‘The Mandalorian and Grogu’ review: The Forced way

Directed by Jon Favreau, The Mandalorian and Grogu is essentially three episodes of a TV show in a CGI trench coat.

There’s a moment, about forty minutes into The Mandalorian and Grogu, when Din Djarin (Pedro Pascal) walks into yet another dimly lit cantina, asks yet another grizzled informant where to find his next target, kills a few henchmen, and walks back out toward the Razor Crest. The scene’s direction is competent enough. Ludwig Göransson‘s score does what it always does. Pascal’s voice carries the right gravel through the helmet’s modulation.

And somewhere in the back of my brain, a quiet thought surfaced: “This is the part where the show would cut to commercial.”

That thought, once it arrived, refused to leave. Because the longer Jon Favreau and Dave Filoni’s film runs (two hours and twelve minutes, every one of them earned the hard way), the more clearly you can see the seams where one episode of The Mandalorian ends and the next begins.

A bounty leads to a planet. The planet has a character with information. The character demands a favor. Of course, the favor leads to another planet. The structure is so transparent it stops being a structure at all and becomes a checklist. Three TV episodes in a trenchcoat, pretending to be a movie.

For the… fans?

Let’s be fair to the impulse here. Favreau has spent months telling anyone who would listen that he built this film for the audience that skipped the show. And you can feel that intention. The exposition is patient. The mission is simple. Sigourney Weaver‘s Colonel Ward, a New Republic officer the script invents whole cloth to deliver the premise, sits Din down and explains the plot to him like a teacher describing a worksheet.

He must find the Hutts, free their nephew Rotta, get the location of Commander Coin, save the galaxy from another Imperial revival. The film keeps faith with the casual viewer. It assumes the casual viewer wants the sort of competent, color-by-numbers adventure they could fall asleep during on a Sunday afternoon in 1987.

That assumption is the rot at the center of The Mandalorian and Grogu. The film thinks it’s making a pulpy Saturday matinee. What it’s actually making is a TV movie.

The distinction matters.

And the distinction matters in a particular way that gets to what’s broken inside Lucasfilm right now. Favreau and Filoni keep gesturing toward Indiana Jones and James Bond when they talk about Din Djarin. These eponymous heroes, static archetypes, the genre logic of the unchanging man moving through changing situations.

They do have a point, in theory. Indy doesn’t have an arc in Raiders, exactly. He has a stance toward the world. Bond’s pleasures live in his style and the films’ style. Like in the way Q’s gadgets and the villain’s lair and the henchman’s gimmick rotate through the formula.

Here’s what those films also have, though: a Belloq. A Goldfinger. A Marion Ravenwood, a Pussy Galore, a Toht melting his face off in front of the Ark. The fixed hero works because everyone around him is alive. The pleasure of the genre is meeting the next oddity.

Dins of the father.

The Mandalorian and Grogu contains roughly a hundred characters, by my rough count of the supporting cast and creature designs. And exactly one of them registers as a person you might want to spend time with. That’s Rotta the Hutt, voiced with weary aristocratic exhaustion by Jeremy Allen White. Here, he’s reimagined by Favreau as a gladiator-prince. Think Adonis Creed with a slug body, fighting in pits to escape the inheritance his father (Jabba the Hutt) left him.

The idea is somewhat interesting. White finds the wounded boredom inside the part. You can see, in flickers, the movie this could have been. A story about a son refusing to become his father. A Mandalorian apprenticed to a child also refusing to become his father. Two father-shaped voids learning to circle each other.

The film proceeds to monologue Rotta’s motivation, twice, in scenes minutes apart. He spells out the inheritance he wishes to escape. Then he spells it out again, in case you missed it the first time. The film keeps treating its one good character like a kid who needs to repeat instructions back to the teacher. Favreau and his writers have so little faith that anything subtextual will land that they refuse to let subtext even exist.

Speaking roles.

The other thing the film gives up on, more strangely, is anyone who isn’t a man.

I want to be careful with this observation, because the easy version of it sounds like a checklist complaint. And I’m interested in something more specific. The second season of The Mandalorian — the one most fans remember as the show’s peak — moves through a procession of female characters whose stories matter.

There’s Bo-Katan Kryze stepping back into Mandalorian history. Cara Dune anchoring a frontier town. Fennec Shand returning from the desert. Ahsoka Tano walking out of mist with white blades. The show understood that a stoic male hero needs to encounter people who exceed him. The whole Western tradition the show borrows from is built on this. Built on the drifter who walks into town and finds someone already there. Someone whose problem he can choose to help with or walk away from.

The Mandalorian and Grogu offers, by my count, exactly one human woman with speaking lines and a name: Sigourney Weaver’s Colonel Ward, who exists to brief Din at the beginning and chastise him throughout. The aunt Hutt, one half of the twin antagonist pair from The Book of Boba Fett, hisses a few lines in Huttese alongside her brother.

And yet…

Beyond that, the film travels through six or seven planets and offers a parade of male henchmen, male informants, male bounty hunters, male shopkeepers (Martin Scorsese voices one, for reasons I cannot reconstruct), male pilots, male Imperial officers, male crime lords.

It is one of the strangest male monocultures I’ve seen in a recent tentpole. And the strangeness isn’t even ideological. The Western works because the drifter meets the town. This film has Din meet only other men in helmets. The galaxy, somehow, shrinks.

I don’t read it as malice. I read it as a production where the question never came up. That’s worse, actually. The original series got this right by reflex, after all. The film fails to get it right because the reflex stopped firing for whatever reason.

The Mandalorian and Grogu abandons the only thematic premise it has.

Din Djarin spent the back half of the series choosing his moral framework deliberately: Leaving the orthodoxy of the Watch, finding Bo-Katan’s heterodox faction, and deciding that his loyalty to Grogu superseded the Creed’s prohibition against removing his helmet. The series resolved by having him pledge himself to the New Republic, working only for what he understood to be the good guys. This was, for those of us who care about the character, the most interesting place he had ever stood.

The premise of the film is that the New Republic asks Din to do shady work. He must consort with the Hutts, free a captive heir to a crime dynasty, traffic with the galaxy’s worst. All in service of finding a hidden Imperial. The film teases the obvious dramatic question. Then the film does everything in its considerable runtime to avoid asking it.

In fact, Ward chastises Din for his moral squeamishness, the script playing him as someone fussy about the dirty work the New Republic needs done. The movie wants you to feel that Din’s discomfort is the obstacle, rather than the subject. The film treats his arc as an unambiguous good.

The one weapon Din doesn’t have.

Compare this with Andor, a show The Mandalorian and Grogu now exists downstream of, whether or not it wants to. Stellan Skarsgård‘s Luthen Rael spends two seasons articulating exactly this dilemma. The moral compromises rebellion requires, the sunrise you sacrifice yourself to never see. And it remains the single best thing Lucasfilm has produced in the streaming era.

The thread is right there. The Mandalorian and Grogu picks it up, looks at it, and threads it back into the armored sleeve.

You can feel, watching this, the exact moment the film decided it was happier as the Saturday morning cartoon. That decision is a choice. It is a choice that gives up on most of what its own protagonist used to be for.

The man who couldn’t change.

The Mandalorian worked, in its first two seasons, because it understood it was a series of short stories about a man who couldn’t change. Who traveled through a galaxy full of people who could. The third season started losing that thread by reaching for the franchise lore: The politics of Mandalore, the Imperial shadow council, the Easter eggs from Rebels. And the film completes the slide.

However, the film also decides that what makes Star Wars Star Wars is the iconography: The helmet, the kid, the cantinas, the swooping ships, the carbonite-frozen tableau. It treats those images as the meal rather than the seasoning.

Sure, the opening sequence works. We see Din introduced in motion, mid-hunt, doing the one thing he does, and the film cuts loose for a few minutes before remembering what it’s afraid of. Göransson’s score in this sequence does the thing he does so well, too, recalling Carpenter and Vangelis and the synth grain of ’80s pulp without losing the Wagnerian heart of Williams.

And yes, the puppetry on Grogu remains truly lovely. It’s the kind of practical craft that makes you feel briefly hopeful about cinema. There are individual frames in The Mandalorian and Grogu that justify their existence on an IMAX screen.

Then the movie starts asking Din to run a bunch of f*****g errands.

A film of errands is still a film, in principle. Paris, Texas is errands. Stalker is errands. But even errands in a film have to mean something. They have to accrue. The runtime has to bend a character toward someone they couldn’t have been at the start.

Din ends The Mandalorian and Grogu exactly where he began it — protective, helmeted, taciturn, doing the right thing for the right reason — and Grogu ends it slightly more confident at using the Force on small objects. Probably. The film closes with a soundtrack cue titled “Your Turn, Grogu,” gesturing at a passing of generations the movie has done none of the work to earn.

Recognition, the film keeps insisting, is enough. Look! The helmet. Look! The kid. Look! A familiar cantina, a familiar species, the twin Hutts you half-remember from Boba Fett, Embo from Clone Wars, Zeb from Rebels, the Anzellans being twee, an X-wing slipping through canyon walls, a Mandalorian theme over a sunset. The film mistakes the act of pointing for the act of dramatizing. Look, it says, again and again, instead of feel.

One of the most expensive non-sequiturs ever made.

There’s a brand of failure in popular art that wears the costume of success, and The Mandalorian and Grogu is one of the cleanest examples I can recall. The technicians did their jobs. The producers, too. Pascal showed up and gave the part what the part required. The score is all right. The puppet is quirky fun. Many shots are framed by someone who’s framed shots before. And the result still amounts to one of the most expensive non-sequiturs ever made. A live-action cartoon that, watched on a screen four stories tall, somehow contrives to look smaller than it did on a television.

What’s strange, sitting with the film afterward, is how clearly it points at the question Lucasfilm now has to answer.

For seven years, the company has used Star Wars television as a holding pattern. Some of it has been remarkable, to be clear. Andor will outlive most of what Hollywood made this decade. Some of it has been charming. Skeleton Crew found a real heart. Some of it has been a discourse engine. The Acolyte contained the bones of something interesting that the broader online culture chose to bury.

Fan service language.

But the through-line, project to project, has been a slow drift toward fan service as a language. The language of characters returning because you remember them, Easter eggs deployed because the franchise expects applause for the act of placement.

To that end, The Mandalorian and Grogu is the moment that language hits the multiplex. It is the proof of concept for a model where the Disney+ logic — recognition, callback, completionist pleasure — becomes the model for theatrical Star Wars itself. Filoni now basically runs Lucasfilm. His sensibility favors fan-service-as-mythology, the careful pulling forward of Legends-era characters into canon. The long architectural game of Heir to the Empire and the MandoVerse capstone.

Whether that capstone film actually comes about depends almost entirely on what this weekend’s grosses look like. Whether it should get made is, I think, a harder question. The instincts on display here — the worship of frenzied action, the allergy to subtext, the inability to imagine that Din Djarin might have a moral interior worth probing — are the instincts that will run Heir to the Empire if it survives.

The bottom line.

Now having seen what those instincts produce when given two hours and a $166 million budget…well, it’s easy to feel terrified of what they produce given the keys to the rest of the decade.

Still, there is a version of Star Wars that the last several years have shown us is possible. It is a patient Star Wars. One that is willing to be strange. That trusts the audience to weigh a moral dilemma in their hands without flinching. With a character whose interior runs deeper than the next set piece.

The Mandalorian and Grogu offers a different version. In this version, the audience receives what the audience already received, albeit in a slightly bigger format. And yes, for the price of a ticket on top of the price of a Disney+ subscription. The film is, in that sense, perfectly designed for the moment Disney is in. A moment where the company would rather you remember something you already liked than risk asking you to like something new.

The Mandalorian and Grogu opens in theaters on Friday, May 22. Watch the trailer here.

Images courtesy of Disney and Lucasfilm. Read more articles by Jon Negroni here.