I had been eagerly awaiting this new Disney+ series. But after watching the first episode, I was disappointed. Ewan McGregor does his best, but he couldn’t make up for a ho-hum story and a ho-hum script.
Disney, I suspect, needs to try to please kids. That may not work very well for oldies like me who were already older than Luke Skywalker when we saw the first Star Wars film back in 1977. There is a young Princess Leia character in Obi-Wan Kenobi, age around seven, who is extremely annoying — miscast and cockily unaware of how bad her lines are. Maybe that will work for kids. Remember Jar Jar Binks, and the young Anakin and his pod race? The Star Wars franchise has always been weakest when it tried to be kid-friendly.
What we have, I’m afraid, is a first-string cast (Ewan McGregor and Hayden Christensen), but second-string writing and directing. Still, I’ll keep watching. The visuals on the planet Tattooine are superb. The music (some of which was written by John Williams) is excellent. And it is always fun to return to the Star Wars world, which, after 45 years, has become a kind of parallel universe.
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