Name: The Mandalorian and Grogu Review: Star Wars’ Return to Movie Theaters Does Not Justify Its Own Existence — Review
Rating: 4

Star Wars released in 1977. Nearly 50 years later, not only has one of Hollywood’s most coveted franchises gone from an instant phenomenon to a multi-decade cinematic institution, but the industry itself has changed almost beyond recognition because of the visual effects work George Lucas and his team at Lucasfilm pushed forward with that original movie. We’ve watched entire franchises come and go, watched new ones spawn in the wake of Star Wars and the science fiction renaissance, and watched connected universes like the Marvel Cinematic Universe take the basic Star Wars formula and blow it up to a scale that would’ve been incomprehensible in 1977. There has been so much innovation since Luke and Han first met at the Mos Eisley Cantina. Nearly 50 years later, we’ve come full circle, and the snake has fully consumed its own tail. The Mandalorian and Grogu is torpedoed by visual effects that look so goopy and intangible that the very nature of what made the original Star Wars such a cataclysmic moviegoing event feels almost null and void from the start.

The decision to mark Star Wars’ return to movie theaters seven years after the folly of The Rise of Skywalker with a Mandalorian movie is puzzling, particularly considering the Disney+ series’ initial success as a launching pad for the streaming platform and its increasingly diminished cultural relevance since. I suppose The Mandalorian creator and showrunner, and this film’s director, Jon Favreau has proven himself to be a steady hand when it comes to translating nerd-culture IP onto a bigger canvas that can satisfy franchise diehards and general audiences equally. After all, he was the guiding hand behind 2008’s Iron Man, which spawned the MCU’s popularity and hostile takeover of Hollywood for the following decade. He also directed Elf, which accomplished a similar hostile takeover of Christmas that still pokes its head up every December. But here, Favreau is either fully committed to the bit of smashing three Mandalorian episodes together into a movie and hoping people eat it up, or he’s director-by-name only while the studio’s producers pull the strings. Either way, the result is a movie that feels almost entirely inconsequential to the larger Star Wars lore, as well as the individual characters it is supposedly asking us to care about.

I am by no means all that interested in the characters of The Mandalorian and Grogu in the first place. I made it through roughly a season and a half of the television series before committing to the understanding that these episodes never really intertwined in a particularly satisfying way, nor did they have enough juice to position the show as a true anthology where the only real connective tissue was Mando himself. It had some serious late-period The Walking Dead energy, where you could almost just tune into the season finales and get the gist of the entire season’s plot. This movie has that same one-off energy as one of those episodes, except now it’s playing on a much larger screen.

Mando (played, or at least voiced, by Pedro Pascal) is given a mission by Sigourney Weaver’s Colonel Ward, which proves to be more dangerous than it actually feels. He’s tasked with meeting the deceased Jabba the Hutt’s twin siblings, who have intel on the whereabouts of one of the remaining Imperial warlords, Commander Coin. They’ll give him the information in exchange for Mando returning Jabba’s son and heir, Rotta, who has shed the Hutt family image and expectations by becoming a self-made gladiator on the moon of Shakari. Once Mando and Grogu make their way there, the mission gets more complicated than they expected, and about as complicated as you’d expect if you’ve seen even a couple episodes of the flagship television series. There are some fun individual sequences here, but very little of it feels like a reason to bring these characters to the big screen.

And then there are the visual effects, which are frankly baffling. Star Wars has spent nearly five decades pushing the boundaries of what visual effects can accomplish, only for one of its biggest theatrical returns in years to look this synthetic. So much of the movie has this glossy, weightless quality to it where the environments, creatures, and action never feel like they occupy the same physical world. It isn’t simply a matter of preferring practical effects; the original Star Wars movies were themselves technical marvels because they made their impossible worlds feel tactile. Here, so much of that texture has been scrubbed away. For a franchise built on spectacle, that is a pretty devastating problem.

I leave this movie wondering: why? Why make this the movie that returns the Star Wars brand to movie theaters? And yet, at the same time, I understand exactly why. Disney sees a recognizable character, a recognizable title, and an audience that will show up because it says Star Wars on the poster. The result is a movie that feels less like a grand return and more like another piece of content being moved through the machine. That’s probably the most depressing part of The Mandalorian and Grogu. It isn’t aggressively terrible so much as it is aggressively unnecessary.

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Disney has more than doubled the number of canonical Star Wars entries since taking over the franchise, across movies and television, without building much in the way of meaningful new material that pushes the series into a direction audiences can actually be excited about for the future. There were always going to be misses. Star Wars itself has never been immune to them. But the sheer volume of material has made the franchise feel less special, and a movie like this doesn’t do much to reverse that trend.

The next attempt at moving the franchise forward is Ryan Gosling’s Star Wars: Starfighter, with Shawn Levy behind the camera. Gosling has proven himself to be a pretty bankable star, but I’m weary of adding Levy to the franchise after watching Disney repeatedly struggle to figure out what exactly it wants modern Star Wars to be. My expectations remain low, which in and of itself is depressing. Walking into a Star Wars movie expecting to be disappointed shouldn’t feel like part of the experience, but here we are.