This sequence has a cool western-siege aspect, as Owen (Joel Edgerton) and Beru (Bonnie Maree Piesse) fight off this attacker and attempt to protect young Luke. Obi-Wan’s dilemma is intercut with a whole other thread, where an injured (but don’t worry, only fully run-through with a laser-sword!) Reva heads to Tatooine to menace the Lars family homestead and, she hopes, kill Luke Skywalker as revenge against Anakin. (Doesn’t he also … want to save everyone?) Okay, fine, you want to make it clear that Obi-Wan is actually ready to stop avoiding the big Darth, but boy, it would have been cool if Roken felt like an actual character and not just the person who spouts off contradictory assertions to gin up nominal conflict. He then intuits that Obi-Wan isn’t really doing this to save everyone (even though it probably will?) but because he “wants” to. At the same time, he takes the mildly incoherent position that Obi-Wan should not, in fact, break off from the group to lead Vader away, insisting that there must be a way for everyone to stick together.

As the entertaining and satisfying “Part VI” opens, the Empire is hot on the heels of the transport carrying various Force-adjacent refugees, and while Roken (O’Shea Jackson Jr.) tries to keep hope alive among his passengers, he quietly confides to Obi-Wan that they’re basically screwed. Obi-Wan never explicitly states “finding” Anakin as his goal in confronting Vader again. This is underlined by the fact that, minute for minute, it’s probably the most human-heavy Star Wars undertaking yet its lead droid is a child’s plaything, and the nearly hourlong finale, “Part VI,” features all of about two alien creatures onscreen.Īt the same time, Kenobi is similarly driven by in-world questions about people lurking underneath their menacing helmets as well as some meta questions about acting: How do you find Anakin (or Hayden Christensen) underneath Darth Vader (or a costume, various stuntmen, and a very famous, now digitally assisted voice)? And can you? Should you? Compared to its predecessors, the Obi-Wan Kenobi series represents a major departure: Its lead character is exposed and actor-specific in a way that Mando and Boba are not.

Boba Fett took the opposite approach, trying to figure out who this character known for his headgear really was underneath. The Mandalorian tried to wring emotion out of scenes that often played out between a puppet and a character whose face was fully obscured by a cool helmet (and by most fans’ standards, succeeded wildly). It’s probably no accident that the first two live-action Star Wars TV shows deal explicitly with characters who spend time in cool helmets The Mandalorian and The Book of Boba Fett each doubled as savvy marketing and meta experimentation. If certain fans bristled (or, less charitably, fussed like babies) over the abundance of CG menageries in the prequels or the human messiness (and diversity) of the sequels, the series could always return to the helmets, whether through narrative (Kylo Ren performing a hasty, “cool” repair job on his imitation Vader headwear in The Rise of Skywalker) or lucrative ancillaries (check out just how much non-Grogu Star Wars merchandise revolves around showcasing endless helmets rather than actual faces). Gleaming, menacing helmets have become a major part of the Star Wars iconography, to the point where they’ve come to symbolize a kind of originalist traditionalism in the series. Yet the movie is prescient about one aspect of Star Wars movies that had not yet been produced back in 1987: Underneath the gleaming, menacing dark helmet is a whiny, insecure human being - whether it’s Rick Moranis or Hayden Christensen. There are certain elements Brooks travesties with glee, but as funny as the movie is, it’s clearly been made by people who are more casually amused by the original trilogy than meticulously obsessed with satirizing its details.

The Mel Brooks spoof Spaceballs is not an especially exacting parody of Star Wars.

Obi wan kenobi hello there