‘Star Wars: The Mandalorian and Grogu’ Review – The First Star Wars Film In Seven Years Is The Franchise At Its Most Forgettable

It’s hard to believe that a film franchise as popular and expensive as Star Wars has had its film division on ice for nearly 7 years, but the reason for this remains a query with a complicated answer. Most would point to the obvious of the last Star Wars film, The Rise of Skywalker, effectively killing the franchise’s credibility with its cowardice, or the onslaught of Disney + series, which the franchise has called home since 2019, making the series dormant in its ability to return to theatrical.

The truth lies in a combination of nearly all this reasoning; ever since the great divide within the fanbase post Rian Johnson’s The Last Jedi, aside from occasional exceptions, Lucasfilm has grown complacent in less risk-taking within a franchise whose icon status is built upon innovating the Sci-Fi genre like never before. The franchise started opting for taking the safest routes possible with almost all their projects, and this complacency and combination of over half a decade worth of streaming quality material is how we end up with the latest Star Wars movie, The Mandalorian and Grogu, a film that’s fine enough at best and numbingly tedious at worst.

This isn’t to say that The Mandalorian and Grogu is an abysmal film, and it certainly has its cute moments of levity and solidly helmed action from director Jon Favreau, but the film can just never escape the feeling of being an overly elongated episode of the Disney+ series it’s an extension of, in both redundant structure and flat visuals. It’s not from the worst Star Wars movie, but it’s certainly the series at its most flavorless, and it’s the most a Star Wars film ever felt like going full autopilot mode.

For the uninitiated, The Mandalorian and Grogu is essentially an abridged adventure of the TV series it’s based on, The Mandalorian; fortunately, prior knowledge of the show is not needed to grasp what’s going on here. The film starts in a very similar fashion to the series, following the adventures of Mandalorian Din Djarin (Pedro Pascal), an extremely skilled bounty hunter working post the fall of the evil Empire. The Empire, however, still has imperial warlords scattered across the galaxy, and the New Republic, led by Colonel Ward (Sigourney Weaver), decides to gather the help of The Mandalorian and his tiny apprentice Grogu to defeat the still-standing imperial warlords.

Their latest assignment has them finally encountering Jabba the Hutt’s twin cousins. The brother and sister are willing to give The Mandalorian and The New Republic the whereabouts of an unknown imperial warlord in exchange for Mando rescuing Jabba’s now adult son, Rotta the Hutt (Jeremy Allen White), from imprisonment, where he is forced to fight in gladiator-like competition. With stakes high and another bounty on the line, Mando and Grogu must journey forth on their most expansive journey yet.

If there’s anything to at least appreciate about the sporadic nature of The Mandalorian and Grogu, it’s that it at times can capture a bit of the fun of the back to basics monster of the weekish format that is sometimes present in the series. Fun can still be had in just watching The Mandalorian, just continuously beating up stormtroopers and bad guys every couple of minutes, and in that way, the pacing is very akin to a video game in both a positive and negative way as the movie progresses.

In spite of the inevitably insistent corporate merchandising around his existence, Grogu himself is of course as cute and charming as ever. There are periods where, during an action sequence, the movies need to cut to Grogu doing cute things, which can be a hindrance, but a big part of the little guy’s charm, which still remains intact, is the utter wizardry of the puppetry work done with him. Grogu has a standout chain of scenes where he must care for his surrogate father, and it’s where the film slows down in a nice way and gives him a bit more to do in the narrative.

It also can’t be understated just how incredible Ludwig Göransson’s score is throughout the movie’s entirety. He does such a great job offering a new side to the galaxy far, far away musically that, rather than just taking the greatest hits from John Williams’ Wonder, he creates and evolves from his own, bringing a distinct essence to the Mandalorian, with a standout piece of it being essentially a techno remix of the classic Mandalorian theme. It’s funny because the score is so good that it often has more wonderful and thrilling qualities than pretty much anything in the movie itself.

After its relatively effective cold open, the problems with The Mandalorian and Grogu begin to pile onto each other when you realize, structurally, it is 5 episodes of the show crammed together in one, which may seem fine at first, but it worsens the experience as the film progresses. Mando mowing down the baddies in between moments of some truly rough dialogue becomes incredibly repetitive, and it doesn’t help matters when the action becomes progressively worse, going from solid enough stealth takeouts and blaster shootouts to grey, sludgy landscapes and CGI creatures of all sizes bashing each other around like action figures.

The film’s narrative is virtually nonexistent and really only has any presence when it needs some reasoning to get our characters from point A to B. Specific lines revolving around the new character of Rotta the Hutt tend to be particularly laughable when he quite literally spells out his backstory and relationship around his father in subsequent scenes, reptating the same information as if the audience didn’t hear him the first time.

It truly makes moments like these, and the lack of basically any meaningful development between the new characters or The Mandalorian himself makes most of the movie’s dialogue heavy and exposition scenes feel like cutscenes within the video game revolving around Mando bashing goons. We are never allowed many moments to actually sit with anything that happens, with even Martin Scorsese showing up in a flash by role. There exists not a single memorable performance or moment at all within a movie that operates at an endless stop-and-go structure, and its videogame logic would maybe be more tolerable if it did so more efficiently, but the movie clocks in at nearly two hours and 20 minutes, making the redundancies basically unforgivable.

The Mandalorian and Grogu is far from the bottom of the barrel when it comes to the films within Star Wars, but it certainly will go down as easily the most forgettable. Nearly every Star Wars film, whether it’s pure majestic wonder, deep confusion in its swings, or bewildering anger, makes you feel something, but this is the first time Star Wars has felt like a virtually nothing experience. It’s handful of solid action scenes and cute Grogu moments can’t save it from a safely dull structure that has nothing new to offer to the world of Star Wars or its titular characters. The film only reiterates the idea that a film series that was like no other in its prowess now operates as blandly as any other franchise, and that’s sad.