Star Wars: Skeleton Crew Review - Star Wars Goes Goonies, With Dazzling Results

It's a bit surprising that it took this long for a show like "Star Wars: Skeleton Crew" to come along in the "Star Wars" universe. The galaxy George Lucas created — a scaffolding on which many, many creators have hung their own stories — was designed with kids in mind, built as an endless sandbox of creatures, ships, worlds, and wonders. Kids have spent the last four decades imagining themselves in that world, so why not just do a story about the kids in that world?

Now, courtesy of "Cop Car" and "Spider-Man: Homecoming" filmmakers Jon Watts and Christopher Ford, it's here, and it's exactly what you'd hope for with this kind of premise. With a pace that moves like a rocket and a sweet soul that'll have you itching to keep hanging out with these characters, "Skeleton Crew" is the Amblin-esque "Star Wars" series we've been waiting for. It's a welcome addition to an ever-growing galaxy, even if it does lean a little too hard at times on certain well-worn ideas.

In the wake of "Star Wars: Episode VI – Return of the Jedi," the New Republic has taken over control of the galaxy, instilling a period of relative peace that, for certain kids, just means outright boredom. One of these kids is Wim (Ravi Cabot-Conyers), a boy on a drab, conformity-obsessed planet that looks very much like American suburbia in the 1980s. Wim's a good kid, but he's not interested in the rigors of school, or the very basic jobs he's expected to fulfill when he grows up. Wim's head is filled with stories of Jedi and adventure, of the glory days of the Old Republic; so when he unearths what he thinks might be a hidden treasure after crashing his bike in the woods one day, he's already primed for exploration.

Though his best friend Neel (Robert Timothy Smith) isn't too keen on the idea, Wim sets out to dig up his find with the help of his rival, the cool but rough Fern (Ryan Kiera Armstrong), and Fern's cyber-augmented best friend KB (Kyriana Kratter). One thing leads to another, and soon the kids are far from home, stranded inside a runaway spaceship with only a battered Droid (Nick Frost) to help them. Conflicted, confused, and surrounded by danger, their only hope lies in the unexpected arrival of a clever rogue (Jude Law) who might be a lost Jedi — or might just be a guy with secrets of his own.

There's a lot of great "Star Wars" plot fodder here, especially when the kids start to realize that getting home is, for them, a bit more complicated than just hitting some coordinates on a starship screen. Jon Watts and Christopher Ford have clearly thought beyond the basic "kids on a starship" premise here, and each of the three episodes offered to press ahead of the show's premiere is proof that there's a long game at work, a sense of rising tension even as the show also offers a blast of fresh fun every few minutes. It's a series trying very hard to walk the line between good old-fashioned kid movie fun and genuine "Star Wars" galaxy-building, and so far at least, it's doing it quite well.

The crux of making a show like "Skeleton Crew" work is, probably not surprisingly, figuring out a way to root the series in the experiences of its four young leads while also pleasing people who've been watching "Star Wars" for decades, or at least several years. The show has to capture that elusive space opera feeling while also offering new perspectives on the kinds of things — space pirates, hyperspace, Jedi, Droids, and so on — we've all known about for most, if not all, of our lives. It's here that Jon Watts (who directed the premiere episode) and director David Lowery (who directed episodes two and three) deploy their experience as family filmmakers to great effect.

There is a real sense of wonder in the way the kids move through the world, even when the sights are familiar, the dangers are predictable, and the beats of the story play out as you'd probably expect in the "Star Wars" galaxy. A lot of that is due to the cast, in particular Ryan Kiera Armstrong and Kyriana Kratter, but it's hard to overstate how well the show threads a certain needle. It's not just that the show is walking the line between the familiar and the new with its characters' experiences. It's that it's figuring out how to use the familiar in entirely new ways. There's a reason these kids live in a weird suburban planetscape, a reason they're having trouble getting home, and a reason Jude Law (who's also excellent) is along for the ride. It's a wonderfully well-realized piece of work, and despite a few muddied visuals and the occasional too-cheeky reference to a previous "Star Wars" line or scene, it works.

But there's something else happening in "Skeleton Crew" that's worth focusing on, particularly when Ravi Cabot-Conyers gets to dig a little deeper into Wim's emotional state and the inner world he's built while living on an isolated, stunted planet. We accuse so many "Star Wars" these days of being nothing more than glorified fan fiction, incidents of big-name creators getting a gig so they can play with their action figures on a million-dollar scale — and "Skeleton Crew" is smart enough to know this. We know it's smart enough because it opens as the story of a little boy playing with action figures, reading stories of great deeds in the galaxy's past. This is not the first "Star Wars" story to engage with the lore of the franchise, but there is a sense of potential energy in these early episodes that suggests "Skeleton Crew" may go deeper into that world than any story before it. It's a show that wants to not just emulate its forebears, but hopefully understand them, and that adds ambition on top of all the fun. For that reason, and many others, it's a welcome addition to the "Star Wars" galaxy.

"Skeleton Crew" premieres on Disney+ on December 2.