Skeleton Crew Lifts One Of The Most Important Sequences From The Original Star Wars

This article contains spoilers for the first episode of "Star Wars: The Skeleton Crew."

Jon Watts, perhaps best known for his work bringing Spider-Man to life in the Marvel Cinematic Universe, incorporates his and co-creator Christopher Ford's love of "Star Wars" and '80s movies to the forefront in "Skeleton Crew." While the brand new show on Disney+ tells the tale of pirates in the era of the New Republic, it also plays the backdrop for a tale of four kids who find a starship and are accidentally whisked away from their home with no way to get back. It takes so many of its cues from the kids-in-adventurous peril tropes of '80s Amblin movies produced or directed by Steven Spielberg. If you're looking for the other side of the grit pendulum-like "Andor," it might sometimes be easy to forget that it's "Star Wars," but "Skeleton Crew" remains so true and genuine to the earnestness of a galaxy far, far away.

Not only does it come through in the writing, the production design, and the filmmaking, but there are entire sequences that pay homage to "Star Wars," going back to its very beginning.

So many creatives talk about how impactful it was seeing the original theatrical release of "A New Hope" in 1977. that initial pan down to Tatooine and the Tantive IV coming overhead and the Star Destroyer Executor chasing it was a watershed moment in cinema. Then, when the ship was captured and the rebel ship was boarded, Darth Vader stepped out and cinema was forever changed. People left that theater with a different understanding of what film could be and no one has been quite able to replicate it. But Jon Watts took a crack at doing it, in a different way and for different reasons, right here in "Skeleton Crew." While it doesn't open with an opening crawl, "Skeleton Crew" does start with familiar blue text, just like the familiar "A Long Time Ago, In a Galaxy Far, Far Away..." from the Skywalker saga films, but it's more of an informational opening, more akin to "Solo: A Star Wars Story". Then, the camera pans down, just to a desert-like planet and a ship that bears a striking resemblance to an Alderaan Corvette comes onto the screen from the right, just like Princess Leia's in "A New Hope," but we're still in for a surprise.

There's an expectation created by designing the opening to reference "A New Hope," where the audience is waiting for another ship to come racing overhead, chasing the ship. It almost comes out like a jump scare when the boarding harpoons jet in from the screen left into the ship. Once we're inside the "Skeleton Crew" ship, the crew assembles behind crates and down hallways, just like the Alderaanian crew of the Tantive IV trying to protect Princess Leia and the plans to the Death Star. They have the same sort of plaintive looks on their faces as they await whatever fate will befall them. George Lucas was very deliberate in his choices of color and costume in "Star Wars." You could see the faces of the good guys and they were wearing colors. As the bad guys stormed through the hallways, they were masked and wearing stark black and white. Here, in the far-flung hyperspace lanes, things aren't so clear. 

The cargo crew and the pirates are all in earth colors. All but one character bears their own face: the dreaded Captain Silvo. We're meant to understand here that although the situation feels similar, the lines between good and bad are much more blurred here in this part of the galaxy. The shoot-out looks very much like the one in "Star Wars" and Captain Silvo even approaches the captain of the cargo ship, hoisting him up by his throat exactly like Darth Vader does Captain Antilles in "A New Hope." Their dialogue even matches the same cadence, evoking the same dynamic between the two. And we're supposed to believe that Silvo commands his crew with the same iron fist that Vader does.

When Vader's stormtroopers realize the Death Star plans are not on the ship, Vader gives orders and scrambles everyone in different directions. They work to take the loss and pivot into a victory. Or at least to mitigate the loss. Because of how well-known "A New Hope" is, we almost expect that for Captain Silvio. We're conditioned by that pattern of storytelling. We expect this is what's going to be coming next.

So when a mutiny is declared and Silvio has no loyalty from his crew and has to fight his way out of the situation, we're left with one more fascinating funhouse mirror about just how different a world it is that we're dealing with here in "Skeleton Crew" and this show altogether. It's really quite clever how Watts is able to communicate how we should be altering our expectations of "Star Wars" without a word, merely by reframing how a familiar situation to "Star Wars" plays out, using only the cinematic language of "Star Wars" that we can all read and know by heart. This is some pretty brilliant and elegant filmmaking that you can only really pull off in a universe as uniform and in a canon as cohesive as "Star Wars."

New episodes of "Skeleton Crew" air on Tuesday nights on Disney+.