“Star Wars” has always been, on some level, for children.
But, with the exception of “The Phantom Menace,” “Star Wars” stories have rarely been about children.
That’s the value proposition of “Skeleton Crew,” the latest TV series from a franchise that now largely exists on the small screen.
Though “Star Wars” hasn’t delivered a blockbuster to the multiplex since 2019, Lucasfilm has maintained a steady drip of releases on Disney+.
A four-quadrant movie has to appeal to everyone, which “Star Wars” always has by being part fantasy, part military epic, part romance and part coming-of-age.
Children have always been the target audience for “Star Wars.”. That isn’t criticism or condescension; it’s a swashbuckling fairy tale set in space that George Lucas created, and filmmakers who came across it early on have carried on the tradition. But children have hardly ever appeared in “Star Wars” stories, aside from “The Phantom Menace.”. This is what “Skeleton Crew,” the newest TV show from a franchise that is now mostly confined to small screens, has to offer. It’s also the most authentic to the saga’s DNA, or at least a specific strain of it, in a sense.
Although “Star Wars” hasn’t brought a box office hit to theaters since 2019, Lucasfilm has continued to release films on Disney+ in a steady stream. With “Andor” at the top end and “Obi-Wan Kenobi” at the bottom, these projects have varied in quality, but they have also isolated some aspects of the “Star Wars” universe. Since “Star Wars” combines elements of romance, military epic, fantasy, and coming-of-age, it always appeals to a wide audience. More focused television shows include “Andor,” an adult political drama with no hint of the supernatural, “The Mandalorian,” a neo-Western, and “The Acolyte,” which was canceled after just one season earlier this year and only featured the Jedi as wizard-like mystics. The strength of “Star Wars” as it exists now is that it’s a broad tent that encompasses all of these genres and tones with minimal apparent inconsistency.
Given its own history and the enormous success of “Stranger Things,” “Skeleton Crew” is a purely nostalgic children’s adventure and it makes sense for “Star Wars” to follow this path. “Skeleton Crew’s” charismatic cast and contagious sense of wonder go a long way toward selling the project, even if it occasionally displays indications of such ruthlessly logical reverse engineering. There is something refreshing about witnessing the process of modern IP mining, which co-creators Jon Watts and Christopher Ford (both of “Spider-Man: Homecoming”) are familiar with, translated into a child joyfully running loose on a spaceship.
While a text crawl and a cold open reveal that “Skeleton Crew” is set in the post-“Return of the Jedi,” pre-“The Force Awakens” era of the New Republic, during a wave of space piracy, the film places us in the shoes of Wim (Ravi Cabot-Conyers), a young child who would rather play pretend lightsabers with his friend Neel (Robert Timothy Smith, who sports a cute CGI elephant head as a new, betrunked “Star Wars” creature) than prepare for an exam. Wim and his widowed father Wendle (Tunde Adebimpe) reside on At Attin, a dubious utopian planet that forbids starships from entering or leaving its strictly guarded airspace while silosing its youth into career tracks to help with “the great work” of post-Empire state building. It’s also the first time we’ve seen the “Star Wars” version of a suburban paradise, which is already eerie.
Because of this seclusion, Wim finds himself stranded far, far away with Neel and two new, uneasy allies: tech whiz KB (Kyriana Kratter, wearing a Cyclops-esque headpiece and a sick bob) and swaggering tomboy Fern (Ryan Kiera Armstrong), after mistaking a grounded ship for a lost Jedi temple. Armstrong gets to play the wiser, less naive Fern as a bit more of a badass, but all four kids are in over their heads when the ship’s malfunctioning droid (Nick Frost) leads them straight into a pirate den. Wim’s excitement is a relatable entry point; who hasn’t geeked out over Jedi lore at that age, or wished they could be a part of it?
They run into Jude Law, whose character identifies himself as Jod Na Nawood, a seeming Force user, who happens to be the biggest star in this galaxy. It’s entertaining to watch Law shed his mask into the caddish glee that characterizes one of his more pleasurable modes, and it’s evident that Jod is dealing with more than meets the eye, just like on At Attin. Neither Adebimpe nor Kerry Condon, who plays Fern’s mother in “The Banshees of Inisherin,” ever come across as phoning it in for a franchise salary. They also have similar star power behind the camera: Watts is the pilot’s director, while David Lowery (“The Green Knight”), The Daniels (“Everything Everywhere All at Once”), and Lee Isaac Chung (“Twisters”) each do at least one episode.
Because of the aging of its characters and the diminishing benefits of constantly saving the world, “Skeleton Crew” never evokes a sense of galactic stakes or deadly danger in the three episodes that were shown to critics. There isn’t a clear link to more well-known “Star Wars” stories either, though one will probably surface later in the eight-episode season (I’m still cringing at that last shot of Yoda in “The Acolyte,” especially since it ended the series). The aspirations of a show that stays true to its “Goonies”-style formula and keeps things light are limited; “Skeleton Crew” only expands “Star Wars” in the most literal sense. However, the program manages to make the most of its brief and create a “Star Wars” series that is more grounded in childhood than it is in bringing back memories of one’s own.
