Monthly Archives: May 2024

Film

Highway (2014)

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Imtiaz Ali’s 2014 film Highway opens from the point of view of an anonymous driver. As the credits roll, we are taken on a journey through the vast countryside of India. We roll through a desert, past small towns, in and out of dense forests, and up a winding path into the snowy mountains. It is the very picture of mobility, if not necessarily freedom. Suddenly the movie shrinks to half the size of the frame, a crude but effective cinematic technique, and we meet Veera, a young woman in her late teens or early twenties preparing for her wedding. Veera lives in a house that recalls the mansion in Crazy Rich Asians, but it soon becomes obvious she is not a happy woman. As she runs into the street to her fiancée’s car, the movie expands back to full frame. “Let’s go. Let’s go. Let’s go,” she says to her fiancée, inviting him to take her on a late night drive, but he’s having none of it. He is a young, handsome man in his twenties, but he almost looks like a wax figure, already so committed to the idea of upper-class propriety that he might as well be Veera’s father instead of her future husband. Reluctantly he lets her get into the car. They go on a short drive. She wants it to be longer. He’s worried about traveling without bodyguards. She proposes that they run away to the mountains. He laughs it off as a ridiculous idea. They stop for gas. She gets out of the car, raises her cloak, and imagines she can fly. He continues to scold her. “Get in the car Veera. It’s not safe.” It’s not. Veera is startled by the sound of gunshots. The gas station is being robbed. One of the robbers grabs Veera and puts a gun to her head. Her fiancée remains in the car, not only paralyzed with fear, but smugly self-satisfied. “I warned you,” he says. “I warned you.” He doesn’t stay smug for very long. The robbers open the door, toss him out of the car onto the parking-lot, and take Veera along as an insurance policy.

What is the worst type of betrayal? History tells us it’s Judas turning Jesus over to the Sanhedrin, who would then turn the son of God over to the Romans to be crucified. But is it? Veera’s kidnapper Mahabir is a young man a few years older than her fiancée. He’s a brutal thug who throws her into the back of a truck, stuffs a rag into her mouth to silence her screams, and initially intends to sell her to sex traffickers. Just about his only good quality is that he sincerely hates the rich. He’s a potential revolutionary as much as he is a common criminal. In another life, Veera’s fiancée might have hired him as their body guard. Wealthy Indians, like in many countries in the world, would rather pay one half of the working class to guard them against the other half of the working class rather than establish the conditions where everybody could live in peace. In other movie, Veera might have had an affair with her bodyguard, who represented the decisive masculinity her upper-class husband didn’t have. In Highway, however, Veera and Mahabir end up living out the fantasy that she begged her fiancée to indulge, if only for a few hours.

Unlike the kidnappers in Luc Besson’s Taken, Mahabir is not a monster. In reality he has no intention of selling Veera to a pimp. He briefly toys with the idea of demanding a ransom from her parents, but he doesn’t quite seem to know exactly how to go about it. You can see him hesitate each time he stuffs the rag back into her mouth. When she asks if she can relieve herself in private he lets her, even though it gives her a chance to escape. Eventually he lets her go, but she returns. She has fallen in love, but why? It has to be more than just the fact that he’s young and good looking, and it’s more than just “Stockholm Syndrome.” Unlike the kidnappers in Taken, who have a well-developed system of contacts in France to traffic women, and who have paid off the French Secret Service to look the other way, Mahabir knows that he’s fucked, that he’s made the one mistake that always lands you in jail (or in the grave). He’s victimized the rich. He knows very well that he could have trafficked all the young, working-class women he could find and at most it would have meant giving the police a few bribes here and there. But Veera is not only a rich girl. She’s the daughter of a major oligarch, the kind of man who can snap his fingers and have any government jump at his command. If Veera returns to Mahabir every time she has a chance to escape, it might just be arrogance, the sense that she’s basically his death warrant, and wants to punish him for stuffing a rag in her mouth and holding a gun to her temple. In reality, by the end of the movie, she genuinely cares about him. She tells him to call his mother. His mother would be worried about him. They drive into t he mountains. He tries to let her go again. She comes back again. He’s no longer able to resist. She’s his kidnapper as much as he’s her kidnapper. They’re two young people in love who have kidnapped each other.

We also begin to notice that their journey has mirrored the journey of the truck in the credits. It will end up in the mountains, with Veera and Mahabir finding that little cabin Veera had fantasized about with her fiancée. It will also end up back in Veera’s father’s compound, with Veera boxed into a reduced frame, her dream of flight crushed for good. We know Mahabir’s death is coming, but it ends up being more surprising and brutal than we had expected. One moment they are looking at each other. The next moment, he’s clutching his lower back in pain as dozens of soldiers surround their cabin, and he’s shot multiple times. Veera screams out in pain. She’s not being rescued. She’s being kidnapped, and in a manner that causes her far more trauma than the kidnapping at the gas station. Mahabir is thrown onto a stretcher and taken to the morgue. Veera is drugged and taken back to her family. When she wakes up, her dream is over. She’s been dragged back to a reality far worse than Mahabir. It’s not the arranged marriage. Her fiancée is an uptight prig and a coward, but as we’ve seen from the first half hour, he’s not the real problem. She can manipulate him easily enough. There’s something much darker in Veera’s past than just an arranged marriage with a shallow twit.

Back with her family we finally learn what kind of betrayal is worse than that of Judas. When Veera was a little girl, she was molested by her uncle. He would call her downstairs, give her chocolate, sit her in his lap, and rape her. We see flashbacks to Veera as a little girl, to the days before she had her innocence stolen. Veera’s uncle warns her never to tell anybody. She does not listen to him. She tells her mother. But her mother betrays her, covers it up, tells Veera to do what her uncle has ordered her to do, stay silent. There is no greater betrayal than a parent who puts her own daughter in the hands of a pedophile. Very no longer cares about staying silent. She violently denounces her uncle in front of the whole family. She lets out an extended primal scream. At long last we know why she had no real urge to escape from the criminals who kidnapped her, and why it’s not just Stockholm Syndrome. They were just opportunists who wanted to make money, and who eventually regretted what they had done. Her mother was the genuine sex trafficker, willing to pimp out her own daughter to maintain her respectable position in ruling class society. Veera’s fiancée fails yet again. Even now he can’t defend the woman he was to spend the rest of his life with. The louder Veera screams, the less they react. At least with the gag in her mouth, she had the chance of removing it. But now she has no gag in her mouth and her screams go unheard. She leaves her family and her fiancée for a dull job at a canning factory, not her fantasy of being a shepherd’s wife, but the harsh reality of working class life. At least she’s no longer living a lie. In the last scene, we see Veera as a little girl along with Mahabir, now as a boy. Hindus don’t die and go to hell or heaven. They get reincarnated. Hopefully we are seeing a preview of the new life they were reborn into together.

Film

ANDOR (2022): EPISODES 4-6

Episode 3 of Andor ended with Cassian Andor and Luthen Rael, played by Stellan Skarsgård, blasting their way out of Ferrix, and leaving Syril Karn and his corporate police detachment either dead or in a state of shock wondering what happened. Andor, who has no money or ship of his own, is essentially Luthen’s prisoner, dependent on the older man, not only for his ride out of Ferrix, but for food and shelter until they both figure out his next step. When Luthen suggests to Andor that he join a group of revolutionaries on the planet Aldhani to take part in the robbery of an imperial garrison, it’s more of an order than an opportunity. Andor, who doesn’t have much choice in the matter, agrees.

If you’re a student of the Russian Revolution and all of this sounds familiar, it’s no accident. In a 2022 interview with Rolling Stone, Andor’s creator Tony Gilroy explains that he based episodes 4-6 of the show on the opening of Simon Sebag Montefiore’s book Young Stalin, and the infamous 1907 Tiflis bank robbery, where a heist organized by Lenin and led by Joseph Stalin, carried off 241,000 rubles from a caravan of armored cars making their way through  Erivansky Square in what is now the city of Tbilisi, Georgia. The robbery was not a success. Over 40 people, including a number of innocent bystanders, were killed. 241,000 rubles in 1907 was only the equivalent of about 3.4 million dollars today, and very little of it wound up being of much use. The Czar’s secret police had a record of the serial numbers of all the largest bills. What’s more the 5th Congress of the Russian Social Democratic Party passed a resolution condemning the “participation in or assistance to all militant activity, including expropriations as disorganizing and demoralizing.”

Nevertheless, The Tiflis bank robbery was a defining event for the ruthless, violent group of revolutionaries who would later become known as the Bolsheviks. Luthen, like Lenin, is determined to bring down the empire by any means necessary, and to do that he needs a lot of resourceful young petty criminals like Cassian Andor. On the way to Aldhani we not only learn that Luthen knows pretty much everything about Cassian Andor, but that Andor is no stranger to revolution and guerilla warfare, having served as a cook for an insurgent army during his teenage years, and having quit in disgust over factional squabbles that saw his fellow revolutionaries fighting one another more than they fought the empire. That Luthen is willing to pay Cassian 125,000 imperial credits to join his team on Aldhani is a testament to Cassian’s potential as a future militant. When Luthen asks Cassian to choose an alias, a codename, and Cassian calls himself “Clem” after his stepfather, we see how Bolsheviks are made. Clem, a skilled thief and scavenger, a black man who was hanged in the town square on Ferrix by the empire, has become Clem, a member of the revolutionary vanguard.

Cassian’s salary is an immediate source of tension between Luthen and Vel, the leader of the revolutionary cell on Aldhani, a severe young woman played by Faye Marsay, “the waif” from Game of Thrones. The last thing she wants is a mercenary, whose high salary is guaranteed to cause resentment among the other members of the cell, but Luthen insists that she take him and she follows his orders. As she introduces Andor to his “comrades,” Cinta, a young dark-skinned woman whose entire family was murdered by stormtroopers, Karis Nemik, a young man in his 20s, and the group’s intellectual and revolutionary theorist, Taramyn, a tall, formidable looking black man and an ex-imperial storm trooper, Lieutenant Gorn, an imperial officer and Vel’s man on the inside, and Avrel, a white man in his 40s, an ex-con who immediately begins to antagonize Cassian Andor and foment discontent, we begin to see why Vel is in command. She’s authoritative but open-minded and curious. She breaks up fights by asking each man his opinion on the issues. She skillfully integrates Andor into the team while making sure her people keep an eye on him to make sure he’s trustworthy.

The mission on Aldhani is a classic heist movie played out in the most poetic of all setting, Glen Tilt Park in Perthshire, Scotland. If you can imagine Jean Pierre Melville crossed with Ossian, Oceans 11 in the Scottish Highlands, the Italian job in the middle of the Highland Clearances, you can begin to understand the narrative complexity and originality of Andor. The imperial garrison on Andor is a bit like any frontier garrison in a district being ethnically cleansed for the good of “progress.” If the Kenari people in the early episodes of Andor were indigenous Mexicans, the Dhanis are basically Highland Scots, fair-skinned, red or blonde-haired pre-industrial people the empire has been pushing south out of their native land for decades. Just like the Irish peasantry in 1847, or the Scots Highlanders after the Jacobite Rebellion, the Dhanis are squatting on land too valuable for their “primitive” way of life. For the imperial officers, administrators and bureaucrats at the garrison, Aldhani is considered a bad posting, a backwater they send you when your career isn’t going anywhere.

As we follow Luthen back to the imperial capital on the planet Coruscant, where the formidable revolutionary leader lives as the owner of an art gallery popular with the imperial elite, we immediately understand why nobody at the imperial garrison on Aldhani can appreciate the planet’s staggering natural beauty. Even the ruling class on Coruscant live in dull high rises decked out in sterile IKEA furniture. We also meet two new characters, Mon Mothma, a liberal Senator who’s working behind the scenes with Luthen to raise money for the oppressed, and Deedra Meero, an ambitious imperial intelligence officer who sees the imperial crackdown in the wake of the disaster on Ferrix as a chance to jump-start her career. Imperial society is the picture of corporate evil. The ruling class make banal small talk. Senior management plays mid-level managers off against one another. Mid-level managers bully their underlings. Everybody moves in a tight, clipped way that says “I’ve built a forcefield around myself against beauty and imagination.” Above all, everybody is spying on everybody. Luthen has organized the heist on Aldhani partly because his contact in the Senate, Mon Mothma, is no longer able to move money around in the official banking system. Even her chauffeur is an imperial spy.

Probably the biggest plot hole in Andor is the fact that the empire still uses hard currency, that there’s a Fort Knox full of imperial gold bars to steal on the planet Aldhani. Nobody in the United States in 2024 uses cash. Even back in 1907 in Russia, the Secret Police could render stolen bank notes useless by circulating their serial numbers. There’s no reason to believe that the empire wouldn’t simply deactivate stolen imperial credits and render the physical media as valueless as expired Walmart gift cards. What empire worth its weight in evil lets people use cash. The empire in Andor is still in transition. It’s the 1970s, not the 2010s. The system of repression has not yet been perfected. In the end, the imperial payroll in Andor is a McGuffin, the excuse to show how the revolutionary cell organized by Luther and Vel pull off the perfect heist, not because any of them has any kind of superpower or extraordinary skill, but simply because they train for it, and train for it, and train for it. They put themselves through the paces so many times that even at the end when they’re all ready to kill one another, they still manage to pull it off.

What makes the heist in Andor so original is that in order to make their getaway, Vel, Andor and their comrades exploit The Eye of Aldhani, a rare natural phenomenon, a once every three years meteor shower, which is the center of a traditional religious ceremony for the Dhani. They need to pilot their slow, bulk freighter past the luminous natural phenomenon before the imperial garrison’s tie fighters can blow them out of the sky. Karis Nemik, the team’s intellectual has modified an ancient navigational system that will pilot them through the awesome spectacle of light even as the electrical charges fry the sophisticated computers on the tie fighters. Everything about the heist requires perfect timing, nerves of steel, inside information, and precise mathematical calculation, but in the end, it’s the beauty of the Scottish Highlands that lets the rebels defeat the evil empire. Andor and his space Bolsheviks succeed where Bonnie Prince Charlie and his Jacobite Rebels failed. The Jacobite Rising of 1745 isn’t particularly well known in the United States, but if you’re a fan of the TV series Outlander you will see the connection immediately. It’s an astonishing moment of TV. Somehow Tony Gilroy has managed to insert Celtic romanticism in the middle of a dirty Bolshevik Revolution organized by squabbling sectarian murderers and thieves. Cassian Andor, the last descendent of an extinct Mesoamerican tribe and Karis Nemik, a young intellectual with salvaged technology from the distant past, outwit an entire imperial garrison and make off with a spaceship full of gold.

Andor has rescued Bolshevism from young Joseph Stalin and given it back to the ancient highland bards.

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Film

Andor (2022): Episodes 1-3

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The 2016 film Rogue One is perhaps the most divisive Star Wars movie of all. The Excellent film critic Deep Focus Lens absolutely hated it. I thought it was the best Star Wars film since The Empire Strikes back. Set immediately before the first scene of the original Star Wars, which I will never call A New Hope, Rogue One is the story of Jyn Erso, played by the British actress Felicity Jones, and Cassion Andor, played by the Mexican actor Diego Luna. While neither Jyn nor Cassian has ever been particularly popular with hardcore Star Wars fans, they are the real heroes of the whole saga, since they are the ones who steal the plans to the original Death Star. Without Jyn and Cassian, Luke Skywalker, force or no force, would not have been able to send a pair of torpedoes down the garbage shoot, and blow the giant planet killer to kingdom come.

Running for twelve episodes, and consisting of three feature length movies, the first of which I will review here, the Disney + miniseries Andor is the prequel to Rogue One, the origin story of Cassian Andor before he reluctantly teamed up with Jyn Erso. Andor is no super hero story. It’s not even really Star Wars. Rather, it is Star Wars without the force, light sabers, Jedi knights, emperors or princesses, 8 foot tall space wizards in black S&M gear, or swelling orchestral scores by John Williams. If the original Star Wars was classic 1930s Hollywood, Andor is a mixture of genres, a heist film, a prison escape film, a police procedural, all wrapped up in a gritty style that might best be called kitchen sink noir, a style best exemplified by the forgotten 1981 Sean Connery film Outland or the 1984 cult classic Streets of Fire. If someone told me there was a lost Bruce Springsteen album called Darkness on the Edge of Andor, I would believe you. In fact, compare Diego Luna to young Bruce Springsteen or young Michael Pare.

Andor opens on the “industrial planet” of Morlana One with Cassian walking down along causeway in the rain towards the red light district of a corporate office park. If you’ve been to Hoboken or Jersey City, you’ve seen this place. He walks into a bar you might be tempted to compare to the bar at the Mos Eisley spaceport in A New Hope, if the bar in the Mos Eisley spaceport got rid of the raucous music and only admitted humans. Naturally everybody in the bar, including a pair of corrupt, corporate security guards, think Cassian is there to get laid, but even though Cassian is very much the type of guy who would pay for sex, that’s not what he wants. Just the opposite, Cassian is looking for his younger sister, from whom he got separated on their home planet when their tribe — who are obvious stand ins for indigenous Mexicans — was wiped out by an imperial ship in an incident that looks a bit like the first time white men made contact with Native Americans back in 1492. Cassian, who was rescued by a white woman named Marva, and her black husband Clem, who we later learn was hanged by the Empire, is looking for his authentic self in a place that no longer exists, a planet that was made uninhabitable by an imperial mining disaster, for an indigenous culture nobody has ever heard of, for a little girl who has been dead for 25 or 30 years.

Finding no trace of his sister in the bar, Cassian walks back up the causeway to his ship, where he’s mugged by the two security men who had mistaken him for an easy victim. Diego Luna, who’s about 5’10” and 150 pounds, is no more imposing than Mark Hamill, who got bullied at the bar at the Mos Eisley Space Port until he was rescued by Obi Wan Kenobi and his light saber. It’s a fatal mistake. Cassian was brought up on the working-class planet of Ferrix by a pair of scavengers, and knows how to handle himself in a fight. He knocks one of the men to the ground, cracks his skull on the concrete and shoots the other as he begs for his life. What makes the scene so good is how believable the fight is. There are no fancy martial arts. Cassian isn’t even that strong. It’s just one sober man against two jackasses who have had too much to drink at the bar, and who have convinced themselves that they’re tougher than they really are. When Cassian gets back into his ship and goes back to Ferrix, it feels like he had just killed a pair of drunken New York City Police officers outside a bar in the East Village, and fled the scene of the crime to go back home to Newark or Elizabeth in New Jersey.

Back home in Ferrix, Cassian begins constructing an alibi he hopes will cover his tracks. Along the way he meet his ex-girlfriend Bix, that one perfect 10 you sometimes run into in a dreary blue collar city, her current boyfriend Timm, Cassian’s friend Brasso, a hulking giant who’s willing to cover for him, everybody who’s ever done Cassian a favor or lent him money, and above all Marva, Cassian’s formidable old step mother who will later appear in perhaps the most memorable scene in the series. While Cassian is planning his escape, arranging to sell a valuable piece of gear he had stolen from the empire to a shady buyer he contacts through Bix, we go back to Morlana One and meet the imperial authorities in charge of the crime, only they’re not the imperial authorities. They’re just a mid-level corporate security department, the local cops in the 1993 movie The Fugitive who bungle the case until Tommy Lee Jones takes over. The head supervisor accurately sizes up the case from the very beginning. Two corrupt security guards picked a fight with the wrong man. We also see that the Empire is basically New York in the 1970s or 1980s, the imperial core before sincere Nazis and authoritarians like Rudy Giuliani take over. People tolerate the Empire because they can carve out their little grift inside of it. The two security guards got to drink, and fuck, at an expensive whorehouse because they could use their authority to shake down an occasional customer for his wallet. If they got killed in the process, that was just too bad. Nobody was going to waste any time tracking down their murderer, but the times are changing.

When we meet Syril Karn, we don’t even need an introduction for he’s such a familiar character. Played by the American actor Kyle Soller, Syril is the ambitious young police officer, think Lieutenant Exley from LA Confidential or Elliot Ness from The Untouchables, who’s determined to root out the corruption of the city police department, and put it back on track as an official crime fighting organization. “They were two Morlana employees,” he tells his supervisor, who advises him just to let it go. “If I don’t solve their murder than I am not worthy of the uniform.” While Syril may be the villain of the first part of Andor, there’s nothing particularly evil about him. He’s just a dedicated police detective doing his job. He’s not likable like Kevin Costner or charismatic and macho like Clint Eastwood or even an intellectual like Sam Waterson in Law and Order, but he does do exactly what every good police detective does. He kicks his lazy subordinates in the ass and makes them earn their pay. He locks on the one clue Cassian was careless enough, or sincere enough, to let drop, that a man from the planet Kenari (think Oaxaca or Chiapas) was looking for his long lost sister in a whore house in Morlana One, and just methodically sifts through the details. It’s a long shot, but like in every police procedural, that long shot eventually leads right to a viable suspect.

It is a long shot. Marva has wisely covered up the fact that her step son is an indigenous Kenari. Diego Luna is a well-known Mexican actor who fully embraces Mexico’s indigenous heritage but he doesn’t look particularly indigenous. He looks like any mixed race, mostly white, upper-class Mexican. If you told me he was Greek, or Turkish, or Sicilian, or even French, I’d believe you. Ferrix, like Elizabeth New Jersey, Scranton PA, Buffalo, New York, or Chicago is a dirty old industrial city full of every ethnic group, race, nationality, religion, skin tone, facial feature, height, weight, build, physical appearance, and cultural eccentricity known to man, or whatever humans in the Star Wars universe are called. It’s exactly the kind of place where a man like Cassian would cling to whatever makes him different. I know, for example, that my name “Rogouski” is derived from a small city in Silesia on the border of Poland and Germany, that my mother’s ancestry is French Swiss and German, that my paternal grandmother was born in Lithuania. Yet I couldn’t tell you very much about any of those places. I’m as American as Cassian is a native of Ferrix. In this day and age of the “Landback” movement you better believe that if I were even 5% Cherokee I’d tell everybody about it. Cassian, of course, who adores his mother Marva, has wisely kept his ethnic heritage to himself, but of course he has told most of his girlfriends, including Bix. Who hasn’t told their boyfriend or girlfriend about that obscure little country they can claim as their homeland?

As Cassian is getting his alibi straight with Marva, we learn that he has not brought Bix home to meet her. That tells us that she was never really important to him, that she was the passive partner in their relationship, the one who admires more than is admired. Timm, on the other hand, who’s played by the Scottish actor James McArdle, knows that he is punching far above his weight category. He’s a dull working class bloke in a dull industrial city who has scored the hottest babe in town. This fact is such an important part of his identity, he’s terrified of losing it. He also knows that he’s living in Cassian’s shadow, the mysterious Hispanic bad boy who for some reason Bix is reluctantly willing to do a favor for every time he comes around and asks. Timm fears that as soon as Cassian wants her back, she’s his for the asking. Timm is also not particularly bright. He doesn’t realize that his best possible option is to let Cassian sell his stolen imperial electronics to Bix’s contact and let him get out of town for good. Timm is a young man who knows he’s the rebound guy, the warm body who will serve as a place holder until she finds something better. So he acts in an irrational manner. He calls up Syril Karn. You were looking for a man descended from the mysterious and now genocided people of Kenari? I have some information that might be of interest to you.

In the third episode of Andor, the first story arc of the series comes together in an explosive way. Syril taps another security officer, commandeers twelve soldiers, and heads to Ferrix to arrest his only suspect. We also meet Luthen Rael. Played by the Swedish actor Stellan Skarsgård, he’s Ben Kenobi to Cassian’s Luke Skywalker, Alec Guinness to Mark Hamill, the wise old mentor the lost young man was seeking all along. Unlike Alec Guinness’s Ben Kenobi, however, Luthen is no kindly old space Jesus. He’s more like Lenin or Robespierre, a ruthless, cold revolutionary determined to bring down the empire by any means necessary. If that necessary means is using and exploiting an angry young man like Cassian, so be it. He wants the electronics, of course, but he’s more interested in Cassian himself, a thief clever enough talk walk in and out of imperial bases and just take what he wants. Cassian mistrusts Luther but he also has no trouble telling him how he can steal so many imperial components. He’s a nobody. The Empire doesn’t care about him. All he has to do is walk in and take what he wants. It’s New York City in the 1970s and anybody with the requisite lack of morals can probably steal enough to live a pretty good life.

But times are definitely changing. Syril Karn and his detachment reach Ferrix faster than anybody, even an experienced Bolshevik like Luthen, expected. They quickly take Marva hostage, arrest Bix, and trace Cassian to the spot where he and Luthen are arranging their transaction. It’s now too late. Cassian has to trust Luthen, who’s his only way out. As they shoot their way out of the city, as Timm foolishly dies trying to rescue Bix from Syril Karn’s officers, as Marva taunts her arresting officer with a promise of the revolution that awaits him, Luthen tells Cassian about a mission. The rebellion is now ready to infiltrate a frontier garrison and steal the payroll for an entire imperial sector. Is Cassian interested. The rebellion is ready to pay well, and what choice does Cassian have after all? In the next episode, soon to be reviewed here, we enter a new arc of the Andor series. Fans of Jean Pierre Melville or the Oceans 11 series will enjoy it.