I haven't historically considered myself a "Star Wars" kid. And to be clear, I take no pride in saying that or anything. I respect the property and what it's given to pop culture.
But I do feel like it's worth mentioning in this review that I didn't really go into Jon Favreu's The Mandalorian and Grogu thinking I had much of what I'd call nostalgia for this movie to exploit.
And yet watching this movie, I found myself hearkening back to the things about Star Wars that caught my attention as a kid. For me, that was the gladiator-style match in "Attack of the Clones." This film offers quite a few roller-coasters along those lines. And as far as the creature designs go for the monsters in these arenas, they were quite good. I wasn't trying too hard to anticipate which were computer-generated and which were puppeted, but the aesthetics of both the Jim Henson era and the Spielberg era sat very well here in this vessel.
This spinoff of the hit Disney+ series sees The Mandalorian and his adopted kid on a special assignment to rescue Ratta, the heir to Jabba the Hutt's criminal enterprise. This is not Mando's first choice, but the payoff may carry a long way for both the rebellion and a bounty hunter with a child to support. Yet as he dives into this corner of the criminal underworld, and as the ethical implications of his actions manifest, things become complicated, and this bounty hunter will have to reckon with the cost of having a moral compass here on the galaxy's frontier.
The movie's biggest surprise was turning anything Hutt-related into one of the more endearing things Star Wars has offered in recent years. Even knowing that Jeremy Allen White was playing the giant slug man, I honestly could not recognize Carmy in the performance.
Another thing about my polite interest in Star Wars mythology is that, even though the state of the canon in the wake of the Disney takeover is hotly contested within the fandom, I haven't always known how to sort my own classification. The Disney+ series on which this is based? I like it just fine. I don't consider it peak television. My main investment in the property has been the window it provides into the evolving popular image of the masculine hero--and what it does to pair this intergalactic cowboy with a small child who is completely dependent on him.
This is where the film gets interesting to me. For much of the film, their parenting game functions more like padding than narrative infrastructure. Up until the film's midpoint, you could honestly imagine much of the story playing out the same without baby Yoda in tow. And so the parent-child setup becomes more of a thematic draping than an active agent in narrative progression. This is where I think it might be easy for Tik Tok film critics to microwave some lines about the movie "not knowing what to do with itself" or "losing the vision."
And this is where perhaps I am projecting more onto the project than Lucasfilm was designing when they were plotting how best to hold the attention of audiences without a Skywalker to lean on. Even so, I couldn't help but see the links inherent in the scenario that were left unremarked upon by the dialogue.
In the wake of a galaxy redefining itself after decades of subjugation, a landscape where every alliance matters, a man has to decide to whom he owes his allegiances and for whom he will compromise. This is the world he is building for a world rising out of oppression, and it's also a world he is building for his kid, which endows everything he does with the mythos and gravitas of the builder of a kingdom, and that was enough to secure my investment for the whole movie.
And maybe this is all the musings of someone still actively wading through a different sort of galactic empire still waiting for someone to blow up the second Death Star--and hoping that there will be some kind of rebuilding period of our own.
But this gave me the rare experience to look at something "Star Wars" and feel something a lot like hope, much like the return of the jedi order or The Force awakening. And I guess that is worth something.
--The Professor
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