More cheese please on this cheese pizza of a movie
dir: Jon Favreau
2026
The titles of films are often baffling, but could you imagine trying to explain the title of this flick, a Star Wars to, say, a non-English speaking immigrant in their 70s? For some reason I’ve become fixated on an imaginary conversation in my head that could never happen these days since my sainted mother has passed on from this mortal coil:
“Son, what did you do this weekend?”
- “Well, Mother dearest, I went to a cinema and watched a movie.”
“Praytell, what was the movie called?”
- “Err, um, it was called The Mandalorian and Grogu
“What, and I cannot stress this enough, the fuck are those things, individually and then put together in that sentence?”
- “Mum, they’re made up sci fi bullshit.”
“Oh, okay then, sorry I asked. I just wanted to know what my son has been up to and if he’s been all right and instead I get passive-aggressive nonsense and salty talk. I cannot abide salty talk.”
- “I’m sorry mum, please forgive me. Here, have ten thousand flowers to make up for it.”
“It’s barely enough.”
- “I know let me try harder…”
Okay, so that was self-indulgent twaddle, but, hey, when you lose your mother, then you can tell me what the appropriate way to honour her is. First things first, she would never have sworn like that, but secondly, however prone to exaggeration I might be, if I’d said the words The Mandalorian and Grogu to her face she probably would have slapped me, and with good reason.
To be fair I would never have been able to explain Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind to her either, mostly because I think all of us only ever pretended to know what it meant.
The thing about Star Wars that I think all of us are starting to appreciate, with a certain amount of creeping dread, is that the ‘thing’ that George Lucas and a whole bunch of other people created, everything and everywhere that it was cobbled together from, it as an entity can only ever look backwards. The one thing they’ll never do is stop looking backwards. A new film that comes out this year is set in the past. Does that make any sense? Something supposedly set in a far distant future / past in a far flung galaxy has to always, always, always be set in the late 70s, early 80s.
Entirely independent of anything to do with a story or plot, I was fascinated to watch long sections of this flick set on… a moon of a planet named after Shakira, who, presumably in this universe is rich enough to own her own star systems. And the setting of this planet that our hero walks around in has sets that pretty much look identical to Blade Runner forty years ago. Don’t get me wrong, it looked fine, it’s just that, for whatever reasons, and I’m sure there’s lots of them, it looked deliberately like the past’s idea of what the future might look like circa 1985.
It’s fascinating that it must always look retro-futuristic, and that it must always be filling in gaps between eras that we couldn’t really care about. I mean, there is no consensus in terms of what audiences in general want, and what Star Wars fans specifically want out of this franchise anymore. Anything that mimics the original films too closely is criticised for being too timid and cautious, anything that varies too greatly is criticised for being not faithful enough.
I think it’s a no-win situation, which is why they should maybe pack it all in for 10 years and let it rest.
But of course they won’t. There must have been some strategy at play in thinking these two nonsensical words would do well together and draw in audiences as a title, but the flick got ignored at the box office, and was beaten, soundly, with big sticks, by Backrooms and Obsession, which were made, combined, on budgets less than 10 per cent of what was expended here.
I don’t know how many people have watched the series on Disney+ in order to want to watch the continuing adventures of Lone Wolf and Cub, sorry, I mean the Man with No Name (whose name is Din) and his green diminutive charge but... it really can’t have been that many people. I mean, I watched the series, all the series because I’m a cheap date and a lifelong nerd tragic, but the rest of the world has both higher and lower standards at the moment.
Picking up from nowhere, but set after the end of Return of the Jedi, where the Empire has collapsed but some individual commanders still try to operate as warlords, the Mando, as he is called, is tasked with pursuing these Imperial remnants and Bringing Them to Justice, or just killing them as the case may be. His boss is Sigourney Weaver? Either she’s just flatout playing Sigourney Weaver, or some Rebel leader who acts like a disappointed nanny whenever she chats with him. “Messy, very messy” she keeps describing the bedroom that he’s meant to keep tidy.
She forces / manipulates the Mando into finding the son of Jabba the Hutt who similarly is a big slug like creature, except he has muscular arms and abs. He has abs in places where abs probably shouldn’t be, but he’s happy about it.
He, being a slug monster called Rotta, is voiced very unnecessarily by Jeremy Allen White. I say it’s unnecessary because the voice is so distorted that anyone could have done it. I could have done it. I, too, could have delivered strange dialogue about how, even though I’m a slug monster, I want to be a man, and be my own man, and fight like a man, and get out from beneath the shadow of the man my father was, all the while wondering why I, a buff slug monster, would be referring to myself as a man.
Are we not men? We Are Devo-lved Slug Monsters!
Rotta fights in some gladiator pits on Shakira’s Moon. He thinks he’s about to get his freedom from slavery, but his owner, some Imperial Remnant jerk called Coin or Coyne or something, wants to kill him, because Rotta’s aunt and uncle, also slug monsters, hate Rotta for reasons. Mando does this or that, and notice I haven’t even mentioned Pedro Pascal at all yet, because 99 per cent of the time, it’s not even him; it’s two other people walking around in the Mando costume and him supplying the voice, but he does shoot a lot of people, and stab a few people too.
The film, if I can call it that, almost seems like it could have reached a natural conclusion at a certain point, after about an hour, and then another ‘episode’ starts, and it’s dragged on for another 45 minutes or so. In that second part, Mando is unconscious, and his little green ward has to look after him, for ages and ages and ages.
Long stretches of no dialogue. I was okay with that. The dialogue was often so terribly generic that long wordless stretches ended up being a blessing.
I have to think the thinking behind this film is that having Pedro Pascal act like Clint Eastwood in the Sergio Leone films would appeal to adult men, maybe some women, and the antics of Grogu and the other tiny mechanics / Babu Fricks would appeal to children. Draw in new audiences for this aging and rickety franchise. It’s not a bad idea on paper. I mean, Pascal gives good voice, and the muppets operating the puppet that is Grogu can wrench some laughs out of the little dude’s antics. The cuteness mingled with his dangerous cluelessness in the face of danger appeals to all sorts of people despite their ages.
I feel like the people saying this flick just seems like three episodes of the tv show squashed together are missing the point: in some places it looks way better than what they could manage budget-wise on the small screen. The opening attack on some Imperial remnant jerk that the New Republic wants captured looked great and looks better and more expansive that anything they did on the show. But that isn’t kept up for the entire length of the flick. Not that it really matters. The issue is it tells a tale that doesn’t advance anything and doesn’t illuminate anything that needs illuminating, unless we had burning questions about whether Hutts had feelings and aspirations and such.
We learn nothing we didn’t already know about the Mando, Grogu keeps doing his thing of trying to eat lots of things, which never started being amusing at any stage, and stays non-verbal, and uses his powers whenever it’s narratively convenient. The story transpires in a way and in a context where it changes nothing, really, and doesn’t forecast anything more interesting happening in a future film or installment either. If I had any goodwill towards these characters (and I do), it’s not really because of anything that happens in this flick: it’s solely because of my experiences watching the three seasons of the show.
So, ultimately, it’s horribly unnecessary, but not completely unenjoyable for the non-toxic Star Wars fan, of which there are about three left, I think. I wish I could tax them further for how cowardly they are, how unwilling to do something expansive and new (like the Andor series, or even Acolyte, which had a lot of goods points even though it was still fixated on the past of the franchise), but it agreeably killed time in a non-painful manner.
That’s about all I can hope for these days.
6 ways in which Grogu nearly kills everyone and then just saves everyone out of 10
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“ The old protect the young, and then the young protect the old.” – this is the way - The Mandalorian and Grogu
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