The Mandalorian and Grogu opens in theaters on May 22.
When The Mandalorian premiered on Disney+, one of the things that made Star Wars’ live-action episodic TV debut so special was how ably it evoked the wonder of the Original Trilogy while also forging its own unique path through the galaxy after the fall of the Galactic Empire. The Mandalorian and Grogu, the big-screen debut of Din Djarin and his adoptive son and first new Star Wars movie in seven years, gets caught almost immediately in a feedback loop of self-satisfied nostalgia which it seldom pulls out of.
The Mandalorian and Grogu’s plot is dead simple: the bounty hunter and his little Baby Yoda are contracted by the New Republic’s Colonel Ward (Sigourney Weaver) to bring in the late Jabba the Hutt’s adult son Rotta (Jeremy Allen White) at the behest of Jabba’s twin siblings, who are eager to continue consolidating power after their failed attempts to do so on Tatooine during the events of The Book of Boba Fett. While technically a follow-up to the third season of The Mandalorian, which concludes with Din Djarin and Grogu settling on Nevarro and agreeing to work for the New Republic, The Mandalorian and Grogu draws from effectively zero of that groundwork, to a degree that’s completely perplexing. They spent three seasons on Disney+ building out characters and cultures specific to this corner of the Star Wars galaxy and, by design, this film seems like it’s laser-focused on catering to people who have only heard about the show.
Maybe that provides a cleaner jumping-on point for general audiences, and those who are brand new to this way of experiencing the galaxy will likely find some satisfaction in watching The Mandalorian go through the same motions of trying to get a job done while both babysitting and training Grogu. But for any Star Wars fans who haven’t been frozen in carbonite for the last few years, it leaves most of the developments here feeling duplicative of turns we’ve already taken in the series. And so the film adds woefully little to character-critical moments like Mando’s helmet being removed, or Grogu’s use of the Force.
It’s like poetry, it rhymes… with things the majority of the audience will have experienced more recently than the last Star Wars movie we all went to see in theaters. No, George, I already said… oh never mind.
By virtue of having his name added to the title, you’d imagine Grogu would have a lot more agency here. But as such an outsized presence in the film, his weaknesses as a character come into stark relief. We do see Grogu take a more active role in action scenes – like when he takes off after Rotta in a stroller that seemingly has the top speed of a podracer – but the movie almost never hands out any negative consequences to Grogu for his impulsivity, so there’s very little novelty to watching him make the “little stinker” move every time and face no consequences. The Mandalorian TV series largely avoids having to interrogate that dynamic by utilizing Grogu as a pivot point for Din Djarin’s journey, forcing the bounty hunter to make choices and change based on his relationship with the little green guy. That means that The Mandalorian and Grogu needed to be all the more creative to spin a worthwhile story out of watching Grogu interact with the world through what means he does have available to him, and precious little of it rises above baiting the audience with his cooing or his hungry tummy.
Din Djarin, for his part, never has real cause to underestimate Grogu’s innate ability or tentative understanding of Mandalorian ideals, and so his occasional need to change his plan of attack based on his wild card companion doesn’t usually amount to more than a quick and easy shift to plan B. This leaves Pedro Pascal, the voice of Din Djarin, feeling a little wooden, as so little of what happens gives him call to modulate his performance away from the Mandalorian’s staple calm. Both characters are incredibly capable, and already understand each other very well by the time the movie starts, and the script from director Jon Favreau, Dave Filoni, and Noah Kloor seems totally disinterested in rocking the boat. This is Star Wars at its most conflict-averse, and I can’t help but notice that correlates to it also feeling like the most boring Star Wars movie yet.
The Mandalorian and Grogu’s drama being largely inert, we’d look to the space fantasy spectacle to make up that lost ground, but the movie’s action is scattershot at best. The movie’s at its most exciting when Mando and Rotta have to team up at one point during what’s essentially a life-size game of dejarik (“that’s space wizard’s chess,” Ron Weasley said with a smug grin), featuring the real monsters represented on the Millenium Falcon’s holochess board. It’s a chaotic battle that calls to mind the gladiatorial fight on Geonosis, but it’s also here that The Mandalorian and Grogu’s biggest flaw with its action comes into view.
Mando is primarily a close-quarters fighter, but his fights here end up being a little tough to read. The movie heavily favors pitting Mando against CG creatures and droids in smaller rooms, and that often leaves Favreau’s coverage looking for good angles to emphasize the work Brendan Wayne and Lateef Crowder – Mando’s physical performers – are doing to communicate Din Djarin’s creativity and ruthlessness when the Sabacc cards are down. Ludwig Göransson, the series’ composer, has some chances to shine – the synth-heavy version of Mando’s theme that hits when he arrives on Shakari rocks – but little of Göransson’s work goes far enough towards injecting life into the movie when it needs it most in the third act, which really drags itself over the finish line with a series of noncommittal fakeouts.
It feels inevitable that, in the years to come, the popular criticism of The Mandalorian and Grogu will be that it just feels like either a truncated season of the TV show or a too-long episode. It feels important to put that idea into some context here, and why taking all the highlights of what maybe could have been The Mandalorian Season 4 and making a movie out of them is such a dramatic non-starter. The Mandalorian’s eight-episode seasons have the luxury of drawing stories out for seven or eight hours, with each individual episode more free to tweak the rhythm with which each chapter plays out, the genre conventions it leans into, and how much to let the circumstances of the plot affect change in the characters on a long-term basis. You get around two hours to do that in a movie (two hours and 12 minutes, in this case), and that demands a lot more focus and discipline in how the stakes and the momentum of your story are managed.
Structurally speaking, The Mandalorian and Grogu is constantly pulled between those modes of storytelling, full of fits and starts from the jump and with no demonstrated interest in letting anything that happens be permanent. The film’s opening scene features Mando and Grogu hunting a remnant Imperial warlord on a snowy planet, but outside of giving Mando a chance to stalk hallways and take out stormtroopers for a few minutes, this sequence winds up being completely disconnected from what’s to follow and more of a warning shot than a starting gun being fired off. Each scene’s utility seems only to get us to the next phase of the mission, and to jeopardize as little as possible for Favreau and Filoni, should they decide to keep this sub-franchise going in the future. The Mandalorian and Grogu, to put it into X-Files terms, is a “monster of the week” and not a “mytharc” episode, and, for a marquee cinematic event for the duo, that feels like a huge miscalculation in practice.
Baffling as it is to have basically the entire cast of the show sidelined for the movie (a couple of brief and unsatisfying cameos notwithstanding), there are a few supporting characters who breathe some life into the film. Sigourney Weaver’s Colonel Ward is just there to hand Mando his missions, and to tell him how good or bad he did on that mission, but if you need a steely commander who you’ll believe would jump into an X-wing along with the young bucks when it comes time to throw down, you could do a lot worse than Weaver and the effortless cool she brings to the table.
Meanwhile, Jeremy Allen White’s Rotta the Hutt winds up being the only character in the movie with any dimension. We meet Rotta while he’s being held captive on Shakari as a gladiator for a powerful gangster, Lord Janu (Jonny Coyne), but he’s fairly comfortable with the arrangement. Rotta seems glad to be regarded by the bloodthirsty crowds on his own merits rather than being judged by the sins of his father, Jabba… so glad that he repeats that character motivation nearly word-for-word the second time we encounter him. White’s natural, even-handed performance, Rotta’s sensitive way with Grogu, and the good ideas Favreau does have for showing how a ripped Hutt would fight (like the gator-like death roll he does on occasion) make him a welcome presence whenever he’s onscreen. The movie hints towards an intention to mine the interesting juxtaposition between Jabba and Rotta and Mando and Grogu’s father/son relationships early on, but it loses this thread by the time Rotta becomes less of an active part in the story.
Star Wars Rebels’ Zeb Orrelios (Steve Blum) is also on hand as Mando’s occasional pilot and New Republic liaison, and the two have some fun banter, but Zeb feels a little stuck between being a full-blown part of the story and an animated Star Wars cameo appearance that I can’t imagine will get the general audiences the film seems to be focused on catering to all that excited.
The Mandalorian and Grogu’s one soaring achievement, the one reliably thrilling part of the movie, and so perhaps the clearest example of how ineffectively the rest of the movie mines the Star Wars universe for texture… is the crew of diminutive Anzellans that arrive halfway through to modify Mando’s new Razor Crest ship. These little Babus Frik wind up joining most of the action that follows and let me say this unequivocally: they will be the only thing about this movie that I remember with any real fondness next week. That’s not just because of their hilarious mutterings and wonderful puppeteering that bring them to life, though. Through the Anzellans, we get the occasional chance to step out of the non-descript, sanded-down perspective of Mando and to see what life is like for these capable hard workers from nary a foot off the ground. They have a tiny spaceship that Grogu looks like a giant in, and the abject hilarity of that imagery aside, it’s one of the only effective ways the movie deploys the idea that Grogu is (slowly) growing up and coming into his own.
But… If you’ve got a bad feeling about salvaged creatures with silly voices from The Rise of Skywalker having room to be the best part of a movie called The Mandalorian and Grogu, there’s not much here to make that feeling go away.
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