It’s Disney+ Day! A day that has existed for about three years. A storied history! It’s a day to celebrate the existence of a streaming service! And celebrate I do, because it’s given us hours of Star Wars. Hours and hours of Star Wars. So much Star Wars.
Is it too much?
It is not.
Today’s special offerings for the day include Obi-Wan Kenobi: A Jedi’s Return, a one-hour documentary about the limited series; and an extended look at Andor (which I believe also played before Rogue One’s return to IMAX theaters).
Obi-Wan Kenobi: A Jedi’s Return offers quite a lot that will be familiar to those who followed the promotion of the show. Many of the interviews recount stories that have been shared in interviews by the stars (Ewan McGregor’s response to seeing Vader on set, Hayden’s first day back) as they promoted the limited series leading up to its release. There’s quite a lot of footage in the documentary that exists elsewhere. The documentary also spends a fair amount of time summarizing of the show itself (“And then we meet Tala!”), which seems more suited to promotion than a Making Of.
The special also doesn’t engage in the frankness of more freewheeling behind-the-scenes stories like Light & Magic and The Beginning, where we see creative disappointments and slightly cheekier humor. (This documentary doesn’t include a young Ewan McGregor’s blue joke about how “length is important” when choosing his lightsaber, for example. Not a joke that is very Disney+ Day.) We don’t see how the series evolved from a film to series, don’t watch script meeting or first-read throughs, don’t see alternate takes, there’s no walking through a long hallway at Lucasfilm just to show everyone how many people worked on the movie. We don’t even linger on why it took so long for the actors to return to the roles and the painful response the prequels received at first. This documentary is celebration that takes us all the way to Celebration.
But really, that’s all this is intended to be. It’s a sweet-natured tribute to Obi-Wan Kenobi. I imagine in a few years, when the show will not have been promoted and released a few month prior, this will feel like a comfortable time capsule. (Does that metaphor work? Can time capsules be comfortable?)
It’s fueled by the nuclear level of charm exhibited by Ewan McGregor himself. A documentary can get away with a lot of rehashing if this Scotsman is selling it to you like it’s Expedia. The star and Executive Producer is so shockingly, blindly suited to be on-camera that I imagine one day a camera will corner him and bellow “I am your father.”
Still, there are a plenty gems to mine within this familiar material. Moments of genuine warmth and excitement. Watching Ewan and Hayden’s affection for each other is always a pleasure. Vivien Lyra Blair’s love of droids is almost too perfect (considering that General Organa will someday leave Rey with the wisdom to “never underestimate a droid.”) O’Shea Jackson channeling the kid in all of us would make even the saddest person alive (you know who you are!) smile. Hayden and Ewan revisiting their Episode II images with anti-aging blue dots on their faces. Bonnie Piesse and Joel Edgerton’s interview. Deborah Chow talking about her father. Kumail Nanjiani nearly getting the stuffing knocked out of him for the love of Star Wars. Ian McDiarmid as Palpatine, once again, please, never stop, always do this, forever, you wondrous horror you.
The moment that most delighted me was seeing Liam Neeson in costume and on set with Ewan McGregor. In the series itself, Qui-Gon appears as a force ghost, which has the effect of making the actors seem like they shot their footage on different days. I didn’t expect to see them standing next to one another, live and in color, almost a quarter century (!) after they first appeared on screen together. It felt like seeing them together again, all over again.
Another stray interest that this documentary brought up for me was in the relationship between the actors who portray these characters, and those same actors’ ownership of the characters themselves. Throughout the documentary, each legacy actor’s relationship with and responsibility towards these characters is underlined and underscored. Hayden Christensen is Anakin Skywalker, we’re told. Ewan McGregor is Obi-Wan Kenobi.
Most of the time, though, actors neither write nor direct the movies in which they appear. Their work is interpretative. Actors infuse fictions with the illusion of reality by using what’s real inside of them. It’s why we so associate the actor with the character: what we love about characters often comes from the actor himself, herself or themself. The choices those characters make, though, the words they say, how they are clothed, framed, how they fight? The actors are rarely the primary force behind those things. They are both stewards and interpreters, but that’s a very different role than that of a writer.
But that’s the subject for a future essay! For now, I’m just happy we get some more Star Wars in our lives. I’ll be writing up some thoughts on that Andor clip in the next few days as well.
Finally, I leave you with the most important frame in Obi-Wan Kenobi: A Jedi’s Return. The real heart of the matter. I know this was on purpose, and if it wasn’t, please lie to me about it. Benign lies are true kindnesses. Or, perhaps I should say, the truths we cling to depend greatly on our point of view.
(Those are Hayden Christensen’s hands.)