The Mandalorian and Grogu poster.
As you are almost certainly aware, Star Wars has been in trouble for awhile now. Ever since Disney bought the IP from George Lucas the general consensus is that the series is on life support, if not totally dead. Whatever goodwill was gained from the purchase was first killed by The Last Jedi, utterly annihilated by Rise of Skywalker and then The Acolyte spread the ashes across the four corners of the Earth in humiliatingly woke fashion.
"Star Wars is dead" they say, and for good reason. Disney Star Wars has been more bad than good. Sure, everyone can point to the excellent Rogue One, it's cerebral and serious TV show follow up, Andor, and the first two seasons of the Mandalorian as "Good Disney Star Wars", though there is even debate about that. And some would put the newly released cartoon Maul: Shadow Lord in that category as well. But Those three titles I mentioned before greatly overshadowed the good, to the point where a lot of folks don't care about The Mandalorian and Grogu despite it being the first Star Wars movie in seven years. Given the theater I was in was 2/3rd's empty on an opening night showing, excitement seems to be pretty low.
Clearly Disney needed to change course and it's not surprising that they picked The Mandalorian as the template. The first two seasons were great. A space western combined with the basic premise of Japanese series
Lone Wolf and Cub it immediately struck a chord with audiences, largely because of the lower stakes, the "monster of the week" format and the charming relationship between a bounty hunter and his little green alien son.
However, it too fell into the Disney curse as the third season was not as well received. Instead of focusing on The Mandalorian himself along with Grogu, it somehow became the story of how Kara Thrace... I mean Bo-Katan Kryze, reformed the Mandalorian home world. I didn't hate it but it was a major departure from the first two seasons. It was not helped that almost two episodes of the series was buried in the otherwise dreadful Book of Boba Fett.
Given that context it almost seems like this movie is too late. Had it been released after season 2 of the show it would have done gangbusters but now? There are rumors that this movie will flop. The real question is will anyone even care about this movie regardless of the quality?
That's not a question I am ready to answer but what I can do is say that The Mandalorian and Grogu is one of the better things Disney has done. It's obviously not at the level of Andor or Rogue One, but it might be at the same level of the first two seasons of The Mandalorian TV show. It's not a perfect movie by a long shot, but it's not offensive, it didn't fall into the woke nonsense that crippled the wider Star Wars series and it was, if nothing else, pretty fun.
The basic plot of the movie is that the two titular characters are working for the New Republic, which replaced the Galactic Empire after Return of the Jedi, hunting down former war criminals. After a brief opening where they destroy an Imperial Warlord, the pair take a contract offered Sigourney Weaver's Colonel Ward to rescue Rotta the Hutt, who happens to be the son of Jabba the Hutt, also from Return of the Jedi. They end up fighting monsters, imperials and even enemy starships.
It's not a super complex plot and you can pretty much guess how the story is going to go before you are through it, but it's also well done and it has a lot of fun moments in it as well. The score is well done and the puppet work for Grogu and a few other minor characters remains a major selling point. Grogu is cute little monster as always.
This is an action movie, through and through, and as an action movie, don't expect some major plot developments for the rest of the Star Wars universe. This is a movie mostly about how the Mandalorian and Grogu are becoming an actual team and it does, refreshingly, refrain from making the stakes too high.
Grogu is the highlight of the movie and it's good to see him grow from the rather useless prop he was in the first few episodes of the TV show into a competent sidekick himself. He's obviously not on the level of Mando, but he gets his licks in as well. It's funny that a character that is nothing more than a well designed puppet can be the core of the movie, but he is.
What may confuse people who are casual fans at best and may not have seen any Star Wars properties since Rise of Skywalker (ugh) are the constant callbacks to other Star Wars products, mostly from Dave Filoni's cartoons and shows (the man himself makes an appearance as an X-Wing pilot). Most of the call backs are easy to miss, Zeb Orrelios works as an alien buddy even if you don't know who he is, and Embo works as a villain too, largely because of his cool design.
But the problem is that I don't know if people are going to know about Rotta the Hutt. He comes from the 2008 The Clone Wars film, which served as a pilot movie for the cartoon show, The Clone Wars. That movie was so poorly received that most people don't even remember that it's a movie, and even the fans of the Clone Wars TV show recommend skipping it (and I do as well, it was not good even if the show that followed it eventually got good). Making the third most important character of the movie a call back to an obscure on poorly received movie is certainly a choice, especially since he functioned as nothing more than a living McGuffin in that film.
It's too bad, since I liked Rotta as a character. He's absolutely playing into the "not all X are bad" trope but it was absurdly fun to see a 1000 pound slug man as something more than a lazy and gross monster. Indeed, he's a mighty gladiator and it's hilarious to watch him fight. I didn't know I needed to see a ripped slug man beating the utter crap out of gladiators, stormtroopers and monsters, but it turns out I did. Sure, the concept of a good character from an otherwise evil species isn't anything groundbreaking, but it's at least well executed here and he's probably the funniest character in the film.
Other highlights have to include some of the fun fight scenes, with the gladiator fights being a highlight for me. And, unlike a lot of Disney Star Wars, they actually remembered that there should be space battles, well at least atmospheric ones, where starfighters are blowing each other up. The film also had some genuinely funny moments, most of them coming from Grogu.
Most of the humor derives from him or the other tiny aliens running around doing things that are inherently funny for a 2 foot tall creature to do. It's not deep humor and it might fall flat for some people, but I liked it. I also have to say that the creature, ship and location design was very good as well. It absolutely feels like Star Wars, but also feels like what is here isn't a rehash of what came before, things have evolved a bit, still recognizable but new and different.
A lot of folks were worried that the movie was going to be woke, and that seems to largely overblown. I think Disney finally realized that nobody wanted to see a coven of lesbian space witches or a legacy character from the Original Trilogy humiliated because they are the wrong race and gender. The closest thing to wokeness is the racially diverse starfighter squadron and Weaver's Colonel Ward and both of them are entirely forgivable and feels a lot more like 1990's style race and gender blindness than box checking. If that's the tier of wokeness these days, then it's clear the culture has changed to a much more tolerable level. For toning this down alone the film deserves praise.
What is strange to me is how uneven the CGI is in this movie. Some of it is breathtakingly good, especially the starfighter scenes in the beginning where they are flying into the sunset. But the opening scene where the Mandalorian steals a mini walker and rides it down a cliff looks shockingly bad and would have been embarrassing in the TV show, let alone the 1st movie in the Star Wars series for seven years. The Hutts in the film occasionally look bad too, but they are wisely mostly left in gloomy locations which helps them play a bit better.
Acting is also another weak point. Sigourney Weaver seemed to be phoning it in, though given how little she has to do (she's basically Mando's boss) that's not a surprise. Pedro Pascal is ok, but he too doesn't have too much to do in terms of actual acting, almost all of his scenes are action scenes, and I am guessing most of that was a body double. If you go into this film expecting to see acting on par with something in Andor, or even the Original Trilogy, you will be disappointed, but it's also not on the same level as some of the bad acting in Star Wars films we have seen before. I'd put it on par with what you see in the TV show though.
My last major criticism is pacing. The films opening and first two acts are extremely fast paced and rarely give you a chance to breath. There's only a few quiet non-action scenes and the film could slow down a bit. But then in the third act there is a section where the pace crawls to an absolute stop. Grogu basically plays Minecraft in the swamp for what feels like a third of the film, though realistically it was probably 10 minutes or so. Either way, the pacing is absolutely off and it's my biggest criticism of the film.
There are a few other nit-picky things that I didn't care for. I do have a problem with the fact that of the dozens of enemies the pair face, only a few of them are actual threats. Stormtroopers continue the tradition set in Return of the Jedi where they are more of comic relief than an actual threat and it's not like the majority of the battle droids in the third act are any better. The same could be said with the starfighter battles as only one ship on the hero's side is shot down, and that was at least partially on purpose. At least the monsters, the giant battle droids and Embo give Mando a fight. This is a huge problem with Disney Star Wars and I do think they need to bring back some mook tier villains that actually pose a threat to the heroes.
The other nit-picky thing is that I genuinely don't like Pedro Pascal. You only catch a glimpse of him in this movie. There is a brief period in this movie, (which isn't a spoiler because it was spoiled in the trailers) where he is without his helmet and my honest reaction was "ugh, this guy, again". Pascal is an annoying person politically and he's very much overexposed and if you have difficulty separating art from the artist you are forgiven if you want to skip this movie, though, to be fair, the advantage of Mando almost always wearing his helmet is that you forget he's even playing him.
So what's the final verdict for me? This was not a perfect movie by any stretch. But given the extraordinarily low expectations I had for it, I was presently surprised. It felt like an hour and a half version of season 1 episode of the TV Show, and that's actually fairly high praise. I probably put it right on the line between "actually pretty good" and "mediocre" with the scale tipping to the former, not the latter, mostly because I genuinely enjoyed the space fights and big chungus gladiator Rotta.
It's probably the 2nd best Disney Star Wars movie, after Rogue One of course, and I put it above all three of the sequels by a large margin. I might even put it ahead of the two weaker Prequel movies, The Phantom Menace and The Clone Wars, as those two films had even bigger problems with pacing. I guess that means I put it in the upper mid tier then as far as Star Wars movies go, and I will probably watch it again when it comes onto Disney Plus.
Would I recommend it? That really depends. I think general audiences might like it as a dumb popcorn movie, though they might be a little lost. Fans of The Mandalorian and Star Wars in general should see it as a decent addition to the canon, though not without flaws. But I also don't think it will be good enough to win back the former fans that Disney lost with the absolute crap they put out since the bought the IP. I'd say see it if you are curious or are a genuine fan of The Mandalorian TV show, but either skip it or catch it on Disney Plus in a few months if you aren't.
Will it be enough to save Star Wars? I honestly don't know. I didn't see it with anyone else and didn't stick around to listen to what other people are saying. The critics were tepid in their support of it, but the
Rotten Tomatoes score for viewers was a lot higher. Good word of moth might be enough to save the film, but I still think there are just too many former fans that gave up on Star Wars for good after the sequels and The Acolyte for it to be a big success.
Either way though, I do think it's a positive direction for the Star Wars series to go in. I had been saying for awhile that the series needed a lower stakes romp that had as little to do with the sequels as it could and this film does that. And it was genuinely refreshing to see a movie with almost zero wokeness. Perhaps Disney will really be able to turn Star Wars around, especially if the next movie, Ryan Gosling's Starfighter, is well received as well.
