Star Wars: The Mandalorian And Grogu

Bluesky

Star Wars is a rough conceptual cloud, a set of ideas and appearances that produce something whose boundaries are uncertain and whose features are mixed. It's a bit like a sandwich, which might, as the mood takes you, include a hot dog or a burrito or a reuben. A monte cristo counts differently than the others but is it more or less enjoyable for it?

After the original we've had films that ask 'what if it was darker and bigger?' and 'what if ambition blinded us to quality?' and 'what if it were actually a war film?' and 'what if we made a sequel to the commercial juggernaut?' and 'what if we made a sequel to the weird Seventies experimental space opera?' and then 'what if we ignored that as loudly as we could?'

In that litany The Mandalorian And Grogu asks 'what if Star Wars were an Eighties action movie?' and the answer is 'pretty fun'. It has opening text at the start, but then a pre-credits sequence, a bit of Top Gun, which will be followed by bits of things like Predator and Aliens and lesser works like Raw Deal and Commando. I have described Star Wars as bricolage, but maybe cookery is as apt - a pinch of this, a pinch of that, and from those borrowings (if not outright thefts) something new. Or, sometimes, something that feels like leftovers.

It's hard for me to to have mixed feelings about this. Every Star Wars film will be someone's gateway to the franchise, and because this is not mine it's maybe clearer to me how little it unlocks. I've seen the movies, been bought the t-shirts, have the streaming shows, the comic books, the miniatures games, the action figures, the Lego, the fan art, the hat, the socks. For me there's the pleasures of recognition, and in fairness some moments of stark beauty, sunsets and forests and more. For others the nagging sense that when this does make it to Disney+ there should be an 'annotations' track that explains that Garazeb 'Zeb' Orrelios, of a resistance cell based on Lothal, callsign Spectre 4 was introduced in the animated show Rebels, is based on early concept art for Chewbacca, shares elements of his history with drafts for that character. That the guy in a different hat than mine is Dave Filoni, superfan and showrunner. That the Mandalorian Creed is at its most fundamentalist based on abnegation and privacy. That early bounty hunting target Rodda The Hutt first appeared in The Clone Wars where he was nicknamed 'Stinky', kidnapped as a baby to try to spark a separate conflict in that tumultuous era.

Carrying all that context with me means I'm not sure how well anyone else will pick up elements upon which this and other stories depend. With Pedro Pascal (and two co-performers) holding to a vow to remain masked, one of our protagonists is less animated than his puppet and digital co-stars. Grogu is a delight, but there's never quite the same moment of wonder as the first time I saw Kermit on a bicycle. It's not easy being green, but the screens will do a lot of lifting. Rodda's importance to events is undercut by effects work that doesn't keep pace with the quality of much of the rest of the film, and Jeremy Allen White's performance feels a bit flat. He's a great actor, but surrounded by voice performers the disconnection between him and what's on screen feels remote enough that one might reach for it to change over. Unlike Sigourney Weaver's performance(s) in and as various Avatars the animation doesn't seem to be motion capture. It might be, I've not yet waded through enough of the swamp of 'making of' content to find out, but the effect remains.

Weaver herself adds a bit of gravitas to a role that needs more fleshing out. We get more of a sense of the Anzellans, miniature mechanics who exist in a confluence of Mogwai, Time Bandits, and Fraggle Rock. They're one of dozens of small parts that should keep The Mandalorian And Grogu ticking along like clockwork but have me grinding my gears a little. Each and every one of the other works I've thus far cited is one of which I am fond, but like the Ninja Turtles my fondness for pizza doesn't extend to when it's reheated. Make it fresh though and I'll enjoy it again.

Did I enjoy Martin Scorsese as a nervous food-stand operator? Not as much as I did seeing Werner Herzog in the similarly titled streaming show. Did I enjoy Ludwig Goransson's score in cinema sound? Absolutely, and staying through the credits meant I was rewarded with a charming version of the theme, one which illustrates Goransson's status as a worthy successor to John Williams. Not least as this doesn't contain, as far as I'm aware, any of the various leitmotifs he established over four decades. Sonically there was a moment where I expected a Wilhelm scream, and I'm not sure if I felt its lack because among the tinkling of ivories I wanted keys to jangle or that it'd more firmly root this in the Westerns that were one of the original's key influences.

This has the feel of a serial condensed to a feature. At two hours and change it's at once too long and not enough. The Mandalorian has had a major role in the Boba Fett series too, and the rancour one might feel about crossovers is lessened by how few there are here. It's "good luck", not "may the Force be with you", and I'm not sure how I feel about that.

The action sequences are entertaining, though some are less striking and more heavily edited than their equivalents. A beskar-clad John Wick, it sees stunt performers punch above their weight among strafing runs and canyon cavalry charges. The various planets we visit add to list of destinations; we've been to the desert planet, the ice planet, the city planet, now thrill to the mangrove swamp planet, the 1930s Chicago where the prohibition is about salt planet.

There are timelapse sequences, a favourite of experimental film, which put this in a tiny minority of Star Wars works. There are some excellent droids, including two that I described in my notes as "the Phil Tippet twins" and they do indeed appear to have been conjured by the architect of Mad God and his minions. There are Y-Wings, U-Wings, hunters of bounties and no disintegrations. There is gladiatorial combat, there are succession struggles, imperious twins, all wrapped in troubling status as a semi-sequel to beloved works. That might seem familiar to some but it won't be alone in that.

There are three writers, director Jon Favreau pulling double-duty, Filoni who was also a second-unit director when not popping up in a way that might get him an action figure, and Noah Kloor whose shorts work got him a gig as a staff writer on The Book Of Boba Fett. Favreau's no stranger to big budget franchise fillers. His Iron Man was the keystone for the Marvel Cinematic Universe but the sequel was the start of the struggle. How do you give audiences more of the same, without it feeling the same? The afterburners that gave Maverick and Goose the speed for which they felt the need are also known as 'reheat', but that's different than remake. Or revision, as while I will talk about Marvel Homework this could be the same for Star Wars. My worry is that newcomers will find themselves lost. If you haven't seen The Mandalorian then you might not know the way.

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