One Thing I Like About Skeleton Crew

There were a few moments in Skeleton Crew where it seemed like Jude Law was the only human actor in a Muppet movie. I don’t mean that to suggest he was somehow “above” the material, or that he was any better than the other performances, because all the performances were generally great.

Instead, I’m talking about how the best performances by humans in Muppet movies will have them so deeply and completely committed to the part that the uncanny valley gets flipped upside down. The Muppets become real, and you get occasional flashes of eerie hyper-reality from the human. With Skeleton Crew, the end result is a character who’s simultaneously in the middle of a grand adventure and unhappy with the character he’s playing in the adventure.

I don’t believe that Skeleton Crew needs another layer of nuance or interpretation on top of everything else, because it’s a solid, extremely well-made, and most importantly, imaginative piece of Star Wars storytelling. This is a reminder of the early days of Star Wars, when it seemed like every new frame in the movie would show you something you’d never seen before.

When I heard the concept “The Goonies but in Star Wars,” I imagined that it’d be fun and charming, but so slight and derivative that it’d end up being completely forgettable. And the series isn’t at all subtle about its references, but it doesn’t drown underneath them, either: they’re evocative, but the series almost always uses them as a jumping-off point to do something else.

Even the twist that forms the basic premise is clever: the kids come from the mysterious treasure planet! So the journey that would be the basis of another type of adventure story is just a story of them trying to return home. And the orderly suburban homes that were supposed to represent the absolute epitome of dull normality in movies like ET are so out of place in Star Wars that they seem eerie, alien, and somehow threatening.

On the whole, it feels like a series made by people who had a ton of ideas, more than something made to fill a slot in a production schedule. More often than not, stuff happens because somebody wanted it to happen. Not because nobody could think of a stronger idea.

Jude Law is such a natural in Star Wars that it’s kind of surprising he hasn’t already been in it. Over the last two episodes of the series, his character does a heel turn, and it seemed odd to me, like they’d mis-interpreted the tone of the series or his character or something. He kills a defenseless pirate, who deserved it, but it still seemed against the rules. And from that point on, he’s strangely inert: no longer the lovable scoundrel, but not an intensely threatening bad guy, either. He’s cruel but pointedly not deadly, so he’s more or less reduced to standing around making threats and fending off impotent attacks from seemingly every other cast member.

His character ends up being the most off-brand possible thing for a roguish space pirate: he doesn’t seem to be having fun at all. And while the action beats of the last episode didn’t really work for me, the thematic beats absolutely did. They picked up the series’s ongoing theme of good guys and bad guys and what constitutes being a hero. They showed how the idea had been seeded in every other episode, with a character showing the kids kindness and helping them along their way. A dark, dangerous galaxy with points of light shining out everywhere.

It seems to be the moment when Jod comes to terms with the fact that he’s not a hero. His story about surviving after Order 66 and seeing the only person who showed him kindness be murdered by the Empire: it certainly seems like a true story, but it also sounds like the justification he’s used for choosing the path he did. I got the sense that this adventure reminded him that at one point, he’d wanted to be the good guy, but he’d abandoned it. To me, it added a layer of resonance to an already-solid adventure story.

One of the things that The Mandalorian and The Book of Boba Fett really drove home was how ruthless the Star Wars universe is. It’s a setting for adventure stories, not for comfortable living. (And in the rare times when it does show people living comfortably, they’re either selfish and awful, or they’re sheltered away and living in fear). I liked that the focus in Skeleton Crew was turned away from larger-than-life heroes or villains, and towards the beauty of lots of individual people helping each other in a dangerous universe.