REVIEW: Star Wars: Skeleton Crew is more of the same but more boring

The competition between platforms to have a wide range of content in their catalogs and for users to think that they have many options has become increasingly normalized in recent months.

The content that each one offers has everything: very good things, good things, not-so-good things, things that are terrible, and some more that are just filler and will hardly ever have moderate success.

Disney+, a giant in animation cinema and now aims to be one of its platforms, has content that advocates a lot for the nostalgia that exists in very good works and that several generations have enjoyed, its new content in its new acquisitions is a separate case.

Since George Lucas sold Lucasfilm to this entertainment giant, things have not gotten better, television series and films have been left halfway between what could have been and what is, being more specific, Star Wars has been a very painful franchise in recent years in terms of story development and in the creation of a universe that tries to connect everything, leaving aside the canon that they have been handling for decades.

The Mandalorian, The Book of Boba Fett, Obi-Wan Kenobi, Andor, Ahsoka, The Acolyte and now Skeleton Crew try to make this new canon in this new universe have a more direct relationship from the Return of the Jedi film, creating new adventures with new characters that tell new stories whether they work or not.

It’s the turn of Star Wars: Skeleton Crew, something completely new that is aimed at younger viewers with a high dose of nostalgia that will possibly help this not be another failure of this franchise.

What is Star Wars Skeleton Crew about?

A group of children are about to have the adventure of their lives. A sudden but important discovery causes them to be lost in the galaxy. They will use everything they have and know to find their way home among space pirates in the era of the New Republic.

If we do an exercise of objectivity and honesty as spectators and fans of this franchise since Star Wars arrived at Disney, this franchise has been stagnant and is going from bad to worse, offering a recycling of what we already know and already know and transforming it into something modern for the new generations, we have already seen the same garbage of space western that opened with Mandalorian and that has not managed to have a point of originality in the works that they have recently presented.

This contest is joined by Skeleton Crew by Christopher Ford and Jon Watts who offer us an adventure very much in the style of an 80s family movie where a group of children are the protagonists of the adventure of their lives, knowing with this the capacities that each one has, the value of friendship and of working as a team, of valuing what they have and of growing to be better, a formula already very used that falls into the cliché that no matter the age we all have the opportunity to improve and what does not improve is precisely the originality in the stories.

Skeleton Crew is set in a new timeline and takes place after the events of Star Wars: Return of the Jedi when the Empire was defeated and now it is the New Republic who has taken control of protecting peace throughout the galaxy to avoid conflicts and the emergence of a new planetary war or for the domination of everything.

On the planet At Attin, which is far from any war contact, there are very special residents. Wim (Ravi Cabot-Conyers) is a restless child obsessed with stories about the Jedi. He wants to have adventures beyond pretending to be a Jedi master with his best friend Neel (Robert Timothy Smith). This is partly an escape so he doesn’t feel alone and abandoned by his father Wendle (Tunde Adebimpe), who, as is already cliché, gives more importance to work than to caring for and spending more time with his son.

A very similar case applies to another pair of best friends from the same school environment, a girl named Fern (Ryan Kiera Armstrong) rebellious and transgressive by nature, and her best friend KB (Kyriana Kratter) a more thoughtful girl and aware of the importance of things and, who are bored of their routine suburban lives doing the same thing, what these children want is to find something that will get them out of all this and make them live an adventure like they have always dreamed of.

Wim and Fern meet after a very unfortunate situation that takes them to the office of their school principal, once reprimanded and punished Wim tells Fern that he found an abandoned Jedi Temple, following the structure of a children’s movie from the 80s Wim in company of Neel return to explore this discovery in more detail but they do not count on the fact that Fern and KB have gotten there first and together they discover that it is not a Temple but an abandoned spaceship.

Questions come, questions go from where it is, who it is from, how it got there, how long it has been hidden, why no one knew of its existence, and course, we must not tell anyone else because this will be our secret pact of best friends forever since we know the characters then we already identify them as the adventurous boy, the rebellious girl, the intelligent and more aware girl and the funny fat guy who in this case is like a blue elephant, who does not contribute anything but is fun.

In their exploration, they find a droid called SM 33 (Nick Frost) Wim in his excitement accidentally presses a button that puts the ship into operation and heads into space having a specific point of automatic return, very convenient so that from this point things begin to develop.

Now these restless and annoying children are lost in space millions of kilometers from their planet without the slightest idea of ​​how to return or where they will go, SM 33 transports them to the only place he knows a landing base populated by aggressive space pirates and dangerous bounty hunters, there they will meet Crimson Jack (Jude Law) a mysterious man who possesses the power of the force, along with this they learn that At Attin is not just any lost planet in the galaxy but is a planet full of treasures that barely appears on the maps of the galaxy and that its exact location is not entirely known, these manipulative children reach an agreement with Jack to help them return home in exchange for a treasure.

This is the premise of the series, we have the good but unlovable children and the bad pirates who look for these good but unlovable children so that they guide them to this peaceful planet and rob them of everything and enslave its population, the planet also has its secret, a series of satellites that surround it and make it invisible and here we ask ourselves, what is this planet hiding? Are the legends that there are treasures there true?

A series of the Star Wars franchise and saga that involves children, it aims to give a new twist to a simpler story to tell, one that has a high dose of comedy and involuntary action where we already know how things will end, these children will come out ahead of this adventure with the already trite moral discourse about friendship, love, the importance of family, the responsibility of parents towards children, education, teamwork, trust, and all this while they walk the path of the hero that will make them better.

In these 2 episodes we can deduce without much effort that everything that happens and will happen is in favor of a script written by Christopher Ford, Jon Watts and Myung Joh Wesner that is based on things already done in movies like E.T. (1982), The Goonies (1985), Stand by Me (1986), the Indiana Jones adventure saga and the classic series Lost in Space and the modern but nostalgic Stranger Things, where these children take on the role of adults to solve impossible situations that give it that touch of nostalgia.

The series desperately tries to take advantage of the resources it has which the youngest audience can identify, living an adventure in the Star Wars universe I don’t think is something that excites or captivates an entire generation that doesn’t understand the power of this nostalgia, a youth work subtly but blatantly directed at a more adult audience and of course at the dissatisfied fans of this franchise who are quite right in wanting all this to end or to transform into what it should be.

The writers along with their directors Jon Watts, David Lowery, Daniel Kwan and Daniel Scheinert, Jake Schreier, Bryce Dallas Howard, and Lee Isaac Chung make a great effort to make these children try and feel natural in balance with the dangers they face and that we can believe that they are in genuine danger without traumatic consequences but with a lot of fun, as viewers we know well that nothing will happen to them no matter how much they face unimaginable dangers.

The episodes currently airing are:

• Episode 1. This Could Be a Real Adventure. The native children of the planet At Attin discover a surprising secret that will lead them to live the adventure of their lives.
• Episode 2. Way, Way Out Past the Barrier. After activating a mysterious ship, they become lost in space, which is the beginning of an unexpected journey.

In technical terms we already know what it is offering us, the retrofuturistic style and setting of the planet At Attin is impeccable, a society that lives isolated from the galaxy and that evokes the 50s on Earth, however, it is not far from other representations in the science fiction genre and how our planet could look like in a very hopeful, illogical and very unbelievable future, the atmosphere they recreate feels more peaceful than what we have seen before and we go from those desert scenarios to something more friendly and familiar but at the same time a jewel of the Old Republic, a lost planet that has acquired with the passage of centuries and millennia a certain mysterious and legendary nuance.

We can say that the main flaws of this series are that its story is not original at all, that the easy way to take something already done and transform it pretending that this is modern focused on a new generation and that it is successful is to fall again into a comfort zone in which they no longer know what to do with this franchise and create meaningless and increasingly absurd content, the second thing is the casting of children, they have not understood that for this to work it is essential that we sympathize with the characters and that the actors do a good job, this does not happen here again.

The cast is made up of Jude Law, Ravi Cabot-Conyers, Kyriana Kratter, Robert Timothy Smith, Ryan Kiera Armstrong, Tunde Adebimpe, Kerry Condon, Marti Matulis, Jaleel White, Fred Tatasciore, Mike Estes, Dale Soules and Nick Frost as the voice of SM 33 who do more than what is asked of them but the development of their characters is very little convincing so far.

The music composed by Mick Giacchino is perhaps the most redeemable feature, it moves away from what we know but has that touch of the classic themes of the saga, exciting pieces that are far above the action we see, a work that if maintained like this could become a classic.

There is not much to talk about this anymore, even though it is under the protection of Jon Favreau and Dave Filoni it does not guarantee that this will be a success, we recognize that Mandalorian in its first and second seasons surprised everyone and placed these 2 creators in a very high place within a franchise that has not managed to have a balance with the force that it boasts so much, on the contrary, the flaws have been evident and they insist that the path to follow is the one that the studio itself imposes on them without having the more creative freedom to do better and more convincing things and not just the filler in a catalog with works that in the long run no one will remember as something that contributes and enriches what is already known.

In conclusion, it is neither too late nor too early to say that this series is completely unnecessary in this universe, children’s and adventure stories had their time and moment contributing something important to cinematography, a phenomenon that they try to replicate not in the best way, hopefully, this studio will focus on what it should do and not be overwhelmed by a nostalgia that in our days is useless, unconvincing and trite.

Star Wars: Skeleton Crew is now available on the Disney + platform.