Released: 3rd December 2024 / Writers: Christopher Ford & Jon Watts (Episodes 1 & 2) / Directors: Jon Watts (Episode 1), David Lowry (Episode 2) Disney +
Watch the Star Wars: Skeleton Crew Film-Maker’s Roundtable.
4th December 2024
Review by Paul Dunne
The Pitch: Join Wim (Ravi Cabot-Conyers), Fern (Ryan Kiera Armstrong), KB (Kyriana Kratter), and Neel (Robert Timothy Smith) for an imaginative adventure that will take them far from the comforts of home, meeting colourful characters like Jod (Jude Law) and SM-33 (Nick Frost) along the way.
This review may contain minor spoilers for Star Wars: Skeleton Crew.
One of the many things said around the release of this series from Disney + is that Star Wars belongs, and has always belonged, to the kids and this is the series that will allow them to reclaim it. Watching the first two episodes for the second time as I write this, I’ve come to realise that the first part of that notion may not be true. Although I saw Star Wars young, being taken to a back-to-back screening of A New Hope and The Empire Strikes Back – complete with a Revenge of The Jedi trailer - and engaged with those films in a major way, I think that this may actually be the first Star Wars adventure since those Ewok movies that are truly aimed at kids. And I’ve come to be convinced the audience that the original Star Wars films, the prequels and almost definitely the Sequel trilogy were aimed at were actually what we would today call the ‘Young Adult’ audience.
Whilst those trilogies post-Return of The Jedi were rife with increasingly over-complicated back-stories and family dynamics, this Star Wars is dominated by child-like wonder, playfulness, very traditional good versus evil mechanics and small drama blown out of all proportion the way only kids can do with their lives. We start in a fairly common Star Wars milieu, not dissimilar to the way A New Hope began nearly fifty years ago: a starfield, orientating context and a giant, hulking starship beset by boarders from a much bigger starcraft. Even a masked humanoid pirate with a deep, resonating voice holding an officer of the successfully boarded Starcraft by the neck and framing his questions in a very familiar way. From its very opening moments, Skeleton Crew wants to take you right back to the beginning. And even further back than that.
Before we had space-fairers and even supermen, we had pirates. It’s hard to quantify just how much pirate and swashbuckling fiction was part of the landscape pre-1960, but I’m willing to make a bet it was the adventure fiction across film, comics and novels. Like Star Wars, Pirate-fiction was rooted in criminality and like the stories it now inspires, theft was the name of the game. Although running through the original trilogy and latterly, the Ahsoka and Acolyte series, were Samurai traditions, Joseph Campbell’s The Hero’s Journey and the Western genre, this leans into Old Hollywood and the movie brats it gave birth to. Tyrone Power, Douglas Fairbanks and Errol Flynn are touchstones once more, but not because of their sword-fighting skills, but because they once stood astride tall ships and needed the stars to steer them by.
Skeleton Crew swallows this this, big-time. The kids even encounter a droid called ‘SM-33’ (Smee) after the much-put-upon first mate who sailed with Captain Hook in Peter Pan. J.M. Barrie’s work provides another touchstone thematically, since ‘growing up’ is a major through-line here. Wim (one of our leads) is constantly being pushed to grow up, and not play at being a Jedi, or have mock lightsaber battles with his friend, Neel. At around ten years old, the kids in Skeleton Crew are being pressured by adults to think about their futures and their careers. And some of them, like Fern and KB, are growing up a little too fast, and are perhaps a little too eager to embrace that criminality I mentioned– until they actually encounter real criminality in the shape of Borgo, a pirate’s spaceport that offers up an exotic, dangerous world in sharp contrast to Wim and his pal’s safe suburban existence on their homeworld, At Atin.
The pace and fun get taken up a notch in episode two and on Borgo, as the children discover that their homeworld is in fact a fabled place, that may hold great treasure. They’ve come from Treasure Island and now must find their way back to it, only now they’re pursued by the galaxy’s worst. It’s an interesting twist, made all the more fascinating by the fact that we spend most of the first episode on this ‘Treasure Island’. At Atin is a place like no other in the Star Wars Universe, largely because it’s so normal. Here the influences hew a little closer in film history, to the American Dream, the nuclear family mouldings of Steven Spielberg. The parents are consumed by their work, the children play truant from school, ride (hover) bikes, and get into trouble in the woods. At Atin is a lot like that housing development in Poltergeist, where normalcy is valued, but something hidden in the ground, buried for decades threatens to shake up the status quo and endanger its children. Only here, it’s a buried starship, not the graves of the dead that haunt the town. In a way, Skeleton Crew seeks to comment on our fandom, with children wishing they were characters in the galaxy’s greatest saga, playing out their fantasies with action figures and in those mock lightsaber battles. The world outside At Atin is unknown to the kids. One of the best moments is seeing Neel, a blue elephant-headed child shout “Look! Aliens!” regarding some of the creatures and races they encounter on Borgo. I don’t think I’ve ever laughed harder at Star Wars.
The kids themselves provide parallels with some of those characters we fell in love with. Wim is Luke Skywalker, yearning for adventure, a chosen one because he finds something once lost. Neel is C-3PO, a worrier who's just along for the ride he doesn’t want to go on. KB is like R2-D2, resourceful in a jam, but with a strong moral center. And Fern is Han Solo, a badass with a heart of gold, who is about to discover a whole universe of trouble but whose confidence often gets her pals out of sticky situations. The young cast is excellent, making the most out of a fun script and the strange places they find themselves in. Jude Law, glimpsed only briefly, cuts an interesting figure, the handsome maybe Jedi, maybe Sith, maybe something else and it will be interesting to see what his presence brings to this in the next episodes. Nick Frost, who is with us in voice-only, is clearly having a whale of a time in the voice booth as SM-33. Skeleton Crew is for both real kids and big kids (like us). It says it’s OK to be young at heart and have fun, and find adventures, but remember to take the kids along for the ride and maybe let them find their own place in this universe. We all want to be pirates someday. Maybe this is our chance?
Star Wars: Skeleton Crew’s two-episode premiere is on Disney Plus now, with new episodes every Wednesday.
