Star Wars: The Mandalorian and Grogu review

Star Wars: The Mandalorian and Grogu is the franchise’s first theatrical film in seven years, and it’s not exactly a heavy hitter. Jon Favreau picks Din and Grogu up roughly where Mandalorian Season 3 left them, runs them through a string of mission beats for the New Republic, and leaves them more or less where it found them. Ludwig Göransson’s score is doing the heaviest lifting throughout the on-screen adventure.

The film is often charming and occasionally beautiful. But it’s also, by design, small. If you wanted a Star Wars film that builds toward something, this isn’t it. If you wanted two hours with Din and Grogu, it delivers just that.

What it gets right

Ludwig Göransson is the reason the film often feels bigger. His reworked themes for the Mandalorian universe carry the cinematic moments the script doesn’t quite earn, and the choices he makes around the quieter beats are some of the strongest music he’s written for the franchise. The score expands his TV work into the kind of space the small screen never asked for. When the film is at its best, it’s usually because Göransson is doing something underneath it.

Grogu is still doing the heavy lifting in the heart department. Some of the warmest moments in the film are the quiet ones — Grogu reacting, Grogu watching, Grogu being Grogu.

Three seasons of television built the Din-and-Grogu dynamic, and the film leans on it constantly. There’s an efficiency to how little the screenplay has to do to make their relationship work — the audience has already done the homework. The script can skip past the legwork of explaining what they are to each other and go straight to the small moments, a look, a beat, a head-tilt from Grogu, that the TV show taught us how to read. When the film stops trying to be a feature and just lets the two of them be in a scene together, it’s at its most confident.

Where it falls short

The pacing is off. Whatever this is structurally, it isn’t shaped like a film. Mando and Grogu move from set piece to set piece in the same rhythm they would on television — a long mission beat, a quieter character beat, the next mission beat — and at feature length that rhythm starts to expose itself. The film never finds the gear shift that separates a two-hour story from four episodes of one. It plays as a string of Disney+ chapters strung together at theatrical scale.

There’s no real character arc. Din ends the film as an unchanged version of the man he was at the start, and Grogu ends it slightly more capable (at a push), and that’s about as much as the runtime allows. The screenplay chooses mission over character. Star Wars works hardest when the franchise lets these characters change — Maul – Shadow Lord earlier this month was an example of what that looks like when the writing commits to it. The Mandalorian and Grogu doesn’t commit. It runs the duo through gigs, the gigs are fine, and that’s where it ends.

None of which would be a problem if this weren’t the franchise’s first theatrical Star Wars film in seven years. The Rise of Skywalker came out in December 2019. Every theatrical project Lucasfilm announced in the intervening years — Taika Waititi’s film, Patty Jenkins’s Rogue Squadron, Rian Johnson’s trilogy — failed to make it through development. The Mandalorian and Grogu is what arrived instead, and the opening-weekend numbers tell their own story: $12 million in Thursday previews, the lowest in the franchise’s history.

The audience showed up softer than Star Wars audiences used to. The film is shaped for a fun two-hour outing with the duo, and it just happens to be carrying seven years of theatrical absence on its back, which is a weight it isn’t built to handle.

Should you watch it?

Yes. If you’re a Mandalorian fan, this is two hours with Din and Grogu on the biggest screen they’ve had and the film delivers exactly what its title promises: the duo, doing duo things, in slightly grander surroundings.

The film stays small on the lore front. Anyone looking for character arcs that change the franchise, or a story that builds toward something, should wait for the next theatrical Star Wars announcements post Starfighter (belived to be a one-off). With Dave Filoni in his newly appointed role of President and Chief Creative Officer (CCO) of Lucasfilm, fans have reason to be cautiously optimistic about where the franchise heads next.

IMAX is worth it for the planet design and the wider exterior shots. The cinematography is at its best when the screen is big and the worlds are wide. The PG-13 rating is fairly earned: nothing too intense, a small step above the Disney+ episodes.

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