After nearly twenty years, Ewan McGregor returns to his role of young(ish) Jedi Knight Obi-Wan Kenobi, and once again Star Wars feels a tad undeserving of McGregor’s talents. An Obi-Wan-centric project was a no-brainer for Disney: McGregor was one of the strongest elements of the Star Wars prequels (1999-2005) and the generation of kids who grew up watching them (including yours truly) is perfectly primed for the nostalgic rewind to a galaxy far, far away. Ironically, Obi-Wan Kenobi is a true successor to that flawed prequel trilogy: it’s full of great ideas but fails in the execution, despite McGregor’s best attempts to elevate the final product.
Obi-Wan Kenobi picks up 10 years after the events of 2005’s Revenge of the Sith, where we last saw McGregor’s Kenobi defeat his apprentice-turned-enemy, Darth Vader. Kenobi now lives as a dejected hermit on the familiar desert planet Tatooine (under the unconvincing alias of ‘Ben’), tasked with protecting a young Luke Skywalker from afar and determined to stay hidden until the events of 1977’s Star Wars. In an attempt to locate Kenobi, Jedi-hunting agents of the Galactic Empire concoct a plan that will draw the reluctant Jedi back into the fight—and into Darth Vader’s crosshairs.
On the whole, the series is fine. Conceptually, there’s a lot that works, but it’s in the structure, pacing, and delivery where the show falters. Even in its most-maligned theatrical entries, the production quality of Star Wars was always stunning and boundary-pushing. You could reliability count on the visuals, sets, costumes, choreography, or score to blow you away, even if the story or dialogue left you wanting. With Obi-Wan Kenobi, those production elements are the very things that drag it down. It just looks cheap. This is likely due to many factors—budget restraints, filming difficulties during COVID-19, retrofitting the story into a six-part miniseries—and I hesitate to lay too much blame at the feet of the series director, Deborah Chow, but I’m confused by the production choices.
Chow previously directed a handful of strong episodes for Disney+’s flagship series, The Mandalorian, but she doesn’t bring much directorial vision to Obi-Wan Kenobi. Her shot compositions and shot sequencing feel uninspired. This is a strange deviation from the visual splendor of Star Wars films, but increasingly common for recent Disney+ Star Wars projects (looking at you, Boba Fett!). The budget limitations are obvious—a 4.5 hour television show will simply not have the resources of a 2.5 hour theatrical release—but some filmmakers can cleverly hide or fudge those limitations. On the contrary, Chow employs stylistic decisions that almost highlight the budget stretching. For example, the action sequences, even when well-choreographed, are hamstrung by clunky camerawork and editing. It never descended to the consistent lows of The Book of Boba Fett, but was surprisingly and disappointingly uneven. (Credit where credit’s due: thankfully, the set pieces that do work are the most consequential ones. A handful of confrontations in the final episodes could have sunk the series if they didn’t deliver. Instead, they maximize the genuine thrills and emotional highs of the characters and performances.)
Chow also makes the confounding choice to shoot much of the show with handheld, intimate camerawork, which is stylistically jarring. The Lucas-era Star Wars films were consistently shot with smooth, tracked camera movements, making Obi-Wan Kenobi feel visually out-of-step. I think I understand what Chow was going for; this technique can be helpful in grounding a story or making the audience feel like a fly on the wall. It lends a naturalistic feel to everything you’re seeing. The issue with Obi-Wan Kenobi is when you’re trying to present otherworldly, fantastical elements on a strained budget, then the grounded, naturalistic camerawork underscores the un-reality of the visuals and production. Instead of paying homage to the stripped-down, practical look of the 1977 original, much of the series plays more like a competently-made fan film, comprised of costumes from K-Mart and yet another cost-saving cave or hallway location. And too often Chow leans too strongly into the handheld method, with unnecessary camera shaking that distracts during an emotional late-series confrontation, continually pulling attention from the emotional performances. It’s the most confusing aspect of the entire series.
So if Obi-Wan Kenobi is so frustrating, why watch it? Ultimately, the force holding the series together is the sheer star power of Ewan McGregor. In spite of all the execution flaws around him, he delivers a powerful, compelling, emotional performance as a broken man who has lost all hope. In an era of actors reprising fan-favorite roles, we’ve seen a spectrum of commitment, ranging from the shrug appearance of Bill Murray in Ghostbusters: Afterlife to the sincere “Hey! They really showed up!” of Harrison Ford in Star Wars: The Force Awakens. McGregor is clearly here to play, and it’s a shame they didn’t take advantage of the expanded run time to give McGregor more quiet moments to flex. The series offers a handful of slower, intimate exchanges between Obi-Wan and his co-stars, where McGregor and company are able to project real emotional gravitas. A particular dialogue scene with Obi-Wan on a dusty transport had me sitting forward, absorbed by McGregor’s ability to display a variety of conflicting emotions. This is the most interesting version we’ve seen yet of Obi-Wan. In the prequel films, he doesn’t really have a character arc; he doesn’t change or learn, mostly reacting to the plot or the choices of Anakin Skywalker. In the original trilogy, Alec Guinness plays him as a stoic, reassuring influence in Luke Skywalker’s life. Here, McGregor’s Obi-Wan is able to struggle, grow, and be challenged internally. His performance is proof that revisiting this character was always a worthy idea.
The other performance that deserves praise is Hayden Christensen, joining McGregor from prequel purgatory and returning as dual performances of Anakin Skywalker and Darth Vader. Christensen has always been unfairly criticized for his turn as young Anakin, having been set up to fail with Lucas’ prequel writing and directing. (If you need proof of Christensen’s acting abilities, check out 2003’s excellent Shattered Glass). In Obi-Wan Kenobi, he delivers an effective and chilling performance as Vader, and seeing him reunited on-screen with McGregor was genuinely thrilling.
The series is hit or miss with its supporting characters. Joel Edgerton and Bonnie Piesse briefly return as young Owen and Beru Lars, and are given limited screen time but some interesting material. Obi-Wan Kenobi introduces a handful of new characters, but the writing is shallow, and most characters feel like two-dimensional stand-ins without much interiority or specificity. The character with the most potential is Moses Ingram’s Reva, one of the Jedi-hunting Inquisitors. On paper, Reva is given a compelling backstory and arc, but is underserved by unclear writing and confusing character motivations, in spite of Ingram doing her best.
In the end, nothing about this exercise convinced me that Obi-Wan Kenobi would not have been improved in every way as a feature film. It was originally intended to be that—even pitched as a trilogy of movies with McGregor seemingly on board—until Disney panicked after the commercial failure of 2018’s Solo: A Star Wars Story. It’s not the first time Disney lost their nerve and sloppily corrected course in the face of backlash. Solo’s underperformance had less to do with the film’s quality, and more with the fact that Disney essentially filmed the movie twice and wouldn’t budge from a packed May 2018 release schedule, but it didn’t matter. Every planned anthology film was quickly retooled into Disney+ projects. That’s not inherently a bad idea, but Obi-Wan Kenobi didn’t actually do anything with the television storytelling format. You could easily take advantage of the episodic nature of television (i.e., focus each episode around a different character’s point of view or introduce a different flashback that ties to the episode’s specific theme). Instead, Obi-Wan Kenobi just plays like a movie stretched into four hours and carved into six parts. If you’re not going to take advantage of the medium, then give this story the budget it deserves and release it on the big screen. The scope and scale of this event should be towering. Obi-Wan Kenobi and Darth Vader are some of the most iconic characters in American fiction, introduced 45 years ago in one of the most influential American films ever made. A rematch of those characters should be presented with similar grandeur. Instead, it’s just OK, and maybe more fitting for Star Wars—a flawed franchise with really only one, maybe two, perfect entries—than I’d like to admit.
Obi-Wan Kenobi is available to stream on Disney+. Its miniseries consists of six episodes and is rated TV-14.
