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Well, yes, relatively speaking, they were best among the class of "Star Wars stuff", but they were ultimately just ... okay, not particularly amazing. And make no mistake, creators of Andor were intentionally packing it with liberal-leftist agit-prop. People just have forgot propaganda can be done well.
Sure but how is that not in line with what Star Wars is all about? George Lucas wasn’t exactly shy about the leftist political messaging, he admitted being influenced by the Vietnam war with the rebellion being the Viet Cong and the Galactic Empire the US, he compared the Emperor to Nixon. Imagine if he’d made the films while Trump was president.
Like c’mon, the main arc of the prequels is about democracy being willingly handed to an evil strongman dictator over a manufactured threat!
I think it is more "Democracy, Fuck Yeah" than left-wing - the aesthetics of the OG Empire are generically evil rather than distinctively Nazi* and the reading of the original trilogy where the Empire is the USSR works just as well (hence Reagan using it in his famous speech), and Lucas moved between endorsing and not endorsing it depending on the political winds. The Empire of the prequels is a consolidating dictatorship following an autogolpe, again with generically evil aesthetics - Lucas cited Napoleon and Caesar (who are not obviously left or right-coded in 2026) as inspiration as well as Hitler. The First Order is obviously fascist, but that is just lazy filmmaking. Lucas gets the thing Orwell gets in a way the makers of the sequels don't - that it is the nature of tyranny and not the political rhetoric used to justify it that matters.
If "Democracy, Fuck Yeah" comes across as a left-wing political message to you, that says more about the right-wing in your country than it does about George Lucas.
* The only scene in the original trilogy directly ripped off from Triumph of the Will is the finale of ANH where the Rebels put on an awards ceremony with aesthetics that Hitler would have approved of.
The aesthetics of the Empire in SW:ANH were definitely Nazi; of course, that was (and remains) an American's conception of "generic evil". What they didn't have is the Nazi's signature Jew thing; the Empire was human-supremacist but they didn't really play that up.
Democracy isn't really a big thing in ANH either. We hear the Empire dissolved the Senate, but the Senate contains aristocrats and royalty (like Princess Leia). The whole elective royalty thing in the prequels is a total retcon.
Correct me if I'm wrong, but the human supremacist thing is mostly an EU thing, it wasn't really part of the movies?
Agree that the original trilogy at least was basically apolitical and the empire is portrayed as 'generic ruthless tyranny' with Nazi aesthetics being there mostly because they look cool.
It wasn't an explicit part of the scripts, but they did pointedly only have humans as Imperial officers, never any aliens. I don't know if that was a worldbuilding decision, so much as wanting the dour totalitarians to all look alike while the plucky ragtag goodies come in all shapes and sizes because it's useful visual shorthand; but it was by no means a retcon.
Where are you taking this... thing?
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Aliens in these sorts of space opera stories are commonly representative of the 'other' or cultural diversity or what have you. Exploring the vast galaxy was about exploring our own formerly interesting planet. When Luke goes to the cantina with Obi Wan, much emphasis is placed on the bizarre habits of the locals. I'd say it's fair to assume the directors knew what metaphors they were playing with, although maybe not pointedly.
Furthermore, back in the timeframe the sequels were made, colonialism was still alive, minorities were sometimes mistreated by the police (uniformed white men primarily), and immigrants were, and still are, exceptionally precarious population groups, in many cases. So I'd say it was fair of them to employ this dichotomy.
I'd say it's less of a worldbuilding decision than an expressive one, perhaps gotten secondhand from stewing around with all the other genre works and their tropes.
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