Of all the things western media could have learned from modern anime, smooshing together a bunch of episodes meant for television and pretending it to be a movie was really not what I was hoping for. Unfortunately, The Mandalorian and Grogu does exactly that.
To be clear, to accuse The Mandalorian and Grogu of being unnecessary or pointless would be unfair given that it could be said for just about any sequel in this age of tentpole mega-franchises; let alone for prequels, spin-offs, reimaginings, stepquels, first sequel twice removed, and prequels-in-law.
Yet, The Mandalorian and Grogu excels at being a remarkable symbol of bloated fan service and brand ego riding on the hope that the Star Wars fanbase has truly suspended any kind of critical thinking. And, if the undeservedly positive response to the recent Maul – Shadow Lord was any indication, they might just be right.
If shifting a TV series (which had already come to a relatively satisfactory if not congenial conclusion) to the cinemas for a supposed reprisal of a journey wasn’t enough of a sell-out move, then the fact that The Mandalorian and Grogu does absolutely nothing to assist anyone who hasn’t been apprised of six years’ worth of content across four seasons of two different shows should be cause enough to understand that this sorry excuse for a movie exists purely to revive hype before next year’s Starfighter.
And if you found the above paragraph confusing, be assured that the decision-making process behind The Mandalorian and Grogu is grades above however poorly constructed that sentence was.
Beyond just being an oddly-paced, poorly-assembled, stunningly uninspired entry into the Star Wars universe, The Mandalorian and Grogu distils every problem faced by today’s film franchise model of storytelling. It not only demands the watching of the three directly connected seasons, but also just about any peripheral show.
Remember that Din Djarin’s reunion with Grogu following season 2’s separation occurs not in the moments of their own show’s third season, but in the finalé of the adjacent The Book of Boba Fett.
This is only a lenient example of the problems already inherent to the original show–which includes characters introduced and developed in The Clone Wars and Rebels (whose own journeys are continued in Ahsoka, yet another spin-off), and one would assume that there’d be a general understanding of the Original Trilogy itself.
But, obviously, within the context of The Mandalorian series, many of these issues were not problems per se. After all, the series was created to boost Star Wars’ presence on the then-new Disney+ streaming platform, and was orchestrated to tie into the release of The Rise of Skywalker, albeit loosely. Whether by design or otherwise, the success of The Mandalorian soon gathered its own fandom, and has only served to replicate all the problems plaguing its parent franchise.
This isn’t to say that these characters don’t deserve the big screen treatment. If anything, the sweeping cinematography of a space western, coupled with the timeless Lone Wolf and Cub dynamic of our protagonists, makes for a ripe film.
Instead, this movie simply stoops to taking two familiar characters through a sequence of stitched-together series of events to simply re-visit familiar locations, forgettable characters, and repetitive scenarios—all in an exercise of impressively inconsequential storytelling.
Simply put, The Mandalorian and Grogu deserves to be watched on Disney+, where it belongs.