I visited the movie theater four blocks from my home to watch the latest Star Wars film. This new film is officially titled “Star Wars: The Mandalorian and Grogu.” And while it didn't exactly transport me, it didn't annoy me much either.
The Disney Plus streaming platform first released “The Mandalorian” as a TV series in 2019 and it has been successful running for three seasons with a cumulative 24 episodes. This film continues the narrative of the series, centered around a laconic bounty hunter traveling through the remote parts of the galaxy, capturing bad guys, transporting good guys, and making friends along the way.
If you have been to a movie theater in the past 16 months you have likely watched a legacy sequel, or you have at least seen advertising for one. These are films like “Mission Impossible: The Final Reckoning,” “Jurassic World: Rebirth,” and “Tron Aries,” all of which were released last year.
This year has plenty of legacy sequels too, and “Star Wars: The Mandalorian and Grogu” is one of them. Legacy sequels are more than ordinary sequels, because they carry the oversized memories and expectations of large-scale ubiquitous film franchises.
For many debatable reasons, these legacy sequels lean hard into the nostalgia of their preceding films, with visual references, repeated bits of dialog and jokes all about past moments on the silver screen. Relying too much on this filmic nostalgia makes these legacy sequels disappointing and creatively tepid to me.
So, I entered the movie theater with some trepidation before watching this Mandalorian” picture with his small green nearly mute companion on his back, not named Yoda. The Mandalorian travels to a planet ruled by gangsters and pirates to rescue Rata the Hutt from his indentured servitude, return Rata to his home planet, and get some prized intel on tracking a mysterious target, like some previous Star Wars films.
The story in this is like a traditional western put in a science fiction setting. The “Mandalorian Grogu” is the first Star Wars film in seven years, the previous being episode nine, “The Rise of Skywalker” from 2019.
Surprisingly, this new release does not lean too hard into the nostalgia of the rich and visually diverse world of Star Wars films. Nostalgic nods do exist throughout, but they don't hit you over the head. So, director and co-screenwriter Jon Favreau does deserve some credit for keeping this new release from being a completely boring trip down memory lane at two hours and 12 minutes long.
This film has the expected square plucky attitude both parents and children will appreciate. Much of the production design is grand and exciting and this has a surprising amount of puppeteering work in it, adding more realism to the acting and action sequences than CGI usually does.
Only four human non-CGI characters or non-puppet characters are in this entire film so most characters are androids, aliens, and animals, with most of them presented through CGI. And with so many crazy animal creatures, this feels like Star Wars does the "Blippi" YouTube series, or Star Wars does its own version of National Geographic.
So many dangerous animal encounters abound. I started thinking, did producers intentionally keep live-action actors to a minimum in this one to cut down on costs?
Whether you're passionate about Star Wars films or not, this one is just okay. By the way, 12 official Star Wars films have been released before this one. “The Mandalorian and Grogu” is fine. It's middle of the road, and I don't expect it to be something viewers will be raving about this summer.
Like we already learned with the extensive Marvel Cinematic Universe of too many movies, maybe there's too many Star Wars movies already deterring this new one from feeling interesting and fresh.
For Flix at 48 I'm Casey T. Allen.
