The best thing to be said about LEGO Star Wars: Rebuild the Galaxy is that it actually works very well as a classic Star Wars tale, and not just a fun “what if?” It has all the ingredients that have made this franchise endure for as long as it has: the theme of family and redemption; the character archetypes of a scoundrel, a pilot, and a Jedi; the witty and at times slapstick humor; the wacky supporting players; and the thrilling action. This is a four-part special assembled to cater to every kind of Star Wars fan, from across every era of the franchise. For newcomers or casual fans, it’s a romp that fits right in with the rest of the Star Wars mythos, but for longtime fans, it delivers on the promise of using the endless imagination of LEGO to bring to life concepts and premises that have only existed in the collective imagination for years – like Darth Jar Jar.
Rebuild the Galaxy continues the LEGO Star Wars tradition of messing with the timeline to have fun with the canon. Here, we follow Sig Greebling (Gaten Matarazzo), a genuine scruffy-looking nerf herder from a backwater planet obsessed with tales of heroes – and specifically the Skywalker Saga – that he repeats to anyone who’ll listen. He realizes his dreams of grand adventure when he inadvertently finds an ancient relic that rewrites the entire history of Star Wars. As far as zany multiverse stories go, this one really is up there with the Spider-Verse movies in terms of sheer creativity.
It comes as no surprise that showrunners Dan Hernandez and Benji Samit give Rebuild the Galaxy the same balance of extremely nerdy and/or obscure references and emotional stories rooted in ideas of friendship found in their scripts for Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Mutant Mayhem and Detective Pikachu. They poke fun at every aspect of Star Wars across four episodes, hitting not just the film trilogies but also TV shows old and new. (Keep your eyes out for a delightfully evil Young Jedi Adventures cameo.) Though there are many fantastic cameos, arguably the most exhilarating is the appearance of Darth Jar Jar. Jar Jar Binks actor Ahmed Best returns and is more than game for exploring the notion that his character is secretly a Sith lord, one of the weirdest yet somehow most prevalent theories about what’s actually going on in the prequel trilogy. If you’ve ever wanted to hear the lines “Mesa the Phantom Menace” from the original Jar Jar himself, Best makes the special worth watching for his performance alone.
If you’ve played any LEGO game, then you know what to expect when it comes to silly and funny visual gags and variations on quotes from the movies, yet LEGO Star Wars: Rebuild the Galaxy makes it all work because it’s in service of its own story and its own timeline. Bobby Moynihan’s Jedi Bob is a standout, with the previously unnamed Jedi minifig-turned-fan-favorite getting his own tragic canonical story that boasts some surprising and poignant ties to the rest of the franchise.
That’s best encapsulated in the special’s take on the Force. Much like The LEGO Movie and its Master Builders, Rebuild the Galaxy portrays the act of putting LEGO bricks together as a Force power that some Jedi are capable of using, unlocking not just the ability to lift rocks, but to rewrite reality. The animation by Atomic Cartoons helps sell the idea of Force Building; though clearly lacking the budget and scope that allowed Animal Logic to mimic stop-motion filmmaking techniques in The LEGO Movie and its follow-ups, there is still very much a tangible quality to the animation, and an effort to make the Force Building feel real. This is particularly impressive in an early sequence where Jedi Bob rebuilds a starship into several different configurations seemingly using the exact same number of bricks, like a kid going off-manual with a LEGO set – in the process communicating the theme of imagination and creativity as a power.
But if there’s a primary reason Rebuild the Galaxy works, it’s Sig, with Hernandez and Samit delivering a classic Star Wars tale of family that would work dramatically even without the cameos and the LEGO building. Sig’s relationship with his brother Dev (Tony Revolori) is the crux of the story, and the turns Dev takes make him one of the best additions to the franchise in quite some time. Revolori delivers a great performance informed by grief, loss, and anger, and the way Rebuild the Galaxy ends, the timeline Sig and Dev inhabit is ripe for many new and exciting tales to come.
