‘Star Wars: Skeleton Crew’ Review: Jude Law in Disney+’s Charmingly Amblin-esque Adventure

If Disney+’s new drama Star Wars: Skeleton Crew had debuted when I was eight or nine, it would have abruptly shoved Knight Rider and The Dukes of Hazzard aside to become Young Daniel’s favorite TV show.

While the original Star Wars saga, a three-and-only-three-movie series I was hardly alone in being obsessed with, was designed to be welcoming to kids, it was simultaneously a world that was generally without children. Instead, we focused on alien creatures or robots who either resembled or acted like children — as well as Luke Skywalker, whose arc took him from callow youth to mature Jedi.

At the same time, with Steven Spielberg’s Amblin Entertainment at the forefront, we were treated to a string of junior quest narratives of varying qualities — movies that captured one of the last cultural moments in which kids were allowed to wander off in the morning, carry out a day’s adventures and return home without their parents freaking out about their untracked, phone-free existences. It’s a genre that included E.T., Willow, SpaceCamp, Adventures in Babysitting, The Goonies and too many others to count.

Skeleton Crew creators Jon Watts and Christopher Ford have made no secret of their inspirations in attempting to do an Amblin-style story set within the Star Wars universe, and through the three episodes sent to critics, they generally succeed. Although its coming-of-age narrative is far less boundary-breaking than Watts and Ford’s pitch seems to suggest — hugely powerful juvenile heroes and their gruff babysitters were already the backbone of the Disney+/Lucasfilm brand — the series is lively and fun. The generally low-stakes, thematically light, young-skewing romp takes us into under-explored corners of the seemingly boundless galaxy while feeling pleasantly familiar.

Our adventure begins on At Attin, an Earth-like planet that distinctly resembles a Spielbergian California suburb circa 1982. This sea of cookie-cutter homes, cul-de-sacs and lawn-mowing droids is a perfectly normal place and Wim (Ravi Cabot-Conyers) is a perfectly normal kid being raised by a too-busy father (Tunde Adebimpe). Wim enjoys make-believe with his buddy Neel (Robert Timothy Smith), who comes from a blue, elephant-y race that apparently is NOT the same blue, elephant-y race that previously gave us Max Rebo.

While Neel follows rules and dreams no bigger than his well-tended backyard, Wim yearns for something more — which is complicated, since his elementary school class is about to take a career placement exam that will funnel students into a workforce that favors future analysts and administrators. There’s no room for somebody like Wim, who wants to be a hero, but doesn’t even know what a hero would look like.

Then Wim, who obsesses over tales of Jedis, finds something buried in a ravine in the forest next to his neighborhood. He believes it’s a Jedi temple; instead, its a spaceship. Wim is quickly and unexpectedly blasted into space along with Neel and slightly older kids Fern (Ryan Kiera Armstrong), the rebellious and high-achieving daughter of a local official (a somewhat wasted Kerry Condon), and KB (Kyriana Kratter), Fern’s technologically astute bestie.

Soon, this quartet of kids is lost in space — not to be confused with Lost in Space, one of several clear inspirations that (subsequent reboots and remakes aside) predate the frame of reference for the core audience of elder millennials and their tween children.

None of the young characters are deeply complicated — though I’ve never had to go through adolescence as a blue, elephant-like creature, so it might be tougher than I’m guessing — but the appealing, youthful energy between the four leads calls to mind what Watts did with slightly older characters in his Spider-Man films. You never worry for a second that the kids are in any jeopardy, despite a title that stems from the actual corpses on the vessel they’re traveling in. But all four performances, primarily vocal in Smith’s case, are in that well-curated Spielberg vein encompassing both wide-eyed wonderment and insistent spunkiness.

You’ll notice a lack of mention so far for Jude Law, the multiple Oscar nominee who is easily the cast’s biggest star (with the possible exception of Jaleel White, playing a pirate who watches a succession of zany events with the cool confidence of a man who did not, in fact, do that). Making his appearance in the second chapter, Law’s Jod Na Nawood is set up as a very familiar genre archetype — the selfish rogue who befriends our pint-sized protagonists, even though we know that we should not, under any circumstances, fully trust him.

Will future episodes reveal that although we think he’s only in it for himself/the money, he’s actually just a collection of rough edges in need of the smoothing that can only be caused by an intense window of forced paternal activity? Who can say for sure, but given the precedent set by The Mandalorian and Obi-Wan Kenobi (and, to a lesser degree, both The Acolyte and Ahsoka), I’m gonna go out on a limb and say, “Yes. Jod Na Nawood is probably just a big ol’ softie at heart.” Prove me wrong, Skeleton Crew!

This, not incidentally, is a role that taps into many of the things Law is best at playing — namely, the sort of man you’d follow into battle even while suspecting that he’s a cad. If Gigolo Joe was Virgil by way of Fred Astaire, leading an innocent “child” through a nightmarish Spielbergian inferno in A.I. Artificial Intelligence, Jod Na Nawood is Virgil by way of Errol Flynn, performing a similar task.

It’s my grown-up instinct that the narrative is initially lacking a central villain or objective that goes bigger than “four kids want to go home.” But … why is that my instinct? The “homeward-bound odyssey” format is pretty resilient, allowing for individual journeys of self-discovery. Wim, in particular, has a lot of growing up to do as he goes from zero to hero, as it were. Fern is a natural leader, but she hasn’t figured out how to combine her rambunctiousness and her authority. KB and Neel will presumably learn to be more adventurous as they discover that the society they come from and the rules it adheres to maybe aren’t what they appear to be.

And if that doesn’t work for you, Skeleton Crew boasts a lot of space piracy, which very young viewers will compare to the Pirates of the Caribbean (or One Piece, which in both its anime and Netflix incarnations is actually a really close tonal pairing), viewers my age will compare to The Goonies and more seasoned viewers will compare to vintage swashbucklers like The Sea Hawk or Captain Blood. The tremendous score by Mick Giacchino has a lot of John Williams in it, but at least as much of the composers who inspired Williams, like Erich Wolfgang Korngold. In a show in which the effects are fine and the set-pieces are decent, Giacchino’s music is the element that often elevates otherwise modest (or intimate) trappings.

So maybe there isn’t a treasure the characters are seeking, and maybe there’s no sense that if they don’t meet some objective, there are likely to be any grand consequences. That doubtlessly makes Skeleton Crew feel more formless than would be acceptable if the series had been trimmed down to a movie. Instead, each episode takes the characters to a different outpost in space, none of which is exactly a location we’ve visited before. There are no generic desert planets or swamp planets. There is one wretched hive of scum and villainy, but it’s more like an interstellar truck stop than Mos Eisley — which is a good thing because if the show had visited Mos Eisley, there’s a chance that Neel and Max Rebo might have crossed paths and forced the creators to explain how whatever species Neel is, he isn’t Ortolan.

Several other background figures in Skeleton Crew look vaguely like creatures we’ve seen in previous franchise entries, but this isn’t a show that’s hung up on callbacks or calls-forward. It doesn’t have the ground-level class critique of Andor or the gap-filling imperative of several of the other recent Disney+ series, which makes it entirely standalone in a way that I appreciated. The kids might know about certain pieces of franchise mythology, but they don’t care about Jedi genetics or government oppression or minutiae detailing trade policy. They’ve never left their home planet before, so everything is amazing or frightening or sad for them, in earnestly emotional terms.

Watts and then David Lowery, who directed the second and third episodes in peak Pete’s Dragon form, want to honor the characters’ experience in a sincere way. Although they gravitate toward cute creatures and weird food and scary-but-not-too-scary circumstances, the joy lies, more than anything, in the “What if?” of it all. I’ll be curious if there’s more tonal or visual gusto in later installments, directed by the likes of The Daniels and Lee Isaac Chung, but I’m willing to accept that Skelton Crew intends to be something more modest and more generationally accessible.

Skeleton Crew is a show about and for plucky kids (and inner kids) free to stay out playing after dark and eager to imagine a bigger world beyond the reaches of an easy bike ride. If you accept the mantra that not every Star Wars series needs to be Andor, it’s probably my favorite non-Andor Star Wars series since The Mandalorian launched.