Hollywood is in love with prequels right now. Sometimes they work…and man, sometimes they don’t.
I think Star Wars: Andor gets it right. It’s engaging, layered, and shows many sides of both the Empire and the Rebellion.
Now it is a prequel, and with that comes great risks in storytelling that I don’t think often gets considered. I think to make a good prequel, the story needs to do a few things:
- Don’t just show us what we already know. (I’m looking at you, Solo.)
- Give us real stakes — ones that make us doubt the character can even end up where they are in the original story. (Again, Solo.)
- Change up the enemy/theme/quest in some way. (Now I’m looking at House of the Dragon)
New Stuff Required
A story gives us all the backstory we need on the characters during that story, if it is done right. This means that we are getting a lot of information woven through that tells us about what happened before and where the characters come from.
Since we already know that, we’re not impressed or surprised when it is given a lot more detail in the prequel. Unless you dress it up with additional information like a surprising context, how what we knew was not the exact story, etc. Solo’s problem has this in spades. Everything we knew about Han Solo that was cool is just a moment in this story, and it is rarely expressed in a surprising way. Even Han is pretty much the same personality–which means we can’t even see him change, because his change comes much later.
Andor is all new. Now to be fair, very little of his actual backstory comes out in Rogue One. But even this version of Andor is different from the one we see later. He’s got the same foundation, but he’s not driven the same way as when we meet him in the movie.
This makes it even more interesting as now we wonder how we got to the Andor in R1 vs. the one we have in Andor.
Real Stakes
One problem that can exist for a prequel is that the stakes in the original are huge (otherwise it wouldn’t be loved enough to get itself a prequel). In SF and Fantasy, this can mean the world/galaxy/universe is threatened with ending. Since there was no mention of any past apocalypses, then we assume they didn’t exist. So what is scaring our characters now?
If you don’t build in the right stakes, then the characters have no challenge, and the prequel falls flat. The audience knows what’s going to happen to these characters and this universe later, so we know who lives and who dies.
Life and death thus makes a poor challenge unless it really seems like there’s no way to win.
Andor does this well. We see his life threatened and no reason to think he can survive. They threaten his freedom, his allies, everything — and he loses a lot.
Change It Up
The last thing that bugs me is when the whole story of the prequel is about the exact same thing as the original. Rings of Power kind of does this with the obsession with Sauron throughout. After all, we’ve seen the big final battle about that. We know they can’t truly defeat him here. (Though I guess they can push him back into the shadows for an Age.)
House of Dragon also deals with this too. The main storyline is about who sits on the Iron Throne. Oh, and the threat of the stuff hiding in the North. Which won’t appear in this series, I assume, because they don’t really wake up and do anything until the main GoT storyline.
So it is exactly the same end goal in both prequels as their main storylines. This makes them feel like a sad echo. I suppose you can’t have Middle Earth without Sauron or Westeros without White Walkers and seat covers, and yet instead of being a buildup to the big epic later, they just have zero punch for me as a viewer. I know we can’t tackle the Throne and North of the Wall at all, so they are distractions.
Andor again proves good here. Even though the main enemy is the Empire, it is given new fresh faces who are developed villains in and of themselves. They build out aspects of the Empire that we’ve not gotten to really see in any depth. The various parts of the bureaucracy are given substance and compete within each other for their own goals.
Similarly, in the Rebellion there are factions and not everyone’s exact goals align–and their means surely don’t. This gives nuance to the same old Rebels vs the Empire we’ve seen a lot over the years.
Can We Just Stop Prequeling Everything?
Honestly, I’m not a huge fan of prequels because most of the time, Hollywood doesn’t care about these aspects. They want to capitalize on a hot property. What’s the best way to do that? Sequel or prequel. And all too often, they don’t know why we loved it in the first place.