Star Wars: The Mandalorian & Grogu Review
We finally have a new Star Wars movie hitting theaters after seven years, and we have another adventure with The Mandalorian and Grogu. So, how is this movie? Is it any good? Is it worthy of being the first Star Wars movie in seven years? Let’s talk about it!
The Review
For the most part, for better or worse, I’d say that The Mandalorian & Grogu basically met my expectations. They didn’t really pass them, everything I’m going to say in my review is everything I figured I would say about the film going into it. Simply put, the movie is fine. The movie is good enough and it’s fun enough as a Star Wars adventure. The film does feel a little bit like three to four episodes of The Mandalorian strung into a 2-hour long movie. You can see how this easily could’ve been a three episode arc on a season of the show involving the Hutts and what each of the episodes would’ve been about. I don’t necessarily say that as a negative, I saw that as something to say. The words I used at the beginning to describe this movie was that it was fine and good enough. That’s sort of why this structure of the review is different, I really don’t have much to say about the film.
That’s not to say that the movie is bad, it’s fun you get all of the cute Grogu moments that you want. Grogu has two different side quests in this movie that both involve saving Mando in some fashion. If you are a big fan of Grogu and all of his cuteness, then there’s plenty of moments here that’ll put a big gigantic smile on your face, you’ll laugh and have fun with these adventures. I think the adventures are fun rabbit trails to see Grogu on, they don’t really add anything to the film. The second one that involves Mando and this fish guy, feels totally pointless and like they could’ve cut it out and tighten the second act of the film up a bit more. Mando gets plenty of awesome action moments here, where he’s beating people up and he’s doing it in the way that we love Mando to do. The film opens with a pretty exciting action scene that has some stealth elements and it’s fun to see Mando being stealthy and taking out Stormtroopers. So both of our title characters get all of the moments that you want them to have and the moments that the fans expected when they bought a ticket to this film.
From there, the elements that didn’t really work about the film for me. The first thing I’m going to mention is more about the Star Wars universe rather than this movie specifically. It’s also the closest thing I’ll get to talk about the SPOILERS. If you don’t want to know, then just skip to the next paragraph. There’s a moment here where Mando gets injured and is inactive for a couple of days. Grogu decides to use force healing to heal one of Mando’s wounds. As soon as that happened, the movie lost me a little bit and made me question something. The common factor between Grogu and Rey, the only force users that we’ve seen use force healing is that they were both trained by Luke Skywalker. This made me question, does Luke know about force healing? If so, why didn’t Luke mention it? Like I said, this is more of a criticism about the Star Wars universe and the rules but if they are heading down the path that maybe Luke knew about force healing, I think that strains some credibility.
As far as the actual movie itself, it felt a little bit like it was trying to play homage to other Star Wars movies, but not in a way that felt satisfying. In the first half of the film, it really felt like certain scenes were to make people go “hey, this is like the scenes in ____”. The opening action sequence takes place on a snow planet with Snowtrooper and AT-AT, it feels like Empire Strikes Back. There’s a scene where Mando goes to a diner to get information that draws to mind Attack of the Clones, even some of the gladiator stuff with Ratta the Hutt reminds you of the third act of the film. The sequences themselves play out very differently from those scenes. But my issue is that they used similar imagery and locations that drew to mind other Star Wars films. When Star Wars is such a massive universe with tons and tons of planets and locations, why are they designed after planets that we’ve already seen before? I think part of the problem with the Disney era of Star Wars is that our characters aren’t visiting the most exciting locations that they should be.
Beyond that, I didn’t think the film’s script was great and had a lot of issues. They sort of both go back to the same idea, that the film’s story and villains feel very lackluster. The first half of the film is really just Mando going to this planet to get information which leads into an action sequence, followed by Mando going to another planet to get information which leads into an action sequence where he must escape. That’s essentially how the first half of the film feels like, so it gets repetitive fairly quickly into the film. The other big script issue is that the film lacks a sense of urgency and forward momentum. The big reason for that is that our villains are so undeveloped and you don’t really care about them. The Hutts are essentially the main villains that are pushing the antagonism in the film. But there’s points where you sort of forget that the Hutts are out there. They have this bounty hunter character that’s hunting Mando but even then that’s only in the second half of the film. As you move into the third act, you don’t really care about anything because you don’t care about our villains or the conflict of the film. Those are the biggest issues that I had with the script is the lack of an interesting plot and underdeveloped villains.
I think what makes this movie so frustrating and disappointing is that it’s the first theatrically released Star Wars film in seven years. When we’ve had to wait seven years for a Star Wars film and it’s this, it’s really disappointing. In the past Star Wars movies were events. Where there was so much anticipation going into a new Star Wars film. 11 years later, it’s easy to forget just how big of an event The Force Awakens was when it came out. It was this gigantic event film that made $2 billion and was met with great reviews. And now we’re getting a Star Wars film that’s tracking to have a low opening and is getting pretty middle of the road reviews. There is a certain sense of disappointment that comes from watching this film. Beyond that, I don’t see this film sparking much conversations afterwards, because there’s really nothing to spoil here. The film doesn’t add anything new to the characters or the world. I was kind of waiting for there to be some sort of reveal that changes things up a little bit, but there’s nothing here.
Final Thoughts: Overall, The Mandalorian & Grogu is a good enough Star Wars adventure. This movie doesn’t do anything that offends the audience like The Last Jedi, but it also doesn’t do anything that unites Star Wars fans the way The Force Awakens did. I saw a tweet saying that casual or non-Star Wars fans will probably enjoy this film more than the hard Star Wars fans. I think there’s some truth to that. Because as a sci-fi adventure it’s good and fun, but it lacks as a Star Wars movie. I’m very curious to see what the audience reaction to this film is going to be over the weekend and see if fans and casual audiences are more positive or negative on the film.
The Score: 8.0/10 (B-)
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