Series The Most Expensive Saturday Morning Cartoon Ever Made
I did not have high expectations for Obi Wan Kenobi. There's something just too constraining about the idea of setting a story between two movies in which none of the characters are allowed to do anything canon breaking or even particularly unexpected. That sort of story telling is the domain of fan fiction writing, not prestigious, big budget television.
Having finished the series now, I can say it is a bit better than I anticipated. A bit. It certainly still has the exact problem I just described; You go into this knowing exactly how Obi Wan, Darth Vader, Luke and Leia are going to come out of it, which somewhat undermines the tension of any scene in which anyone faces peril. And much like with Rogue One, the show feels like it only serves to fill in the gaps that existed between stories for a good reason. Nobody was desperate to know what Obi Wan was doing sitting in the desert for twenty years.
But despite those dramatic limitations and its dubious reason for existing, Kenobi has its moments. The plot itself is unimaginative, cribbing from A New Hope, but I enjoyed individual scenes, moments and characters. That includes a precocious young Leia, who bounces off the beaten down, miserable Obi Wan. My favourite scene between them also involves some fun political commentary, in the form of a jolly redneck alien with a pickup truck, complete with the Star Wars equivalent of the thin blue line bumper sticker. It's a sequence that works in humour, tension, warmth and sadness, and I wish the whole show was like that. Then there is Reva; She is a villain and the only new main character, so we actually don't know how things are going to turn out for her. This automatically makes her better than everyone else in the show. But she is also a neatly written character in her own right; an ambitious and ruthless killer with unclear motives or moral code. She ends up a more interesting dramatic foil than Vader.
Oh gosh, and Darth Vader deserves a paragraph to himself. The show really wants to give the audience these big dramatic show downs and badass moments with the guy to make him look as cool as possible. But because the show can't actually have him kill Obi Wan Kenobi, it keeps having to awkwardly contrive excuses and gaping plot holes to let him keep escaping, which ends up making Vader look like a big ole doofus. I can't say I disliked how Vader and Kenobi's arc ends up playing out in the finale, but its everything leading up to it that feels like a Saturday Morning Cartoon of Star Wars.
If all this faint praise hasn't inspired you to rush out and get a Disney+ subscription to watch it, that's fine. Almost everything about this show is uninspired. The only people who should be trying this are people who already own Disney+ and have ran out of everything else to watch.
Series Obi Wan Kenobi hit its marks but is ultimately unsatisfying
I wanted to like, even love, Obi-Wan Kenobi. I had high hopes based mostly on The Mandalorian, less so, on Boba Fett.
There are inherent constraints in using these legacy characters at a midpoint in their career. We know Leia, Obi, Vader won't be killed nor irreparably injured.
Obi-Wan has a character arc here, and I don't particularly like it. Just as with the deconstruction of Luke's character in eps 7,8,9, whatever they were called, I don't like the ugly side of Obi-Wan here where he turns his back on an innocent, a former padewan, and just lets him be killed and perhaps tortured for information about other refugees offscreen. He even refuses the call from Bail Organa to rescue Leia until Senator Organa shows up in person. All of which should have led the Inquisitors right to Obi-Wan, and to Luke. But plot armor prevails.
Even Leia gets handled roughly here. She's prissy and entitled, imperious, reckless and impulsive, and a poor judge of character.
The special and practical effects seemed rather lackluster, and there were obvious in-universe things which didn't make sense, like the laser fence which didn't extend beyond the checkpoint which Obi seemed unable to figure out how to bypass in ep 3.
The use of small sets, perhaps the volume, led to grand scenes like the siege and storming of the rebel base, being rather perfunctory, not by any means up to the standards even of the original film.
There are some nice visuals, and it is cool seeing some of the consular Jedi's powers from Star Wars the Old Republic online game being canonized for Obi-Wan. But even the final confrontation between Vader and Obi-Wan seems a bit flat and by the numbers.
Overall, Obi-Wan Kenobi is professionally made and acted, but it doesn't go much beyond being the obvious fanservice vehicle it is.
3/5 stars.