‘The Mandalorian and Grogu’ Is More of a ‘Star Wars’-Shaped Object Than a Real Movie

Perhaps the biggest surprise regarding The Mandalorian when it debuted on Disney+ in November 2019 wasn’t the use of the StageCraft on-set virtual production or even the adorable Baby Yoda (later named “Grogu”). It was that creator Jon Favreau and fellow showrunner Dave Filoni found a way to right-size Star Wars for a TV show. The show felt refreshingly low stakes compared to the movies, more akin to a weekly Western where the Mandalorian would go on a mission/do a favor, run into some kind of complication that would require fighting, and finish the job. The more the show strayed from that formula and attempted to weave in old Star Wars: The Clone Wars characters like Ahsoka Tano or Bo-Katan, the less it felt like the breezy addition to the Star Wars universe. While the movie, Star Wars: The Mandalorian and Grogu, attempts to return to these contained adventures, it never makes a case why it has to be on the big screen. Neither the spectacle nor the story demands people leave their homes and come out to see this in a movie theatre. Instead, it feels like Disney is asking people to watch a few Disney+ episodes on a larger screen.

The Mandalorian (Pedro Pascal) and his young apprentice Grogu are working on behalf of the New Republic in the aftermath of Return of the Jedi. They seek out old Imperial officers and bring in the bounty. Their latest hunt requires them to rescue Rotta the Hunt (Jeremy Allen White) and return him to his aunt and uncle, who will provide information on the whereabouts of the mysterious Commander Coin. However, as is often the case in a Mandalorian adventure, the mission doesn’t go according to plan and requires him to fight a bunch of bad guys with the occasional assist from Grogu.

If Disney were to break up this episodic feature into three or four Mandalorian  episodes and air them on Disney+, I doubt anyone would kick up a fuss. Some might even applaud it as a return to form, with a nice little appearance from Sigourney Weaver as an officer in the New Republic. But as a movie, there’s no idea holding these chapters together, nor does the film take advantage of using different episodes to provide different textures to the movie. Director Jon Favreau makes the film look like the show, and while the show doesn’t look cheap, it also lacks anything that makes it feel particularly cinematic beyond the avalanche of CG that accompanies just about every blockbuster these days. It’s tough to say there’s been a massive visual upgrade here like when sci-fi series Star Trek or Firefly made the leap to cinemas.

And yet this would be forgivable if there were some story implications that made this narrative so important that it couldn’t be contained to the TV series. I suppose I shouldn’t be surprised by Disney’s signature timidity by this point, but I am taken aback at how the writers don’t understand the difference between spectacle and conflict. Making the Mandalorian fight a bunch of CG creatures isn’t conflict; it’s merely spectacle because the film is devoid of dramatic tension. Nothing is risked here. The Mandalorian and Grogu both have plot armor in addition to literal armor, and no one thinks about what would force these characters to grow and change. Again, in a TV show, sending them off on their little adventures where they return unchanged is fine. For a movie, it feels like a waste of everyone’s time.

Even if you’re a fan of Star Wars, I’m not exactly sure who this is for beyond the brief moments of recognition of characters from the larger Star Wars universe. Rotta previously debuted in the terrible 2008 animated movie Star Wars: The Clone Wars. The character Garazeb “Zeb” Orrelios (Steve Blum) was in the animated series Star Wars: Rebels. There are a few others who are scattered about, which I guess is nice if you’ve stuck through all these TV shows, but the film has no interest in building on anything that came before. Nothing is revealed, nothing is changed, and it feels like Favreau and Filoni seek to do little more but smash CGI things against each other for 132 minutes.

The filmmakers assume that audiences will show up for any Star Wars-shaped movie, and hey, maybe they will. But the imagination and character that fuels Star Wars through its best stories is absent here. You can paper over that a bit with Grogu being adorable and three-time Oscar-winning composer Ludwig Göransson delivering another banger of a score. But as the clunky plotting continues to unfold, there’s the sense of being cheated, not only by a film that doesn’t feel like a film, but by a company that doesn’t think you deserve real characters or an actual story. Like too many of Disney’s recent blockbusters, it feels like a project that’s been greenlit to appease shareholders, not people who want to see fresh and exciting movies. 

It’s been over six years since the abysmal Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker hit theaters, and while The Mandalorian and Grogu doesn’t hit that film’s incomprehensible lows (there are quite a few plot shortcuts but nothing as laughable as “Somehow, Palpatine returned”), little in it leaves an impression. Even in a theater filled with Star Wars fans, some dressed up as Mandalorian warriors, the response to my screening was largely muted with only a polite smattering of applause as the credits rolled. The Mandalorian and Grogu is technically Star Wars, but audiences know what a Star Wars feature should deliver or at least attempt to deliver. Maybe Disney thought they could suffice with a few TV episodes strung together, but sadly, this is not the way. 

The Mandalorian and Grogu opens in theaters on May 22^nd.