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(courtesy IMP Awards)
Star Wars has always been about good old fashioned adventure and fun this long-time watcher of the franchise.
Ever since I sat down with my mum back in 1977 in a one-screen cinema in the country town near where I lived to watch A New Hope (then just Star Wars), I have loved the sheer escapism of storytelling which can, and often does, go very dark and desperately serious, but which also gets a whole of “woohoo!” and “geewhiz!” on to thrillingly enjoyable effect.
The latest streaming addition to the franchise, Skeleton Crew, taps into these escapist sensibilities rather wonderfully, offering up a tale of four young kids on a backwater planet who dream of something other than their usual lives – well, one of them, human boy Wim (Ravi Cabot-Conyers) does while the other three, elephant-like species boy Neel (Robert Timothy Smith), bad girl Fern (Ryan Kiera Armstrong) and her techie bestie KB (Kyriana Kratter) are just happy being on their home planet of At Attin – and who get WAAAY more than they bargained for when Wim discovers what he thinks is an old, buried Jedi temple.
It is not, as the trailer reveals, and these four wholly unprepared for galactically adventuring kids find themselves on a spaceship that not only slips orbit but sends them hurtling way out into the far reaches of space, far from home and well and truly at the mercy of anyone who wants to use them for their own nefarious purposes.
The only one NOT freaked out by this wholly unexpected turn of events is Wim who, though scared, is also thrilled that his dreams of going off-planet, and yes, becoming a Jedi – Skeleton Crew is set in the New Republic era following the Empire’s collapse – have come true.
But there’s being excited about adventuring and then there’s finding yourself at the mercy of scum and villainy, which the four do at a pirate space station where they are only saved by the ship’s robot SM-33 (Nick Frost) and Force practitioner, Jod Na Nawood (Jude Law) who helps the kids out in exchange for a ride off-planet.
There are some serious issues at play here, including the fact that the reach of the New Republic only reaches so far, and that piracy rages while civilisation struggles to establish itself fully, and the kids are in real trouble at certain points.
But Skeleton Crew by and large channels a very 1980s-set Spielberg vibe, with talk of ———- SPOILER ALERT !!!!! ———- At Attin being a lost planet with hidden treasure (it’s treated as a myth by the pirates) – so, not so boring after all, hey Wim? – and the kids being on a grand adventure, and that’s the sensibility that prevails in a story that establishes itself comprehensively and well in its first two enthrallingly good episodes such that watching them summons up the long dormant kid inside this reviewer who last felt this giddy with possibility quite a few decades ago.
Star Wars: Skeleton Crew streams on Disney+ with six more episodes releasing weekly until 14 January 2025.
Silo S2
(courtesy IMP Awards)
As finely wrought, intensely wrought storytelling goes, Silo is very much in a class of its own.
Its first season proved to be a master class in carefully calibrated narrative spinning with superlatively evocative world-building, richly realised characters and an eye on allowing time for intimately arresting human moments in the midst of a big epic arc.
Season two looks to be channeling more of the same if the first two episodes are anything to go by with a newly out-in-the-world Juliette (Rebecca Ferguson) discovering that the world outside is as hellishly nuclear wasted as she’d been told in the silo in which she lived until she was banished for daring to speak truth to power, but that there’s a lot more to it than anyone had been led to believe.
This is a world where long-ago nuclear war has left a rump population of people surviving in self-sufficient but now decaying silos hundreds of metres deep where life is all interior and any idea of the outside world is squashed by an authoritarian leadership who value survival by any means over any form of free thought or self expression.
Fair enough in one sense since the option is extinction as a species – if the silo goes, then so do its people – but you can only keep the lid of the bubbling kettle for so long, and when outcast Juliette doesn’t die like everyone else before her, and walks over the hill to god knows what while a breathless silo populace watches, it begins to foment a rebellion that silo leader, Bernard Holland (Tim Robbins), knows will erupt sooner or later.
In the second of the first two episodes of season two, “Order”, we begin to see the unravelling of a carefully constructed and controlled social order, though like much of the thoughtfully enrapturing storytelling in Silo, it happens slowly and with the sense that it is going to build and grow until there’s a great and massive explosion.
Understandable – people fight back when they want a sense of self expression and feel they have been lied to by those they trusted – but as Bernard knows, and Juliette soberingly discovers in episode one, “The Engineer”, in this harsh, brutal post-nuclear world, fighting for your rights, however laudable, can end in death.
Lots and lots of death, the extent of which is horrifically uncovered as ———- SPOILER ALERT !!!!! ———- Juliette crests the protective mound around her silo and finds silo after silo indented into the ground, the one nearest her surrounded by thousands of skeletons from a long ago battle to be free.
The first episode is meditative and atmospheric in the compellingly watchable extreme, and it illustrates how complex and clever a show Silo, based on the books by talented writer Hugh Howey, is, its exploration of humanity’s need to be free coming hard up against the fact that expressing that urge could kill it.
FOREVER.
But that won’t stop the pressure building in Juliette’s old silo, and as people like mechanic and Juliette’s old BFF Shirley (Remmie Milner) agitate for change, its looks like its going to become a race between an understandable need to be free and whether this will end up killing everyone, and in spectacularly final fashion too.
Silo S2 releases its final eight episodes weekly until 17 January 2025 on AppleTV+
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