Skeleton Crew may just be the exciting, fun new Star Wars adventure that fans have been waiting for.
There has been a distressing lack of wonder in Lucasfilm’s recent Star Wars projects. In certain instances, like the refreshingly grounded Andor, this has felt both purposeful and considered. This absence has, however, felt accidental in shows like The Book of Boba Fett, The Acolyte, and Ahsoka, three projects that feel flat and trapped in their own dead air. The frustratingly limited imaginations of The Mandalorian season 3 and Star Wars: Episode IX — The Rise of Skywalker similarly robbed them of whatever fun they might have otherwise offered. The best thing you can, therefore, say about Skeleton Crew, Lucasfilm’s latest Disney+ offering, is that it is easily the most wondrous live-action Star Wars project in recent memory.
Created by Christopher Ford and Spider-Man: No Way Home director Jon Watts, Skeleton Crew wears its debt to 1980s genre classics like E.T. and The Goonies unabashedly on its sleeve. Sometimes, its influences seem too obvious, as is the case when Watts and Ford try unsuccessfully in Skeleton Crew‘s first episode to bring suburbs, school buses, and even gum into the Star Wars universe. Once it gets past its rough, Amblin-influenced pastiche of a premiere, though, Skeleton Crew expands into an imaginative, pulpy space pirate adventure the likes of which Lucasfilm has truly never produced before. And the results, at least in its second and third episodes, are equally encouraging and invigorating.
Skeleton Crew begins on the planet of At Attin, an idyllic, closed-off world where Wim (Ravi Cabot-Conyers), a young human obsessed with the Jedi, struggles to find a place for himself. Matters aren’t helped by the absenteeism of his workaholic father Wendle (Tunde Adebimpe), whose inability to give his son the attention he needs only makes Wim hold on even tighter to his Jedi dreams. When he stumbles upon the exterior entrance to a buried starship in the wilderness one day, Wim’s curiosity is immediately peaked. It isn’t long before he and his naïve friend Neel (Robert Timothy Smith) have made their way onboard the derelict ship alongside Fern (Ryan Kiera Armstrong), the rebellious daughter of a high-ranking At Attin official (The Banshees of Inisherin‘s Kerry Condon), and her best friend KB (Kyriana Kratter).
An ill-judged push of a green button brings the buried starship back to life and sends the kids hurtling past At Attin’s atmospheric borders and into the deep reaches of a galaxy they have no idea how to navigate.
