Obi-Wan Kenobi

Daft Vader

Obi-Wan Kenobi
Airdate: May - June 2022
Lucasfilm

Warning: Spoilers but, who cares? It’s hard to spoil rubbish.

Obi-Wan Kenobi was originally scheduled to be a new Star Wars prequel movie... you know, one of those “A Star Wars Tale” movies like Rogue One (reviewed here) or Solo (reviewed here). However, due to Solo failing at the box office, the film was rewritten and reworked as a TV show (is my understanding). In regards to Solo, one of the better Star Wars movies to be made since the Disney buy out, it seemed pretty clear to everyone except Disney, surely, that the quality of the film was not at fault for it’s failure at the box office. Just bad Marketing/scheduling. The Star Wars films had been released one a year for a few years but, following on from one of the worst Star Wars movies ever made, aka The Last Jedi (reviewed here), audience enthusiasm was at an all time low so, yeah, I would have thought common sense might have told you not to release another Star Wars movie just a short five months after that one. I think anything in the brand released then would have met with the same financial ambivalence, to be honest.

But, anyway, instead we have the new TV show which, I wasn’t that fussed about but, since the high quality of the first four episodes of The Book Of Boba Fett (reviewed here), I was actually slightly hopeful for it. Well, let me tell you that this series sees a return to the role of Obi-Wan Kenobi by none other than Obi Junior, Ewan McGregor himself, still trying to do an accent which gets close to Alec Guiness at times. So, yay, we have Ewan back and... that’s it really. His inclusion and acting in this is literally the only good thing about this show.

We also have Hayden Christensen back as Annakin Skywalker aka Darth Vader, giving the myth a bit of spin about how he feels he did kill himself (just to make the lie told by Alec Guiness in the original Star Wars - before it was even A New Hope - just that much lighter). We could have done without him, to be honest. A flashback to a training fight we never saw actually has Hayden looking much older than he did years after that fight would even have taken place and about the only good bit he did have was when he’s peeking out from behind Vader’s half shattered helmet.

But I’m getting ahead of myself. Obi-Wan Kenobi has the title character being hunted by Sith-style inquisitors, highlighted by actress Moses Ingram as the one surviving ‘youngling’ from the retro fitted slaughter of all the kids by Annakin in Revenge Of The Sith (reviewed here) and, to do this, she kidnaps young Princess Leia as bate. So Obi-Wan has to leave Tatooine and relinquish his watchful eye on ‘young Skywalker’, left with the Lars family, to go and rescue her in six episodes of mayhem which almost threaten to contradict the already told future continuity of the franchise and, as my friend correctly identified, it really didn’t need to be made. It’s just a piece of padding to get viewers to Disney+ at this point. I mean, to be fair, most things don’t need to be made but this one is just another exercise of filling in gaps that nobody needed filled and, to boot, doing it in such a careful way to not try and change too much about the final destination that, it doesn’t actually add anything to the canon. It’s like it’s redundant even before it gets out of the starting gate.

I started off quite intrigued because Kenobi’s life on Tatooine, as we see how he’s been living, is actually quite interesting... but he’s soon off on an adventure and all the good work done in the opening half an hour or so is immediately blown out of the water. He’s off on his space romp but, somehow, manages to bring none of the gleeful optimism of the Kenobi character as seen in the prequel trilogy. You can kinda understand why, perhaps but, then think of the carefree but confident character as portrayed by Guiness, which only takes place around ten years after this story... and you can see the mismatch.

And, while I’m on the subject, yeah McGregor is totally the right age to play this character at this point but... one wonders how he gets from looking like someone who still looks in his 30s here... to 60+ Alec Guiness in just ten short years. Blimey, those Tatooine summers must be really hard on the body.

There are also some token cameos thrown in, such as the return of Emperor Palpatine and, bizarrely, a really unnecessary and ‘definitely looking like it was just tagged on with no thought of actually meaning anything’, blink-and-you’ll-miss-it appearance from Liam Neeson as the force ghost of Qui-Gon.

Despite all this, though, the show does have a few interesting moments such as the brief humanising of Darth Vader (which completely compromises his effectiveness as a villain in the later films, to be honest) but they struggle to find a solution to the biggest problem with the show and the beautiful legacy that Star Wars once was. Namely that Obi-Wan Kenobi is a really dull, ineffective and, I dunno, almost ‘by the numbers’ attempt to cash in on a series of films which were very special and inspirational to people both in the 1970s and the 1990s. The light seems to have faded much faster from the franchise than even I expected it to do when Lucas sold it on to Disney and, to be honest, I really wasn’t expecting Disney to be able to handle what they’d acquired that well but... yeah, the Star Wars brand no longer sparks an ‘Ooh’ of anticipation when I hear that something new is in the works. Now I just shake my fist at the moon and yell for Disney to let it die a more dignified death, to be honest. Can’t recommend this one but, you know, Ewan McGregor is always pretty watchable.