As all forms of consensus continue to collapse, it’s become hard to know exactly what folks want from a Star Wars movie these days. Them’s the breaks when you’re nearing 50, I guess: There have been so many different generations who hold this film series in particularly high regard that, were you to ask a random sample size of all-age fans what their favorite movie in the saga is, I doubt there’d be the overwhelming “Empire, duh” that one would have gotten as recently as seven years ago. Time has a way of healing all wounds, provided you’re willing to wait long enough for a new generation to shitpost the prequels into a form of reverence, with even those inflicted on Gen X by the existence of Jar Jar Binks seeming to scab over at the sound of a plucky “Hello there.” As much as it might pain three-quarters of YouTube commentators to hear, the sequel trilogy is likely to head down the same path once Gen Alpha comes of age, and even – gasp – some of the hatred thrown at Last Jedi seems to be abating, though there are those who still want to stoke the embers and try to reignite the blaze. That’s not counting those who fell in love with the universe via Clone Wars, or got pulled in by Rogue One and Andor, or watched The Mandalorian because they were a Boba Fett die-hard, and so on.
It makes sense, though: During the times in which the series’s popularity contracted or, more importantly, had a lengthy absence from the screen, it focused the die-hards around a certain idea of Star Wars, be it represented by Timothy Zahn’s Heir to the Empire books or the seasons of Clone Wars where the good episodes outnumber the bad. Under Disney’s never-ending quest to utilize the IPs they paid such good money for, there hasn’t been one of those pauses, with a glut of canon-relevant movies and shows attempting to accommodate all of these viewers and their tastes with varying degrees of success. It’s weird to think about this, but it’s been nearly seven years since the last time there was a Star Wars movie in theaters, and it’s logical that Jon Favreau’s Star Wars: The Mandalorian and Grogu would herald the franchise’s return to the multiplex. Arguably, the one thing Star Wars nerds of all stripes could agree upon in the post-Rise of Skywalker, pre-Andor era was that Baby Yoda was pretty goddamned cute. Yet whether or not you like Favreau’s feature depends a whole lot on what you liked about The Mandalorian on the small screen, and the Lucasfilm brain trust, at least in this case, has picked a side for this feature.
To be clear: If you’re someone absolutely gripping the edge of their seat hoping for new morsels of information about Grand Admiral Thrawn’s plans, or whatever Boba Fett is up to, and/or set up for the inevitable crossover film bringing the Filoniverse to an epic conclusion that would presumably justify a big-screen outing, you’re not going to enjoy it very much. If this were a proper episode of the show, it’d be a bottle episode – one of those mid-series digressions that attempts to tell a self-contained yarn without advancing the season’s overarching story. For a good amount of the would-be audience, that’s a solid argument to avoid the theater. They’re invested in the grand scheme of things, the ones who bristle at monster-of-the-week storytelling and its insistence on returning to a stable status quo, demanding a return for their careful attention. It wholly lacks the Pavlovian reward we associate with Disney’s long-form storytelling — few hints, few teases, low stakes, nothing really indicating we should stay through the credits for a glimpse of Glorp Shitto — and it’s hard to blame this audience for rejecting it, because the Mouse has done their best to ensure their needs are served. On the other hand, there are some of us out there who thought that the show’s death knell rang resoundingly in the second season, when Filoni pulled in Ahsoka, and had a hideous de-aged Mark Hamill show up.
Truth be told, I checked out of Mando after Book of Boba Fett released, precisely because I could see where it was going — crossover after crossover, bogged down in Mandalore’s geopolitics, straining under the weight of canon, trying to hook you into watching Clone Wars or Rebels again, keeping you in the app to boost viewership metrics. The Wookiepedia entries would exist if I ever needed to brush up on something that happened, if I came across it in a tie-in novel, and YouTube would always be there to see Ahmed Best wield a lightsaber. What so thoroughly drew me in about The Mandalorian was its mostly self-contained storytelling. Sure, there was a season-long plot that Filoni and Favreau were advancing towards, but you had a lot of fun digressions along the way. Jawas running amok; Frog ladies looking for eggs; The Wages of Fear in a galaxy far, far away; Timothy Olyphant as a small-town sheriff fighting a dragon; Mexican standoffs aboard prison ships. It was perfectly episodic, and as soon as Bib Fortuna got shot and Bo-Katan got bumped from “recurring” to “co-lead,” I knew the winds had blown that quality away.
So, thank god this is just a fun two hours spent exploring the darker corners of the Star Wars galaxy, with all the creativity of the show’s best episodes presented in a fashion worthy of an extended IMAX engagement.* I’ll go spoiler-light just in case someone really wants to avoid any and all knowledge of its story, but there’s really not that much to give away. Mando (Pedro Pascal) and Grogu (Baby Yoda) are “independent contractors” working for the New Republic, pulling high-value Imperial Remnant targets from a deck of playing cards much like the ones given to troops in the Gulf War. They’re tasked by New Republic ranger Ward (Sigourney Weaver) with bringing in an ace on whom the Republic has very little information. The Hutts do, however, and they want something in exchange – Jabba the Hutt’s son, Rotta (Jeremy Allen White), who was kidnapped and is being held on the planet Shakari.** When the duo hit the ground, they’re stunned to discover that Rotta is swole, taking down opponents in a gladiatorial ring, exploited by Janu Coin (Jonny Coin), who acts as his Dana White-style promoter. He’s got one more fight coming up, and Coin’s got a fix coming: Rotta will not survive it. So, Mando and Grogu have to rescue Rotta and hopefully find their next target, or risk pissing off both the Hutts and their bosses. More happens, of course – you could divide the film into Mandalorian and Grogu episodes, with the Grogu episode in the back half being by far the more entertaining – but I’ll leave you to check that out on your own.
What I can tell you is that if you enjoy spending time in the Star Wars universe, you’ll likely have a lot of fun here. Favreau and the Lucasfilm brain trust have a really keen sense of how their worlds connect together within this framework, acknowledging the different influences at work that make Star Wars unique among media jumbles. The opening sequence is the stuff of young George Lucas’s childhood dreams, a Commander Cody raid on an Imperial Base that eventually gives way to a thrilling assault on a group of Imperial Walkers amid the snow-capped mountains of a remote world. Seeing how the Hutts live is another wonderfully gross delight – mucus mansions filled with rolly-poly slug orgies patrolled by all those leftover Battle Droids from the Clone Wars, with its throne-room blast doors guarded by giant robots (who may actually be stop-motion ala ED-209 in Robocop). The absolutely precious Anzellans, best represented by Rise of Skywalker standout Babu Frick, play a huge role, and their presence contributes a great deal to why that Grogu segment works so well. There’s solid action (if a bit jumpy and blurry in contrast to the show’s fights), good humor, and an engaging addition to the cast in the form of White, who brings a lovely amount of heart to Rotta even through his voice work.
The problems that existed before the show’s eventual collapse into pitch-man status for Ahsoka – mainly Pascal’s voice performance, which feels like an Eastwood impression that the dude is just too nice to fully commit to, and some shoddy CG work that only serves to make the puppetry seem all the more revelatory – remain, but there’s enough emphasis on what did work that it recalls some of the show’s best moments. I didn’t even mind the shaggy-dog nature of the plotting, as it feels like an appropriate kind of ramble for sidequel Star Wars entries, much as all of the books that nerds circlejerk about inevitably are (most of those involved in the publishing side of the universe tend to emulate the wrong Lucas – George, rather than Marcia). It’s reasonably touching – again, the puppet masters behind Baby Yoda are always at the top of their game, and will continue to horrify Werner Herzog with its ability to be inhumanely human – but it doesn’t feel as cloying because there’s no “Custody of Dominick Ladder Matches” to be had over the Child’s parentage with the Mandalorians or the Jedi or the Imperials or whatever. It’s just a yarn, not an advertisement, and I think it’ll do much better at bringing in lapsed fans of the show (or Star Wars as a whole) than another goddamned power struggle between helmeted buffoons.
Sure, The Mandalorian and Grogu lacks “momentum” or whatever the hell people want from their serialized media these days, which is why some of the responses to the film have centered around its “pointlessness.” This is, after all, a series that took a three-film digression from advancing its established story to explain how Luke Skywalker’s father was conceived and seized upon its astonishing return to cinemas last decade with a follow-up about a bunch of dead spies seizing the Death Star plans. So, no, Star Wars has never been about the delight of wandering about the unfamiliar corners of a very familiar galaxy — it’s been exclusively about one’s hereditary rights to power or the most pivotal events in its history. If you’re frustrated about safety-ism, just remember the Star Wars variation on that old line about college football coaching gigs: The best jobs at Lucasfilm are “fired director” or “director of a project in development hell.” Some English-hearted Irishman once said that we “want the one[s] [we] can’t have,” and based on the trucks bearing signage begging Disney to greenlight a Soderbergh-directed Kylo Ren spin-off outside of this film’s premiere, some fans are still at it even though they’d likely put the guy’s head on a pike if he tried to do anything as revisionist as what Rian Johnson did. Pity that we can’t appreciate the quality of something right in front of us, as “slight” as it may be.
* Had COVID not happened, the season two premiere would have likely been a one-night-only IMAX engagement, based on how the aspect ratio expanded during the big fight with the Krayt Dragon.
** It’s Nar Shadda if its hips didn’t lie.