than two episodes had been online on Disney+. I’ll count that as a success for now.
–
