Director: Jon Favreau
Writers: Jon Favreau, Dave Filoni, Noah Kloor
Stars: Pedro Pascal, Martin Scorsese, Sigourney Weaver
Synopsis: Once a lone bounty hunter, Mandalorian Din Djarin and his apprentice Grogu embark on an exciting new Star Wars adventure.
Jon Favreau’s The Mandalorian and Grogu is supposed to carry on a long and storied tradition one of the most thrilling and lush universes in science fiction. What transpires is an occasionally action-filled, overly safe, and most uninspired piece of franchise IP you could imagine.
Star Wars in theaters used to be appointment viewing. After long gestation periods, both The Phantom Menace in 1999 and The Force Awakens in 2015 broke box office records and launched the series back into the cultural lexicon. Not only is The Mandalorian and Grogu a pointless endeavor on screen, it adds nothing to the franchise, either title character, or towards Summer big budget blockbuster filmmaking.
Even when Star Wars failed, it was trying to connect to something bigger than just a straightforward story of a guy who fights and a cute creature who gets into shenanigans. Say what you want about the prequel trilogy or even something as reviled as The Rise of Skywalker, the franchise had lofty goals. It wasn’t just a vignette of a bounty hunter going on adventures. That’s all this film is. Even the shoehorning of Easter eggs and callbacks are gone. There’s nothing there for anyone.
Even if you are an acolyte (no pun intended) of Star Wars and have dug deep on every episode of The Mandalorian, there is little connective tissue to what the series has established. There are few existing characters to build off of, nor is the Mandalore lore met with anything other than passing mentions. It’s like the film was meant for someone who wants to like Star Wars, but has no prior experience with the actual installments.
The film cycles through the same rhythm of plot beats. The Mandalorian (Pedro Pascal) does some awesome action scenes, Grogu does something cute and heroic, then they come together to solve the problem. Later, the Mandalorian goes on another adventure because he apparently has nothing better to do, he does some action, gets into trouble, Grogu helps, and they come back together. This happens three to four times in the film. Frankly, it gets boring.
The action is well-staged and captivating, but those are just bursts. Each large-scale set piece arrives out of nowhere, concludes with an expected result, and is quickly forgotten. Nothing about the film, including the action, is memorable. Even when Star Wars failed, it failed memorably. The Mandalorian and Grogu provides no other memorable characters, plot points, or thematic elements worth mentioning.
This is not a universe where nothing is worth exploring. Andor and the early seasons of The Mandalorian have proved this universe is worth expanding out. But they don’t expand, they contract. The only outreach from the normal world is going back to the well of the Hutt criminal family. The amount the film asks you to care about Rotta the Hutt (voiced by Jeremy Allen White) is shocking. The Mandalorian and Grogu are in nearly every scene, but there is no actual drama. You can safely assume they aren’t going to kill off these characters. Therefore, there are zero stakes.
While it is undeniably cool to see Sigourney Weaver flying an X-wing, those moments are rare, take too long to get there, and are surrounded by too much fluff to make an impact. It’s an immensely frustrating film that adds nothing to the franchise, the series, and has no reason to exist outside of making a bit of money for one of the biggest film studios in the world. It’s a net loss.
The film is shiny and predictable, the score is familiar, the script is meaningless, and the performances are what they are. There is nothing to hang your hat on, besides it being a Star Wars film. If it didn’t have that franchise attached to it, there would be zero reason to keep your interest. The Mandalorian and Grogu is a major disappointment. Never before has Star Wars felt so pointless and skippable. For a franchise with such monumental highs, this is a staggering low.
