Continuing Laughing Place’s reviews for each individual episode of Lucasfilm’s new animated event series Star Wars: Visions, the third installment is entitled “The Twins” and was crafted by Studio Trigger (creators of Little Witch Academia).
“The Twins” opens with a sight familiar to Star Wars fans: an Imperial Star Destroyer emerging from the shadows. But as the massive ship continues to emerge, we see that it is no ordinary Star Destroyer we’ve seen before– instead it is designated Gemini-class– conjoined at the side to its own duplicate, with a giant laser cannon mounted in the center. From that point we’re introduced to two twins “born to the dark side”: the female Am (voiced by Ryoko Shiraishi in the Japanese audio version and by Alison Brie in the English dub) and male Karre (Junya Enoki / Neil Patrick Harris), plus each of their respective droids– Am’s fussy protocol model B-20N (Tokuyoshi Kawashima / Jonathan Lipow) and Karre’s loyal astromech R-DUO.
As Am makes her galaxy-domination plans known (involving a plot to turn the Star Destroyer into a planet-killing superweapon, naturally), we soon discover that Karre has turned to the light, and has swiped the weapon’s power core– really a lightsaber-fueling Kyber crystal– and is intent on thwarting Am’s machinations at any cost. This confrontation culminates in a cutthroat, no-holds-barred hand-to-hand battle between siblings on the flagship’s hull, punctuated with bursts of extreme Force energy from the remarkably potent combatants. Then Karre wraps things up and provides a modicum of hope after using his trusty X-Wing (strange that a dark side-user had one of these starfighters around in the first place, but that’s the liberty of Visions for you) to execute a maneuver that severs Am from the attachments that were apparently holding her back from redemption.
It’s interesting to me that in this film’s unique alternate timeline, the Galactic Empire and the Republic government evidently co-exist, though definitely not peacefully. The relationship between Karre and Am brings to mind twins Luke Skywalker and Leia Organa from the original Star Wars trilogy, if they had grown up under significantly different circumstances. I like that Am’s armor is reminiscent of Darth Vader’s, while Karre takes on a role that’s somewhere between Luke and Ben Solo after he turns from the dark side. But ultimately, the story of “The Twins” is a bit too simplistic for me to get overly invested in any of the characters, especially knowing that we’ll likely never see them again. Like the other entries in Star Wars: Visions we’ve talked about so far, its colorful, hyperkinetic visuals are once again absolutely breathtaking across the board, but at the same time I doubt this will end up being one of my favorites.
My ranking so far:
1 – The Duel
2 – Tatooine Rhapsody
3 – The Twins
Star Wars: Visions is available to stream in its entirety exclusively on Disney+.