For the first time in seven years, there’s a new Star Wars movie in theaters, and somehow it’s up for debate if anyone actually cares about that anymore. James Cameron’s Avatar films make billions and still face questions about their cultural footprint (or lack thereof). Star Wars has produced a dozen movies, over a dozen TV and streaming shows, and countless comics, toys, and novels featuring a massive amount of memorable characters and lore. To some people, it feels like the brand has been diluted, while to others — specifically new, young fans — it’s as strong as ever. It almost doesn’t matter, then, if The Mandalorian and Grogu is actually any good. It only matters if people still want to show up.
Directed by Jon Favreau in his latest mega-tentpole, this new film is spun off, of course, from the Disney+ series The Mandalorian, which follows the taciturn and eternally masked bounty hunter Din Djarin (Pedro Pascal with his mask off, stunt performers Brendan Wayne and Lateef Crowder the rest of the time). He criss-crosses the galaxy scraping up bad guys along with his charge, Grogu. And in case you’re not familiar, Grogu is a child of the same species as Yoda, hence his zeitgeist-permeating moniker of “Baby Yoda” as so dubbed much of the fanbase — until his name was revealed on the show. As for the specifics of this silver screen iteration, Mando and the little guy are here contracted by the Rebel Alliance’s Colonel Ward (Sigourney Weaver, in one of the few human roles in this movie) to capture a fugitive Imperial general. In order to do that, they’ll need to retrieve Rotta the Hutt (Jeremy Allen White), the sole surviving son of Jabba the Hutt, from a particular flavor of captivity where he’s being forced to fight in gladiatorial combat. Surely, it will all be that simple.
As far as the IP goes, Mandalorian was the first of the Disney+ run, and until Andor showed up, was likely the most well-liked, mostly because it stuck to a simple adventure-of-the-week set of storylines and was infused with a lot of clever action — it seemed a perfect fit for the small screen. The film, for its part, doesn’t stray far from that formula; more than anything else, it feels like three or four episodes of the series run together, functioning as sort of an abridged additional season. It’s got a killer opening sequence, one disconnected from the rest of the movie á la Indiana Jones or James Bond, and the rest of the film’s narrative unfolds in such a way that you can feel one “episode” ending and another getting started (the most appealing one finds little Grogu on an extended and mostly wordless mission to heal his gravely wounded mentor/father figure). It also stands out among recent installments of the franchise (looking at you, Andor) in that it features a lot of weird alien landscapes — particularly notable is a cool swamp planet — and a metric ton of freaky aliens. If it feels redundant to mention the lack of human actors in this again, it can’t be overstated what a strange thing that is for IP of this scale and ubiquity.
Which is perhaps to say, yes, The Mandalorian and Grogu looks and feels generally like Star Wars, which despite its legacy was never meant to be much more than a classic throwback to Saturday matinees and serials. An old-school adventure. In that context, Favreau’s film is relatively successful. The action is crisp, the pacing is mostly brisk, the jokes are cute. The whole thing also looks and sounds great, with Industrial Light & Magic’s superb VFX work taking center stage in a movie that is absolutely dripping with CGI, performance capture, volume work, and more. But that isn’t surprising. And so, more than anything at this point in the franchise’s history and this moment in our streaming era, viewers are left with questions. Do you need Star Wars to be an epic? Does it always need to be a legacy saga of good and evil battling across generations, like the core feature films? Or should it be a more mature response to and reflection of real tensions, as in Andor? Is it good enough to just be a solid adventure film for kids, and what does “good enough” even mean for something that nerds endlessly argue about online, something that critics endlessly debate the relevance and economics and politics of with each new entry, ad infinitum. Does it have to be an all-things epic to be a worthy entry in this massive franchise? Does your 10-year-old even know or care about any of that? It’s bizarre that for perhaps the first time in this storied history, any and all of those answers are entirely beside the point, and that The Mandalorian and Grogu might be perfectly fine, possibly forgettable, and not a whole lot more.
DIRECTOR: Jon Favreau; CAST: Pedro Pascal, Sigourney Weaver, Jeremy Allen White, Jonathan Coyne; DISTRIBUTOR: Walt Disney Pictures; IN THEATERS: May 22; RUNTIME: 2 hr. 12 min.
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