A great deal of your appreciation of the first new Star Wars film since 2019’s limp Rise of Skywalker is going to depend on what you bring into it. In many ways, it doesn’t seem right that you should have to watch three seasons’ worth of homework before shelling over $20 to see a movie, but it probably will have an impact if you do—just maybe not the impact you might think. What made the first two seasons of the Disney+ show The Mandalorian so special was that showrunners Jon Favreau and Dave Filoni centered on emotional connection as much as they did Star Wars lore. By the time we get to the conclusion of Season 2 (directed by Payton Reed, fyi), there wasn’t a dry eye in the house. And I’m not downplaying Season 3 of the series, but the choice to make it more mythology-centric took away from what made the first two seasons so impactful.
So now we have the move to the big screen with Star Wars: The Mandalorian and Grogu, a film that seems to want nothing more than be an adventure, with touches of gangster stories, monster movies, and Westerns. What it has no interest in doing is character development; if you don’t know these characters by now, you’re effectively denied what makes them special and unique in the Star Wars universe. I’ll give the filmmakers credit for not leaning on light sabers or legacy characters, but what we get instead is the villainous bounty hunter Embo, who doesn’t even speak, and twin Hutts whose voices are indistinguishable so there’s no opportunity for connection to either set of antagonists.
The Mandalorian and Grogu feels like a standalone episode of the series; very little about it (aside from the size of the space monsters) feels epic enough in scale to justify a big-screen version of the show. While clever voice touches, like Jeremy Allen White as the fully jacked Rotta the Hutt or Martin Scorsese as a food cart vendor that Din Djarin (Pedro Pascal, when his helmet is off) hits up for information, add a splash of color to the proceedings, they don’t propel things into the feature-film stratosphere.
One thing people don’t seem to acknowledge is that Star Wars movies were never a beacon of great writing, so the fact that this film has almost too much plot seems silly to complain about. The Mandalorian and Grogu is written by Favreau (who also directed), Filoni, and Noah Kloor, and what they’ve effectively done is crammed two or three episodes of the show into a feature film; you can almost spot the episode breaks at times. As we left them in Season 3, Din and Grogu are still working for the New Republic, attempting to weed out any remnants of the evil Empire. They’re given their new assignment by Col. Ward (Sigourney Weaver), and it appears that they’ve even taken on a co-pilot in Star Wars: Rebels regular Zeb (voiced by Steve Blum), a welcome treat in this storyline. And while some of the Mandalorian mythology is mentioned in passing in the film, we don’t get a deepening of Din’s story or where exactly Grogu hails from either.
Where the film does tend to work is in its action sequences and monster encounters. There’s a creature called a Dragon Snake that I loved, and its fight with Din is pretty spectacular and scary. There are space battles and hallway fights, chases through jungles and wrestling matches with Hutts; probably the best moment in terms of action is a gladiator-style sequence that might remind you of a certain HoloChess match. But for every top-notch moment like that (all scored by Ludwig Göransson, there are others that simply sit there, not really fulfilling anything in the Star Wars pantheon. There was a certain point where I was praying for a discussion about trade routes or anything political, but the truth is, the Empire isn’t really a threat in this film, and not having that shadowy undercurrent of evil makes all the difference. We get hints of the force through Grogu (which is always fun), but simply having a pair of globulous gangsters at your primary villains isn’t satisfying in such a deep and rich universe.
Those running the Star Wars franchises have been threatening to do another movie that combines various characters from different Disney+ series, and the likely bad guy in that movie promises to be infinite more interesting than what we’re given in The Mandalorian and Grogu. Whether or not we get that movie is another question, and I’m not sure how much I care about the answer. That being said, I could see younger audiences and families really enjoying the simplicity of this film, and I’d certainly rather kids get excited about Star Wars than another Mario Bros. stinker.
The film is now in theaters.
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