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I am, at most, a casual Star Wars fan, old enough that I watched the original set of films on their initial release and to have been disappointed by the sequel set. Most of the television series that have followed I have had little to no interest in with the exception of Andor and The Mandalorian. Andorbrought a gritty moral ambiguity to the story of a rebellion that struggled to overthrow an authoritarian empire while The Mandalorian told tales in the setting of a more straight-forward morality much like many classic Western movies. Both approaches are valid lines of exploration within a setting as vast as the Star Wars franchise, and both appealed to me on very different thematic fronts. I will confess that while I adored the first two seasons of The Mandalorian, I felt that the producers had damaged their show and premise with the changes presented in its third season. Now, three years after that final season aired, a curious phrase considering that the program was never actually broadcast, the long-awaited feature film centered on the two principal characters has arrived in theaters.
Sadly, the disintegrating quality of the story-telling that began with Season three continues in The Mandalorian and Grogu. While I cannot honestly say that this film is bad in some ways, my opinion is worse than that, because this film is dull and uninspired, vanishing from my memory like a dream a few hours after waking. This movie strikes me as the worst sort of ‘fan service’ with callbacks to characters from other media that serve no thematic or story purpose beyond having a fan point and smile because they recognized the reference.
Lucasfilm/Disney Studios
The movie begins as we follow Mando executing the final elements of a bounty hunt against an ex-imperial officer that has set himself up as a warlord. It is a prolonged action sequence that carries no narrative weight; we know nothing of the person that is being hunted and have no emotional connection to anything that transpires. There is no drama or suspense as the movie’s principal character dispatches unnamed stormtroopers with an ease that drains the action of any stakes. Worse yet, the entire sequence has absolutely no impact on the events that follow. The entire bit could be excised from the film and not one following scene would change. To the plot it matters not at all. It exists only to be a ‘thrilling’ scene for the fans who want to see Mando ‘kick ass.’ I found the entire thing as interesting as playing a video game on ‘God Mode’ where your digital enemies are incapable of any victory.
The rest of the movie is equally meaningless.
Stories, when they are well written, are about change, about characters either growing into a better version of themselves or falling due to the flaws in their nature that they are unable to overcome. The Mandalorian and Grogu is utterly static. The characters enter and exit the story unmoved and unaltered by their experiences. Even when it might appear that Mando has caused troubles by eliminating a criminal contact that the fledgling New Republic had compromised itself by working with, an off-screen deus ex machina absolves him of any error with a bit of clumsy exposition revealing that the criminals were in fact, sans any evidence presented in the movie itself, betraying the Republic the entire time. Our hero, The Mandalorian, is incapable of making mistakes of any consequence or of judgment. A hero like that can only come off as flat, dull, and uninteresting.
Truly, the only section of the movie that held my interest was the street food vendor voiced by the legendary Martin Scorsese.
The Mandalorian and Grogu has neither the cynical tone of evil acts performed for the greater good of Andor nor the direct and easily understood choosing the morally right path of the series The Mandalorian or of the films, instead telling a tale that makes no stand and chooses no side. I fully expect to have forgotten this movie within a week.
