Skeleton Crew Puts Flabby Flesh On Strong Bones
I got a chance to preview the first three episodes of Star Wars: Skeleton Crew, and before I get into the spoiler-free review in more depth, let me say that you will need to slog through Ep. 1. But it will be worth it.
Skeleton Crew is what you get when you blend The Goonies, Treasure Planet and Peter Pan and pour it into a Star Wars-shaped freezer mold. The resulting pop is enjoyable but lacks some depth of flavor. OK, enough with the strained metaphor — below is the review, spoiler-free and revealing little more than what you would have seen in the trailers. Oh, an aside — this review was embargoed until the very minute the show premiered on Disney+ with its first two episodes out of eight. That usually tells reviewers that the studio behind the movie or show thinks it will get terrible reviews. If they thought it would get good ones, the embargo would lift days before, to generate hype.
The barest bones description of Skeleton Crew is, as you will have seen in trailers, the story of a bunch of kids who somehow wind up on a starship that takes them away from home and out into more of that galaxy far, far, away. Those kids are Wim (Ravi Cabot-Conyers), Neel (Robert Timothy Smith), Fern (Ryan Kiera Armstrong), and KB (Kyriana Kratter). You may recognize Armstrong, who played Charlie in the 2022 remake of Firestarter, but the rest of the kids have pretty short IMDb credits. Even so, they do a decent job as teens and tweens playing what seems to be either teens or tweens. If only the script gave them things to say that teens or tweens might actually say.
We come to the first weak point in the series, so far at least. The first episode spends a lot of its 40-minute run time introducing and exploring the young characters. Their dialogue, however, sounds like adults writing what they think they remember about the way kids speak, and not anything resembling actual teen or tween speak. And before you say, “But it’s set in a time long, long ago, and kids wouldn’t speak like they do now,” let me counter with the fact that the show does its level best to make their setting into a futuristic copy of a standard North American suburb. Hell, even so specific as to be clearly a Northwest Coast North American suburb. So the idea that the dialogue is somehow excused by being set at a different time and place is completely negated not only by the setting but by the dialogue itself.
In fact, everything about that first episode is so blatantly trying to imitate Steven Spielberg in The Goonies that it’s almost laughable. The weak dialogue comes from series co-creators Christopher Ford and Jon Watts. Watts also directed the first episode, and the one thing he clearly didn’t crib from Spielberg’s notes is pacing. The pacing is glacially slow. Allow me what at first will seem like a terrible comparison — the first episode of the anime DanDaDan. It takes that first episode of DanDaDan just 6:30 minutes to establish the two main characters, set their relationship, introduce some side characters, and set off into the first big conflict. All without seeming rushed, and with some outstanding writing of teen characters that sound completely believable. If you take out the opening theme, that’s down to five minutes. Ep. 1 of Skeleton Crew takes 30 minutes to get to some action.
The trailers also reveal that the kids eventually meet a character played by Jude Law. And he is, well, Jude Law. A really good actor doing his best with some weak dialogue. Luckily, he doesn’t show up until the second episode, and that one and Ep. 3 are both directed by David Lowery. You know, the David Lowery who directed the mind bending The Green Knight. And man, can you tell the difference. The episodes are shorter, the pacing is much better, and it overall looks more like a movie than a weak Netflix sci-fi series, which is the vibe Ep. 1 gives off.
That said, there are two main reasons why I am eager to see the rest of the episodes of Skeleton Crew. The first is the overarching main mystery that eventually gets revealed. I am really looking forward to how that plays out. The second is the absolutely gorgeous production design.
If it seems like the budget didn’t go into a writer’s room, it might have gone into the production design. While I was slightly critical of the concept of the kids’ home as a futuristic Seattle suburb, the look of it is incredible. From the decorations in Wim’s bedroom to the designs of the houses, buildings and public spaces, it all looks fantastic. OK, so the houses look almost exactly like some of the bases I’ve built in the game No Man’s Sky (seriously, right down to the angled-out walls and the slat windows) they still made them look great, if clearly derivative. Once the story takes the kids out into space, the sets and CG designs get even better. Episodes 2 and 3 are as interesting and exciting as a Star Wars property should be. Alas, Lowery only directed those two, but among the other director credits are Bryce Dallas Howard, who did a good job with some episodes of The Mandalorian, and both of the Daniels, Kwan and Scheinert. Yes, those guys from Swiss Army Man and Everything Everywhere All At Once. Oh, and Jake Schreier, the director of most of the episodes of the series Beef and the upcoming Thunderbolts*, and Lee Isaac Chung, the director of Twisters. How Watts and Ford managed to get this kind of a roster of directors I have no idea. But I’m already glad they did.
I give the first three episodes of Star Wars: Skeleton Crew (Lucasfilm; TV-PG; 8 episodes) a 6 out of 10 with hopes that it will climb higher.
