Star Wars: Skeleton Crew review: a wondrous space pirate adventure

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. They find an unexpected ally in the ship’s only remaining occupant, an old droid named SM-33 (perfectly voiced by Nick Frost), whose gravelly voice and desperate search for a “captain” suggest that Fern, Wim, KB, and Neel have found themselves trapped aboard a long-lost pirate ship. This possibility is quickly confirmed when SM-33 takes them to a starport that turns out to be a gathering place for bloodthirsty, greedy pirates who have no problem threatening and imprisoning a group of children.

It’s in the starport’s underground cells that the kids find themselves face to face with Jod Na Nawood (The Order‘s Jude Law), an enigmatic Force-user whose connection to the galaxy’s long-fallen Jedi Order is as unclear as his trustworthiness. Skeleton Crew, which was written entirely by Ford, Watts, and Myung Joh Wesner, throws in even more delightful space-pirate touches when it goes on to refer to Law’s Jod by multiple other names, the most memorable of which turns out to be Crimson Jack. The character’s introduction, confidently played by Law, gives Skeleton Crew another jolt of life shortly following the sudden, exciting expansion of its scope and story that comes at the end of its premiere. Its first installment struggles to convincingly blend Skeleton Crew‘s Amblin influences and its Star Wars setting, but the series’ second and third entries more than make up for its uneven start.

Skeleton Crew works best not when it’s taking pages out of Americana sci-fi adventures like E.T. but when it is fully embracing the more lightly fantastical, Treasure Island and Goonies-inspired possibilities of its story. That’s evident in the series’ second and third installments, which are helmed by The Green Knight director David Lowery and are more fun and imaginative than any episode of television Lucasfilm has produced since — at the very least — Andor‘s The Eye. These episodes pack in enough world-building details to make Skeleton Crew‘s pirate underworld feel immediately fleshed-out and lived-in, and they do so without disrupting the show’s pleasingly brisk pace and crackling, light-on-its-feet charm. Lowery has previously proven himself uniquely capable of bringing his own, distinct visual artistry to familiar worlds and IP titles, and he does so again here.

That is, thankfully, a trait that Lowery shares with the rest of the series’ directors, which include Watts, Everything Everywhere All at Once filmmakers Daniel Scheinert and Daniel Kwan, Thunderbolts helmer Jake Schreier, The Mandalorian veteran Bryce Dallas Howard, and Twisters director Lee Isaac Chung. Skeleton Crew boasts undoubtedly the most impressive director lineup of any of Lucasfilm’s Disney+ titles to date, and that suggests that the series will be able to maintain the refreshingly polished look of its first three episodes across all of its eight chapters. The show so far lacks any of the distractingly shoddy VFX moments or muddy Volume-provided backgrounds that have marred several of its franchise’s previous TV stories. It looks better than any other Star Wars show outside of Andor, and the time that went into bringing each of its sets and digital environments to life only makes it that much easier to lose yourself in Skeleton Crew‘s immersive, swashbuckling galactic underworld.

It is entirely possible that Skeleton Crew will have fizzled and fallen apart by the time it’s reached its conclusion. It wouldn’t be the first Star Wars entry in Lucasfilm’s Disney-owned era to do so. For now, though, the show has more immediate promise and charm than almost any other live-action Star Wars title that has come along in quite a few years. Its young leads give performances that are alternately stiff and endearingly vulnerable, and some of the arguments that break out between Cabot-Conyers’ stubborn Wim and Armstrong’s bossy Fern may be too purposefully childish for some older viewers. Skeleton Crew itself, however, never veers too far into YA territory.

It, instead, returns to the same fun-for-all-ages, pulp-magazine brew of lighthearted adventure and genuine heart that has been at the center of Star Wars ever since George Lucas first decided to combine his love of Flash Gordon comic strips with his admiration for Akira Kurosawa-directed samurai movies. At its best, it’s a series that has the sci-fi fantasy magic necessary to inspire awe, and while it pulls from multiple different, clearly identifiable sources, Skeleton Crew feels like the rare Star Wars adventure we haven’t actually seen before. It has the potential, in other words, to remind viewers why they fell in love with Star Wars in the first place.

Star Wars: Skeleton Crew premieres December 2 on Disney+. New episodes premiere weekly at 6 p.m. on Tuesdays. Tech Reader was given early access to the series’ first three episodes.