Star Wars: The Mandalorian and Grogu Review - Small Screen Origins, Big Screen Heart
Seven years have passed since Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker stumbled its way into theaters, and in the intervening years, Star Wars has lived almost entirely on the small screen, albeit with wildly uneven results – from the transcendent (Andor), to the disappointing (The Book of Boba Fett), to the harmlessly entertaining (Skeleton Crew). But throughout all of it, the one constant – the show that launched the Disney+ era of the franchise and, by any honest accounting, saved Star Wars’ relationship with its audience – has been The Mandalorian. Jon Favreau’s neo-western pulp serial, built around a taciturn bounty hunter and a small green creature with enormous eyes and an inexhaustible appetite for snacks, reminded audiences of something the sequel trilogy had occasionally forgotten: that Star Wars is, at its best, a genre exercise elevated by emotional truth. Space western. Space samurai film. Space fairy tale.
Star Wars: The Mandalorian and Grogu brings that sensibility back to the big screen, and the result is exactly what it should be.
The film picks up in the aftermath of the Disney+ series, with Din Djarin and Grogu operating on behalf of the New Republic, hunting down Imperial war criminals under the supervision of Colonel Ward, played by Sigourney Weaver with the kind of effortless authority that makes you wish the film had given her considerably more to do. A James Bond-inflected cold open dispatches a squad of AT-AT walkers and Snowtroopers with the kinetic efficiency that Favreau has always brought to action sequences, establishing the hero-and-sidekick dynamic that the film will spend its running time deepening.
The central mission involves the Hutt crime syndicate and a rescue operation involving Rotta the Hutt, Jabba’s son, voiced with unexpected warmth by Jeremy Allen White and depicted here as a buff gladiatorial figure whose fundamental decency is a deliberate inversion of everything his father represented. Rotta is one of the film’s genuine surprises – a character who could have been pure fan service and instead becomes a legitimate emotional presence, a being defined by the weight of a father’s legacy he has spent his life trying not to inherit. The thematic resonance with Din Djarin’s own relationship to his Mandalorian code – and with Grogu’s relationship to the Jedi tradition he was trained in and then chose to leave – is not accidental. Favreau has always understood that the best Star Wars stories are about what we inherit and what we choose.
Grogu himself is the film’s greatest achievement and its most sophisticated narrative choice. He is, obviously, an astonishing creation – the most purely lovable figure the franchise has produced since R2-D2, a being whose enormous eyes and expressive face and perpetual interest in consumable items of various kinds have made him a cultural phenomenon that no amount of corporate merchandise saturation has fully diminished. But the film does not rely on his cuteness. It gives him the spotlight, for a substantial portion of its running time, to carry the film’s deeper themes on his small shoulders. His scenes alongside the mechanically gifted Anzellans – tiny, excitable engineers who become unexpected allies in a rescue operation – demonstrate that Grogu is not merely a mascot but a co-protagonist, capable of driving action and generating genuine tension without the benefit of dialogue or a human face to read.
Pedro Pascal’s Din Djarin anchors everything, as he always has, through a performance conducted almost entirely through posture and inflection. The film finds a reason to remove his helmet for a stretch, satisfying any audience desire to see Pascal’s face while maintaining the dramatic integrity of a character whose armored anonymity is fundamental to his identity. It is a neat solution to a tension the show has navigated carefully for years, and Favreau handles it with the same light touch that has characterized his stewardship of this corner of the franchise throughout.
The film’s weaknesses are real, if familiar. The Imperial remnant storyline, which gestures toward the larger connective tissue linking this film forward to Dave Filoni’s ongoing narrative architecture – Ahsoka season 2 and the eventual crossover film that will bring these threads together – is revisited with genuine intrigue and then somewhat hurriedly set aside in favor of the more immediate Hutt adventure. There is a version of this film that is a little more patient with its geopolitical dimensions, and that version might have been slightly more satisfying.
But these are the complaints of someone who wanted more of something good, which is a different category of complaint from most of what Star Wars has generated over the past several years. Star Wars: The Mandalorian and Grogu is a film that knows precisely what it is – a pulp adventure in the tradition of the serials that inspired George Lucas in the first place, populated by strange creatures, unlikely alliances, and a father-and-son relationship at its center that the franchise has been building toward ever since a small green hand reached out to connect with an armored bounty hunter in that first episode seven years ago.
The moment that stays with me most is not an action sequence or a mythology-expanding revelation. It is a quieter scene in which Grogu is given a moment of genuine autonomy – a choice to make, a risk to take, a demonstration that the found family forged between these two unlikely beings has made each of them more than they could have been alone. The old protect the young. And then the young protect the old.
Star Wars has said this before, in different words and different contexts. This is the Way.
Star Wars: The Mandalorian and Grogu is in theaters now.