George R.R. Martin Thought One Star Wars TV Show Was Better Than All The Rest (And He’s Not Wrong) – SlashFilm

Scold the person all you need for being a procrastinator, however George R.R. Martin is aware of his popular culture. When he is not encouraging folks to take a look at forgotten however worthwhile fantasy fare just like the Eighties Disney flick “Dragonslayer” (a typically shockingly grisly movie that options one of many all-time finest scaly, fireplace-respiration, on display screen villains in Vermithrax Perjorative), he is lending his identify as an govt producer to “Darkish Winds,” the deeply admired neo-Western crime drama present primarily based on Tony Hillerman’s cherished “Leaphorn & Chee” novels. “Darkish Winds” even noticed Martin sharing the display screen together with his fellow govt producer Robert Redford in what wound up marking the latter’s remaining performing credit score.

If all you impatient “Recreation of Thrones” followers are ready for me to jot down, “After which Martin received again to work on his subsequent ‘A Track of Ice and Hearth’ novel, ‘The Winds of Winter,'” you’d finest look elsewhere. In a July 2025 entry on his private weblog (the cheekily titled Not a Weblog), he as an alternative introduced his followers in control on the media he’d been partaking with recently. To his credit score, Martin revealed that he’d been partaking within the crème de la crème of geeky goodness, together with the James Gunn-directed movie “Superman” and “Murderbot” (an Apple TV sequence that enables star Alexander Skarsgård to get as gleefully bizarre as he all the time needs to be). However it was one other sci-fi present that Martin actually wished to toast.

“‘ANDOR’ was this 12 months’s spotlight, although,” he wrote, deeming it “far and away the perfect of the ‘Star Wars’ spin-offs.” He’s not incorrect, both: The Tony Gilroy-created present is probably the most radical and in any other case creatively completed dwell-motion “Star Wars” sequence produced up to now. However greater than that, it is a piece of style storytelling that is subversive in all of the methods Martin loves.

At their finest, “Recreation of Thrones” and George R.R. Martin’s supply novels for the sequence reach taking effectively-established fantasy tropes and subverting them as a way to make a bigger thematic level. “Andor” persistently does the identical factor on the subject of standard “Star Wars” storytelling. As stirring as it’s to look at the heroes in a galaxy far, distant make morally unambiguous decisions or pull off excessive-stakes missions with flying colours, that not often occurs in Tony Gilroy’s sequence. That goes double for characters nobly sacrificing their lives or dramatically going through off in opposition to their enemies. Slightly, on this planet of “Andor,” demise tends to be random or, at finest, a vital evil (because it usually is in actual-life conflict), and the would-be cathartic showdowns between the present’s righteous freedom fighters and fascist villains often play out in a extra grounded and fewer theatrical method.

Extra broadly, “Andor” options standout performances throughout the board (together with, naturally, Diego Luna as its namesake, Cassian Andor) and appears simply as improbable because it ought to, given the “Star Wars” sequence’ large price range (which the present’s creatives spent on making majestic sensible units, filming in breathtaking actual-world areas, and way more). As Martin himself put it:

“Seemed attractive, [star] Diego Luna was first fee, and there was a realism and pressure to the story that was sadly missing in many of the different spin-offs. It is good to see somebody doing science fiction proper.”

“Andor” is now streaming in its entirety on Disney+ … and for those who’re in search of the “A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms” to its “Recreation of Thrones” (that’s, a lighter but simply as enthralling present set in the identical fictional universe), give “Skeleton Crew” a watch afterwards.