It's been a while! I've been rehearsing for a play that opens this month so I haven't had much time to review things. Here's one for The Mandalorian and Grogu, though.
Not every Star
Wars story needs to have a planet-destroying superweapon or a wrinkly old
Sith lord threatening the entire galaxy. There are only so many times stakes
can be ridiculously high before things get stale and the returns do that whole
diminishing thing. Star Wars: The Mandalorian and Grogu does not have
high stakes; it doesn’t feel like it has any stakes at all, in fact, which in
and of itself is a problem.
The titular duo often have their lives
threatened and the impending doom of mission failure often makes itself felt,
but there is no clear endgame in The Mandalorian and Grogu. The film
makes you care about things as they happen, but those things get wrapped up
nice and tight pretty quickly after they are introduced. The result is a lot of
“okay... so now what?” moments as the film goes from problem to problem with no
discernible through- line. Not only did this rob me of some emotional
investment, but it also created some awful pacing that made the film feel over by
the end of hour one and pushing interminable by the end of hour two. For being Star
Wars’s triumphant return to the cinema for the first time since 2019 it
sure feels like The Mandalorian and Grogu is three episodes of the
Disney+ show in a trenchcoat.
But the things that are enjoyable in The
Mandalorian are no less enjoyable in The Mandalorian and Grogu, to
its credit. Mando has a few cool fight scenes full of gadget trickery and
general badassery, and that Grogu kid is as adorable as always. The
Mandalorian and Grogu doesn’t exactly move their story forward, but it also
doesn’t require any prior knowledge of the TV show, which is nice in this era
of combined-universe homework assignments. And Sigourney Weaver in an X-Wing? I
underestimated how much I needed that.
The clear standout of The Mandalorian and
Grogu is the music. The TV show always had a rad soundtrack courtesy of
Ludwig Goransson, who not only won two Emmys for his Mandalorian work but
also Oscars for Black Panther, Oppenheimer, and Sinners, but here
he takes it to a whole new level. It’s kind of weird at times (I am pretty sure
this is the first Star Wars work to feature synth-heavy beats in a few
of its songs), but it not only works but also shows that composers don’t have
to copy John Williams’s homework anytime a project in the galaxy far, far away
comes along.
So
yeah, The Mandalorian and Grogu isn’t all bad. There are, unfortunately,
much worse Star Wars movies out there. But unless you are a diehard
Mando/Baby Yoda fan I would recommend waiting to watch this on Disney+ where it
belongs.
Star Wars: The Mandalorian and Grogu
is now playing in theaters.
