(courtesy IMP Awards)
One of the things that has always about Star Wars, from the moment this reviewer saw A New Hope (or just Star Wars as it was then) in a cinema in 1977 right up until now is its capacity for no holds barred adventuring.
As Luke Skywalker (Mark Hamill) went from being a reluctant moisture farm worker on Tatooine to a hero of the Rebellion, we were taken along for the ride, swept up in an escapist Westerns-style adventure that spoke to the power of leaving the same-old, same-old behind and seeing audacious dreams come true.
It’s a potent part of the franchise’s appeal, and while yes, there are dark elements riding along with all this wish fulfillment, the overwhelming feeling you get from a lot of the movies and shows that make up the Star Wars universe is of individual restraints being freed and consequentially of great and might things being done, of good empathetically slamming evil into the dust of history.
Star Wars: Skeleton Crew lives and breathes this wondrously exciting and uplifting dynamic in ways that will get your inner child soaring high on the winds of possibility with a story that goes both epically big and intimately and affectingly small.
Things start retro-80s small when the Jon Watts and Christopher Ford-created show kicks off in an almost Spielbergian style as four kids from the same school on an almost American-looking suburban planet that we subsequently learn is called At Attin discover a spaceship buried under huge amounts of dirt and plant growth in a forest gully.
No one is supposed to go there on a planet where life is tightly and carefully moderated with kids getting educated and being assigned to drearily corporate roles in something which is far too loftily called “the Great Work”.
One of the kids, Wim (Ravi Cabot-Conyers) longs to leave this all too predictable route to adulthood behind, dreaming of becoming a Jedi in the New Republic, some five years or so after the fall of the evil Galactic Empire, but his father, Wendle, all straight-laced obsequious adherence to the established order is having none of it, determined his son will end up behind a desk just like him.
Shades of Skywalker much?
Shades of Skywalker, yes indeed, but mixed in with the kind of youthful need to find yourself and discover some excitement away from the everyday that is the hallmark of many a Steven Spielberg story and later, shows like Stranger Things.
Wim knows he should leave the ship well and truly alone – he thinks it’s a Jedi temple and that is damn near irresistible – but he can’t help himself and drags his friend Neel (Robert Timothy Smith), an elephant-analogue alien boy, on a voyage of discovery that risks tripping up the security apparatus that tightly controls life on At Attin.
The two boys run into schoolmates, but not really friends at this stage, Fern (Ryan Kiera Armstrong), the daughter of a high-ranking, very driven mother, and KB (Kyriana Kratter) who wears a life-sustaining cybernetic visor on her head, and one thing leads to another and the four kids are blasting off into space, quite accidentally, somehow piercing the shield that rings the planet and which normally requires an exit code to push through.
It’s scary stuff as the ship carried them very far from home very fast but Wim is also more than a little excited along with his terror but overwhelmingly the four kids are freaked out that somehow, and quite by chance, their collective longing for adventure has somehow come true.
Now, what’s impressive here and throughout most of the eight-episode run – the final episode, “The Real Good Guys”, sees them step up to save the day and it feels authentic at that point for kids to be the saviours – is that Skeleton Crew‘s writers let the kids be kids.
They react with fear, they panic when things go wrong, and while they do get braver and more capable, they are, at the end of the day, just kids and they need grown-ups or droids like the ship’s resident robot, SM-33 (Nick Frost) to help them out of t=some very sticky situations.
Other shows make their kids too capable too quickly, and while it propels the story along, it also robs the shows of the sense that here are very small people who are not even remotely adults and they are justifiably scared out of their still-developing brains by what’s happening to them.
They grow, of course, how could you not, but in ways that match what you’d expect kids to do in those circumstances.
They still want to see their parents and go home – even though they know they will have to account for themselves; see episode seven, “We’re Gonna Be in So Much Trouble” – and while they learn to fly the ship and mostly outwit the bad guys like self-serving frenemy Jod Na Nawood aka Captain Silvo (Jude Law) – they also run, quite understandable scared at times and joy oh authentic joy, Skeleton Crew lets them be just like kids would be if they were out in the scary wilds of the galaxy after growing up on a very safe and controlled planet.
Still, there’s still fun to be had and Skeleton Crew leans into all the adventuring, good and bad, with typical Star Wars glee, taking you from a pirate-swarmed space station to a luxury pleasure planet and a war-torn version of At Attin which shows what could have happened to their home if it hadn’t remained mysteriously hidden to the point where most people think it a myth rather than a real place.
Skeleton Crew is packed to the galactic rafters with exuberant fun, real terror and a huge learning curve for four kids who dream of adventure but discover that real life doesn’t always deliver what you ask for, but that when you take that first step on a whole new journey, no matter how accidentally, you have to hang on for dear life and hope you land somewhere good like, well, home.
It’s a rollicking adventure that is blockbuster big and movingly intimate too and it satisfies the need we all have to go adventuring while having those we love, or come to love, around us, and for life to be a comfortingly heady mix of the exciting new and the comforting old that changes us for the better and for life.
Star Wars: Skeleton Crew streams on Disney+