Article
Culture
Film & TV
Politics
War & peace
5 min read

The story from a galaxy far, far away that's just made for these times

Andor holds up a galactic mirror to our media-saturated world.

Krish is a social entrepreneur partnering across civil society, faith communities, government and philanthropy. He founded The Sanctuary Foundation.

A montage shows the lead characters from Andor.

It’s an unlikely setup for success: a series set in a forgotten corner of the galaxy, a prequel to a prequel, telling the backstory behind Rogue One - the fourth highest-grossing Star Wars film. It’s a show with none of the original characters—no Darth Vader, no Luke Skywalker, no Obi-Wan. And yet, Andor has garnered widespread critical acclaim and fan appreciation. This Disney+ series has become the first true Star Wars content for grown-ups. 

Disney invested heavily in acquiring the rights to both the Marvel and Star Wars franchises, paying $4 billion for each. The returns have been massive—an estimated $13 billion from the Marvel Cinematic Universe and $11 billion from Star Wars. Yet, despite the financial success, something has been lost along the way: mediocre storylines, convoluted time-travel plots, and repetitive tropes have dulled the creative edge. 

But Andor stands apart. It offers something different—a grounded, character-driven narrative with rich, resonant themes that speak directly to today’s audience. 

Tyranny needs resisting at all levels

Andor follows a number of intersecting character arcs. Although the series is named after Cassian Andor (played by Diego Luna), a disillusioned smuggler turned Rebel Alliance operative, the story is much larger than a single man.  

As the Empire tightens its grip—both openly through military might and brutality, and in the shadows with a vast array of spies, surveillance, and an ever-expanding intelligence network—the need for resistance at every level becomes urgent. Those with a voice need to speak up while there is still a semblance of democracy and freedom of speech. Money is required to fund an insurgency and foot soldiers from all walks of life need to be found and prepared to rise and challenge the systemic injustice and rising imperial oppression. 

Enter Cassian Andor, orphaned at age six and adopted by Maarva and Clem Andor. His early experiences with poverty and oppression awaken something within him—something that solidifies when Clem is executed by stormtroopers. At the other end of the spectrum is Mon Mothma, born into privilege and political influence. Her arc centres on a moral crossroads: whether she will risk her status, her wealth, and her safety to support the resistance from within the halls of power. 

The relevance of Andor's message couldn’t be timelier. In an era marked by rising authoritarianism, disinformation, and increasing political polarization, the show insists that tyranny must be resisted at every level. It reminds us that democratic institutions are fragile, and silence in the face of injustice enables oppression to grow unchecked. Whether it’s fighting against despotic leadership, the erosion of freedom of speech, or systemic inequality, Andor suggests that the burden of resistance cannot simply fall solely on the heroic few. It requires people at every level of society to act with courage, integrity, and purpose before it’s too late. 

 Truth matters 

One important storyline in Andor is how the Empire constructs a moral justification for its actions through state-controlled, propagandist media. Good people can be manipulated, and truth can be twisted. In real time, we witness spin doctors denying or reframing the brutality unfolding around them—even as the Empire violently crushes a peaceful protest in Gorman. 

Showrunner Tony Gilroy uses every world-building tool at his disposal to draw parallels with both historical and contemporary injustices. For instance, the costuming of the Empire’s senior leadership and Imperial Security Bureau agents evokes eerie similarities to Gestapo uniforms. In contrast, the Gorman resistance fighters appear as if they’ve stepped off the set of Les Misérables, echoing the June Rebellion of 1832. They even speak in a French-accented galactic dialect, reinforcing the connection. 

It's difficult not to read this as a critique of how modern news outlets reframe and re-narrate global conflicts—such as the war in Israel and Gaza—to suit and shape their audiences. This agenda-driven reporting distorts facts and desensitizes viewers, often at the expense of those suffering on the ground. The complicity of the press in disinformation and facilitating or justifying atrocities, is contributing even today to ongoing humanitarian crises in places like Sudan and Gaza. 

In a supposedly post-truth era, Andor reminds us that truth still matters. The series holds up a mirror to our media-saturated world, revealing how outrage is manufactured, narratives are controlled, and reality is often mediated through selective storytelling. It challenges us to reflect on the reliability of the news we consume—and on our own role in questioning or accepting the stories we're told. 

Which side are you on? 

One of the most compelling aspects of Andor is its portrayal of parallel lives on both sides of the conflict. While much of the action follows Cassian’s transformation from smuggler to reluctant operative to key rebel leader, we also witness the rise of Dedra Meero—a driven, ambitious surveillance officer within the ISB, the Empire’s intelligence arm. 

Dedra begins as an underdog fighting workplace sexism in a male-dominated bureaucracy. But as her career advances, so does her capacity for cruelty. She becomes one of the Empire’s most ruthless enforcers, willing to sacrifice anything and anyone in her relentless pursuit of Rebel operatives. Her story is a chilling reminder of how authoritarian systems reward efficiency and zeal, no matter the moral cost. Ironically, her single-mindedness may end up helping the rebellion—her recklessness potentially exposes secrets about the Death Star. 

Throughout the series, we see similar tactics employed on both sides—surveillance, betrayal, sacrifice. The only difference is the larger narrative arc that ultimately vindicates the Rebellion’s cause. But in building complex, believable antagonists like Dedra, Andor shows us the banality of evil—how ordinary people, convinced they are doing the right thing, can become instruments of oppression. 

The question the series leaves us with is chillingly simple: in a world sliding toward growing injustice, which side are you on? 

Celebrate our 2nd birthday!

Since Spring 2023, our readers have enjoyed over 1,000 articles. All for free. 
This is made possible through the generosity of our amazing community of supporters.

If you enjoy Seen & Unseen, would you consider making a gift towards our work?

Do so by joining Behind The Seen. Alongside other benefits, you’ll receive an extra fortnightly email from me sharing my reading and reflections on the ideas that are shaping our times.

Graham Tomlin
Editor-in-Chief

Article
Belief
Books
Comment
Film & TV
5 min read

I’m not sure Christopher Nolan has actually read The Odyssey

The director has drunk the Kool-aid of modernity, and done so deeply
the head of a classical statue looks up amid embers around it.
The odyssey poster.
Universal Studios.

Greek myths are full of hubris. Full of it. I feel like ‘hubris’ isn’t a word you hear very often anymore. It means excessive pride or self-confidence that leads to a downfall, in case you were wondering. “Boris Johnson’s hubristic underestimation of the effects of ‘Partygate’ was the final nail in his political coffin,” we might say.  

In one myth, Icarus is imprisoned, but given wings held together by wax in aid of his escape. He is warned not to fly too close to the sun, because the heat will melt the wax. Guess what he does? Yep! Flies too close to the sun. The wings melt and he falls to his death. Hubris

Another myth tells the story of Prometheus. No, not the slightly underrated Alien prequel. (That’s right, I said underrated, but that’s another article for another day). Prometheus defies the Greek gods by stealing fire and giving it to humans. As punishment, Zeus ties Prometheus to a rock and has an eagle eat his liver, only for it to grow back overnight so the eagle can come back the next day and start again. Hubris. 

Greek myths are full of hubris. Full of it. 

And so, this is why I find the new poster for Christopher Nolan’s upcoming adaptation of Greek epic The Odyssey so … bizarre. But then I’ve been nervous about Nolan’s adaptation since it was announced. Nolan is a wonderful filmmaker, but he’s also deeply naturalistic in the messages he conveys. By this, I mean that all his films suggest that nature – the physical, material world of atoms and things – is all there is. Even when he has opportunity to explore themes of the mystical, or magical, or the supernatural, he only does so when a purely ‘natural’ explanation for such things is possible.  

For example, in The Prestige (and HUGE spoilers for the film here: it’s incredible, please watch it if you haven’t), Nolan tells the story of two rival magicians, played by Hugh Jackman and Christian Bale. Robert Angier (Jackman) is trying to work out Alfred Borden’s (Bale) teleportation trick. The secret? (Seriously: big, big spoilers here). Science. Nikola Tesla has invented a device that can clone someone but send the clone to a different location. The trick – the mysterious MacGuffin at the film’s heart – has a natural, scientific explanation. Magic isn’t real and you’re a fool if you think otherwise. 

Perhaps this is also why Nolan directed the wonderful Dark Knight trilogy. After all, Batman’s superpower is just wealth: it’s entirely naturalistic, with nothing that can’t fit into a scientific way of understanding the world. Or we could point towards the science fiction that underwrites Inception, Interstellar, and Tenet. For a filmmaker so gifted at tension and intrigue, he has surprisingly little truck with mystique, mystery, and the divine. But this is a problem when it comes to The Odyssey. A huge problem.  

Let’s return to that poster I mentioned earlier. It shows the head of a classical Greek statue, flames ember underneath it. The caption? Defy the Gods. And it’s at this point I start to wonder if Nolan has actually read The Odyssey. Because The Odyssey takes questions of divinity and their authority very, very seriously. Like many Greek myths and poems, the message of The Odyssey isn’t ‘defy the Gods’. No: it’s ‘trying to defy the gods is an unbelievably stupid, futile, and dangerous thing to do’. Nolan would seemingly have us raze Mount Olympus to the ground.  

Look, all we have is a poster so far. Nolan might prove me wrong. But we shouldn’t be surprised if Nolan reworks The Odyssey in such a way that ‘defy the Gods’ becomes its central message. Because Nolan is a quintessentially modern filmmaker.  

In a 1965 book called Freud and Philosophy, French philosopher Paul Ricœur described the modern period as dominated by a climate of suspicion or scepticism. Within this ‘climate of thought’, the straightforward understandings of things are actually deceptive, instead hiding hidden, deeper, and ‘truer’ meanings. He described Sigmund Freud, Friedrich Nietzsche, and Karl Mark as the ‘masters of suspicion.’ And so the world around us is to be approached suspiciously, to uncover the ‘truer’ meanings about our subconscious (so Freud), our false, religiously imposed morals (so Nietzsche), or our exploitative economic systems (so Marx). 

Each of Ricœur’s ‘masters of suspicion’ might be mapped on to one of the villains in Nolan’s Dark Knight trilogy. Liam Neeson is Ra’s al Ghul, a Freud-like figure who helps Bruce Wayne navigate the psychological effects of his parents’ murders in childhood. Heath Ledger’s mesmeric Joker is Nietzsche’s stand-in, exposing our misguided systems and structures of ethics, tethered to a religious framework we no longer hold to. Tom Hardy’s Bane is Marx, freeing Gotham’s proletariat from the economic structures that oppress them so. 

It's not a perfect fit, but I think there’s more than enough evidence to say that Nolan has drunk the Kool-aid of modernity, and he has drunk so very deeply. And this would be fine – absolutely fine – if he wasn’t planning to adapt The Odyssey. Because, as a quintessentially modern filmmaker, Nolan’s work emerges out of and celebrates a culture wherein ‘defy the gods’ is a slogan that can only be heard as heroic, courageous, and noble, rather than dumb and futile, as The Odyssey would stress to us. 

Defying divinity is not heroic. The Odyssey knows this and knows it well. Defying the gods never ends well for humans stupid enough to try in Homer’s work. Our modern sensibilities encourage us to be suspicious of institutionalised power, especially when that power takes a religious shape. We are predisposed to imagine that invocations of the divine are nothing more than thinly-veiled power-grabs. And sometimes they are. But The Odyssey is right to say that divinity itself is not to be trifled with. Renounce your creator at your peril. 

Like all his other films, Nolan’s The Odyssey is likely to be tense, wrought, and cinematographically immaculate. But also like his other films, I worry it will be deeply naturalistic in the way it handles the inescapably divine and supernatural elements present in Homer’s epic. The Odyssey has an important message for our increasingly hubristic society. I just worry that Nolan’s not the man to convey it as it deserves. 

Support Seen & Unseen

Since Spring 2023, our readers have enjoyed over 1,500 articles. All for free. 
This is made possible through the generosity of our amazing community of supporters.

If you enjoy Seen & Unseen, would you consider making a gift towards our work?
 
Do so by joining Behind The Seen. Alongside other benefits, you’ll receive an extra fortnightly email from me sharing my reading and reflections on the ideas that are shaping our times.

Graham Tomlin
Editor-in-Chief