‘The Mandalorian and Grogu’ Review
Star Wars is back on the big screen with a small-screen adventure.
I’VE BEEN REWATCHING THE MANDALORIAN with my kids to prepare for the first Star Wars movie to hit big screens in nearly seven years. The good news for the folks at Lucasfilm and Disney is that my kids are super into it: They love the show, they love Baby Yoda (sorry, sorry: Grogu), they love the little Babu Frik species that remains the one bright spot from Rise of Skywalker, they love the action, etc. It’s a fun show.
Rewatching it all in one go, you realize it’s also kind of a mess, particularly in its third season. The Mandalorian did one thing particularly well in its opening season: serve as an adventure-of-the-week story that was tangentially involved in all of the stuff from the movies while also expanding the sandbox for viewers who felt like the Skywalker saga had run its course. But as the show went along, it kept circling back to the New Republic and the Imperial remnants, back to stormtroopers and deathtroopers and Moffs and Imperial fleets. None of it is particularly interesting and all of it is too convoluted for us casual fans to really care about; I’m sure there are lots of fine Easter eggs for viewers of the cartoon Star Wars Rebels (my 7-year-old son gets some of them!), but I simply don’t care that much about the New Republic’s struggles.1
The Mandalorian and Grogu is a weird, bifurcated beast. It feels very much like two extended episodes of the show stitched together. The first has to do with Mando (Pedro Pascal) and Grogu (animatronic) tracking down Imperial remnants to face justice in front of New Republic tribunals. After a ten-minute prologue involving an Imperial bigshot, AT-AT walkers, and a snowy cliff—it seems like a dicey combination by the warlord Mando’s hunting, but then I’ve never been a renowned tactician—Mando is sent by Sigourney Weaver to twin Hutt gangsters to find out where their nephew is so the New Republic can find out where an Imperial is hiding out.
This is intermittently entertaining—Martin Scorsese voices a line cook with important information—but also kind of tedious, a series of fetch quests that culminate in the rather disconcerting form of Rotta the Hutt (Jeremy Allen White), a jacked space slug with a soft spot for Grogu.
The second half of the film is more in line with the show at its best, a series of adventures involving the Mandalorian and Grogu fighting alongside one another while also learning valuable lessons about the importance of family and all that jazz. It is here that we spend more time with the Anzellans (the tiny species of droid/ship engineers to which Babu Frik belongs) and see Mando square off against bounty hunter Embo.
The resultant picture is rarely boring; there’s an action beat every few minutes just in case you start to nod off. But it’s also not quite as rousing as you sense director Jon Favreau and writers Favreau, Dave Filoni, and Noah Kloor might have hoped. It’s also weirdly hard to see: Despite watching it in IMAX, it felt as if the picture was simply too dark, too muddy. As a result, the action sequences are almost obscured, the individual beats are a little difficult to parse. There’s often just a lot going on in any given sequence, often multiple points of attack and numerous characters squaring off. I sometimes found myself a little overwhelmed by everything that was going on. (This is also a very loud movie, particularly in IMAX; I don’t think I’ve ever heard blaster fire quite so extravagant. My head was practically shaking after the first shot of the film.)
The bottom line: Two things may be simultaneously true. I think my kids, for whom this picture is designed, are going to enjoy The Mandalorian and Grogu, and maybe quite a bit; and I think it plays like a couple of mid-tier episodes from the TV series. As such, I’m not sure it’s the rousing hit Disney needs to rekindle the moviegoing experience for the Star Wars franchise. But it’s probably good enough for a generation that has yet to experience the joy of Star Wars on the big screen.
Particularly in its post-Marty Peretz iterations.
(I’m sorry, this is an altogether too esoteric joke, I can’t believe my editor hasn’t cut it.)
Yes, I needed to look up who Marty Peretz is. Yes, you picked just about the only gig in the Galaxy where you can crack that joke and get away with it. Hats off. 😆
I need to rematch the series as well. I seem to remember my interest trailing off after he finally took off his helmet. But always glad to see a new star wars installment, even a mediocre one.