Tia Hardesty

The story is good. Really good. Definite Clone Wars vibes. The young actress playing Princess Leia is perfectly sassy and brings a lot of energy to every scene she's in. In later scenes she absolutely kills it in dangerous situations. Ewan McGregor is remarkable as an Obi Wan struggling with his regrets. Joel Edgerton brings perfect protective grumpiness to Owen Lars. Now the not so great. Grand Inquisitor still looks almost exactly like Pinhead from Hellraiser, and has all the menace and emotional range of the plastic Halloween costumes that were popular about the same time. Seriously, seriously missed opportunity when I'm seeing the Rebels cartoon version as much more intimidating than live action. Moses Ingram doesn't sell her character in the beginning, but she gets much better and by the end her performance is stunning. The character is written to have a menace, a simmering rage that just... Isn't there at first, but as the character gets more complicated the actress really gets into it and it's wonderful. I just have the general impression that the showrunners don't get inquisitors, though. Bail and Breha are good, and the dynamic is very much like what's in the Leia book. Obi Wan, well, you have Ewan McGregor, and I think he's been watching the Clone Wars, so that's clearly awesome. But the Inquisitors are clearly not an enemy the people in charge are excited about, and it shows. As for Vader, he's amazing. There's a lot of grumpiness over the first big fight we see, but remember this is a journey for Obi Wan and the middle is supposed to suck for him. Hang in there. The payoff at the end is worth it.

Only the first episode is out at the time of this review. So the opening action sequence was okay, but the rest of the show was so incredibly slow. It just crawled. Entirely too much time was spent on the characters having personal problems. It's important for character development but there was a lot of repetition of points that could have been made in half the time or less. I also found the more they showed the less I liked our main characters. I love Falcon in the movies and find Bucky tolerable, even though I have never liked the backstory for winter soldier, but by the time I was done with the first episode I didn't especially like any of them. Even Bucky's therapist was awful. Also, I don't believe our title characters even thought about each other, much less spoke, for the entire first episode of a show named after them. So, that's not a choice I would have made. They introduced the bad guys but I'm not sure why I should be super invested in that. They're faceless and formulaic. That would be fine if we had interesting protagonists, but it was an entire episode of moping and personal problems. Hopefully it will pick up in later episodes, but my first impression is that the writers were not up for this.