Liam Neeson Is Right About Disney-Era ‘Star Wars’

Liam Neeson made headlines this past week when he gave a surprisingly frank comment about the current status of Star Wars. Asked if he would return past a single recent cameo he did with Ewan McGregor’s Obi-Wan, he definitively said no, and gave his reason:

“No, I’m not,” Neeson said. “There’s so many spinoffs of Star Wars. It’s diluting it to me, and it’s taken away the mystery and the magic in a weird way.”

At 70, Liam Neeson may not exactly be the target audience for this new Disney era of Star Wars, and is himself the guy who had lines midicholorians in the prequels, but that doesn’t mean he’s wrong, either. I do agree that there is simultaneously both too much Star Wars content and the wrong kind of Star Wars content happening in this Disney period.

One problem is the continued reliance on the Skywalker saga and those attached characters, which is why the new trilogy didn’t land as well as it could have, as it felt the need to be a direct sequel starring the old faces and their direct descendants.

Other problematic projects have been Obi-Wan, which tried to serve as some sort of prequel redemption, but ultimately felt hollow and pointless, The Book of Boba Fett, which took a beloved character and made him weird and lame, and Solo, the unneeded prequel that did so poorly Disney stopped making standalone Star Wars movies indefinitely.

Even The Mandalorian, which has been an shining example of “good new Star Wars” a lot of the time has not been able to resist the temptation to veer back into the Skywalker saga with a bizarre aside that had a CGI Luke Skywalker temporarily training Grogu. It was better when it was steering clear of all that, and I’m not sure how it’s going to go now that it’s becoming a Dave Filoni Rebels sequel series going forward with new Bo-Katan plotlines and such.

Of course, the two projects I am leaving out here are the ones that have been handled the best, Rogue One and its prequel series Andor, which mostly leave the Skywalkers behind, and are content with a single tiny Vader and Leia cameo. Andor doesn’t even have that, and served as a grounded experience about the Empire’s oppression and the birth of a rebellion that was infinitely more compelling than anything else in this new era. And that was true because it stayed far, far away from the Skywalker saga, despite existing alongside of it.

I think you could even argue that in the world of video games, Jedi Fallen Order did a great job with a brand new Jedi-based story that was very separate from the Skywalkers. That’s the kind of story I’d like to see more of (and I believe we may see Cal himself in live action one of these days).

So yes, Neeson is right. A lot of the magic is gone. But projects like Andor give me hope that there’s still a future here, if handled properly.

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Pick up my sci-fi novels the Herokiller series and The Earthborn Trilogy.