Star Wars: The Mandalorian and Grogu

 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.