There once was a time that Lucasfilm intended to release a new Star Wars movie every year for the foreseeable future. That was the playbook they used from 2015-2019, on the heels of Disney’s acquisition of Lucasfilm in 2012. However, after a polarized audience and critical reception to the Sequel Trilogy (The Force Awakens, The Last Jedi, and The Rise of Skywalker) and an underperformance at the box office from the spinoff film Solo: A Star Wars Story, the small screen has been the home for a galaxy far, far away for the past six years. It’s only fitting that The Mandalorian and Grogu marks the saga’s reentry into the cinematic landscape, continuing the narrative of The Mandalorian Disney+ series that began in 2019 and kicked off the streaming era of Star Wars storytelling.
One of the primary conversations leading up to The Mandalorian and Grogu has revolved around the question of whether or not it would even be worthy of the theatrical treatment. Was this essentially just going to be another season of the series, compressed into a two-hour runtime and shoved into movie theaters to fabricate a “Star Wars returns to the big screen” narrative? Well, for all intents and purposes – yes, that is what we have here. Of course, that criteria alone is not enough to pass judgment on the film as a whole, but it is an important contextual starting point.
Directed by Jon Favreau and written by Dave Filoni and Noah Kloor, one thing that is undeniable about The Mandalorian and Grogu is that it was made with care and passion on the technical side. The puppetry design of the Grogu character, our beloved little green Force-wielding friend, remains an impressive display of practical filmmaking. There are few moments in which you doubt that this is a living, breathing creature trying to find his place in a universe expanding around him by the day. Due credit must be given to Production Visual Effects Supervisor John Knoll, Visual Effects Producer Abbigail Keller, and their teams of hundreds of artists for establishing the framework on this front. The film reaches its peak with an extended segment in the middle wherein Grogu is forced to fend for himself in an unfamiliar environment. The movie basically becomes a silent film during this roughly 10-minute chapter, relying fully on the visual storytelling and Ludwig Göransson’s score. Grogu even encounters another solitary soul voiced by iconic character actor Stephen McKinley Henderson, who tells him a thing or two about the ways of the world. The young child is growing up before our eyes.
However, even as Grogu is challenged by his circumstances, the film does very little to challenge its audience. Everything in the narrative that is central to the Mandalorian character himself, Din Djarin – a role played by a combination of Pedro Pascal and body doubles/stunt performers Lateef Crowder and Brendan Wayne (grandson of John Wayne) – is entirely by the numbers. Once again, here he is taking down remnants of the fallen Galactic Empire as they try to reorganize. He’s still wearing his helmet for the majority of the runtime, which limits his development as an emotional being for the audience to latch onto. And the emotional beats that are present are rehashes of moments and lessons the character has experienced in previous chapters of his story. Sure, the action set pieces are larger in scale than what we have seen in the Disney+ series – including an impressive opening sequence which features Djarin facing off against an entire enemy base single-handedly and toppling multiple Imperial walker tanks, and a later showdown against a deadly reptilian creature of nightmarish proportions – but these scenes do little to progress him as a character. He mostly uses the same combination of hand-to-hand melee techniques, gunplay, blunt weaponry, and aerial jetpack maneuvers that have come to be staples of his action hero approach. This is not to say that the action is void of entertainment value. It is never really boring to see Mando engage in combat with squads of adversaries from around the galaxy. But is that really what anybody wants to hear about the action scenes in a new Star Wars movie? That they aren’t boring? On and off for the past 50 years, Star Wars has been a place to show us something fresh and exciting. Even if it is a variation of something that we have seen before, there is usually an attempt to push that something forward into new territory. Unfortunately, that’s only the case for the Grogu half of The Mandalorian and Grogu.
It’s also important to note the score from three-time Oscar-winner Ludwig Göransson, which, in a perfect world, would have been paired with a much stronger film. I felt a dissonance between the experience of the marvelous compositions from Göransson in relation to the mediocrity of the movie they accompanied. If you really wanted to convince somebody to make the effort to see this film in theaters, you could sell it as The Ludwig Göransson and Grogu and leave out most of the other title character’s content.
If The Mandalorian and Grogu is a marker for the direction of Star Wars films on the horizon, it’s hard to be thrilled by those prospects. I will happily take artistic swings like The Last Jedi and Andor a thousand times over cookie cutter slabs of “fun” and “fine enough” like this film. Perhaps 2027’s Starfighter from director Shawn Levy and top-of-the-world movie star Ryan Gosling will be an inspired addition to the Star Wars universe, but for now we’re stuck with the hotel lobby coffee that is The Mandalorian and Grogu.
Featured Photo Credit: Nicola Goode | Lucasfilm Ltd™
Thomas Manning is a member of the NCFCA and SEFCA, and also the co-host of the television show and radio program Meet Me at the Movies. He also serves as Senior Interviewer for Elements of Madness. He has worked as a production assistant and voting member on the Film Selection Committee for the Real to Reel Film Festival. Additionally, he manages his own film review and interview site, The Run-Down on Movies.
Manning is a graduate of Gardner-Webb University with a double-major in Communications and English. His passion for cinema and storytelling is rivaled only by his love for the music of Taylor Swift.
When he isn’t watching or talking about movies, you can usually find Manning drinking a ridiculous amount of coffee, going on spontaneous road trips, and running dozens of miles as he searches for the meaning of life.