The Mandalorian and Grogu is a joyless slog.
I’d somehow picked up the impression that this would be the movie that tied all the threads of the various TV shows together — The Mandalorian himself, baby Yoda, Admiral Thrawn, Ahsoka, Ezra, the Imperial Remnant…. But the big cross-over conclusion is still a few years in the future. For now, what we have is — well, an episode of The Mandalorian. Three, probably. With quite a lot of money spent on them. Any individual scene is tremendous fun; but cumulatively, it added up to…
The Mandalorian is the best thing which has been done with Star Wars since, literally, Star Wars. Yes, I know, the Empire Strikes Back is marvellous. Yes, I know, the Empire Strikes Back is the only example of a sequel which is better than the original, apart from the Godfather. [1] But the Empire Strikes Back wasn’t a sequel to Star Wars. [2] On this hill I will die. The Mandalorian gave me back that sense of being inside a universe, a universe with a history which I missed, with heroes who are embedded in that history and make a difference to it.
Granted, at the time of the original Star Wars, the galaxy’s history existed only in the mind of George Lucas. Mando and Ahsoka and Thrawn have back stories that can be found in two extended TV series, The Clone Wars and Star Wars: Rebels. The whole idea of Mandalore as a planet and a race, as opposed to a manufacturer of bounty-hunter armour, comes from those series. The Clone Wars is the second best thing to be done with Star Wars since Star Wars, and it is as close as we are ever likely to get to what George Lucas originally wanted the saga to look like.
The various iterations of the new Star Wars canon reference each other promiscuously. When Boba Fett, in his self titled TV show, fights a blaster duel with a gangster called Cad Bane, he remarks “I’m not a little boy any more”. If you happen to have seen some episodes of The Clone Wars in which the young Boba hangs out with the younger Cad, that’s quite a nice little moment. Some Star Wars fans enjoy easter eggs and literary hyperlinks of this kind. Others find them highly aggravating. But I think the average viewer — if such a thing as Star Wars has average viewers any more — seems hardly to notice. They just accept Star Wars is the kind of thing which refers to in-universe events that the characters know about an we don’t. They may think this is part of the magic. Christopher Tolkien covers this at some length in his introduction to the Silmarillion.
I think we could all do without the word “lore”. It seems to imply an added extra; a dash of chilli in the narrative stew; a sixpence in the Christmas pudding for the hard core follower to bite on. “Oh, did. Prince Hals’s dad appear in Richard II? You can’t expect me to keep track of all this lore.” And clearly, Star Wars and the Marvel Universe do attract more than their fair share of train-spotters, people who care much more about the livery on the second X-Wing on the right than about the actual story. You may very well think I am a train spotter because I have heard of Cad Bane.
Many, many years ago I uncharitably suggested that some science fiction fans of my acquaintance were using “consistency with the rules of Star Fleet Battles” as the main criteria by which to judge Star Trek: The Undiscovered Country. (They felt that a Klingon Bird of Prey ought not to be able to outrun the Enterprise, or at any rate that it was fitted with the wrong brand of photon torpedo.) I was clearly in the wrong; but I don’t think I was completely in the wrong. Some people do use genre movies primarily as sources of data about the setting. Others use fiction primarily as raw-material for fan fiction, or as inspiration or settings for role-playing games. And very, very many think that the main purpose of literary texts is to give elderly professors something to deconstruct in post-grad seminars. All of the above are, on CS Lewis’s terms using the text, rather than receiving it.
And some people think that all negative critical reactions are really pedantic quibbles about lore, and can therefore be disregarded. If I say that I think Rings of Power is bad there will always be someone on hand to tell me that I am sulking because one particular orc-sword was a few inches shorter than it says in a foot-note to an appendix to a volume of Tolkien’s unpublished notes that it ought to have been.
I did, genuinely, come across someone on Facebook the other day who was denouncing the new series of Beatles biopics (not due to be released for another two years) because backstage footage appeared to show Paul Mescal as Paul McCartney wearing a badge on the wrong lapel during the Candlestick Park concert.
If I had to explain Star Wars to a complete newbie, I don’t think I would say “It’s about a farm boy who through a series of accidents ends up being the only one who can destroy the bad guy’s ultimate weapon and save the life of the princess with whom he has fallen in love.” I think I would be more likely to say “It’s about how the Old Republic fell to treason, and how one of the last of the Jedi passed his knowledge on to the son of his old comrade, who defeated the turncoats and started the whole thing up again.” Something like that. At the very least, you have to know the time-line, or you have at least to know that there is a time-line: Andor is set after Revenge of the Sith, when the Empire is building its power and the Rebel Alliance is coming together. The Mandolorian is set after Return of the Jedi but before the Force Awakens, when the Empire has recently been defeated and the New Republic is establishing itself. Ahsoka is a child in The Clone Wars cartoon, but a venerable Jedi Master in the TV series. Indeed, the point of “Baby Yoda” may be to connect the current milieux to that of a future movie set a slightly less long time ago, in a galaxy still a fair distance away.
So perhaps we should say that Star Wars is nothing but lore. In 1979, some people imagined that Star Wars 2 would simply show “Luke n’ Han n’ Leia off on another thrilling adventure.” Some fans, indeed, are still very aggreived that the Last Jedi didn’t deliver exactly that. But every successful addition to the franchise has been a thrilling adventure that moved the galaxy forward in some way.
The Mandalorian and Grogu largely ignores the rich background that has accumulated over five TV series and an infinite number of cartoons. We may recognise some of the aliens and hardware and characters from previous iterations but it doesn’t make any difference if we don’t. Mando spends a lot of time hanging out with a purple furry alien called Zeb. I, being a train-spotter, can tell you that this is Zeb Orrelios, one of the heroes of Star Wars: Rebels, set about a decade earlier. In the cartoon, his relationship to the trainee Jedi, Ezra, is that of an elder brother to a younger — quite like the relationship between Ben Grimm and Johnny Storm. He pranks him and roughhouses with him, but is always heroic when the real adventure starts. There is none of this in the movie: literally not one single scene would be different if Zeb were a human NPC name C.O Pilot. It’s cool, but not very cool, to see a cartoon character make the jump to live-action. I look forward to seeing him reunite with Ezra in Ahsoka series two.
I saw the X-Files movie (1998) having seem maybe six instalments of the TV show, and had no idea what was going on. I had no idea what was going on in Firewalk With Me (1992) but neither did anyone else. It looks as if the next Spider-Man movie will be predicated on viewers already knowing who the Hulk and the Punisher are, or else on it not making any difference. In the olden days, things like On The Busses and George and Mildred and Til Death Us Do Part and The Sweeney tended to remove the cast from their normal environments for the movie iteration: partly to make the big screen experience distinct from the small screen, but also to make it a stand-alone work.
Presumably, the eventual “big screen cross over conclusion” will have to address this issue: but I would think that, Star Wars being Star Wars, there would be no difficulty in opening the story in media res and bringing new readers up to speed.
Ezra: he’s an apprentice Jedi who was trained by one of the last survivors of the Empire’s purge; he’s been missing in action for a decade.
Ahsoka: she’s an old Jedi who left the order when she thought it was corrupt.
Thrawn: bigwig in the Empire, trying to start the whole thing up again.
On the small screen, Mandalorians were somewhere between the Mighty Morphin Power Rangers and the Knights of the Round Table: a noble warrior race who all wear flying power armour, with fierce rivalry between different ruling families. By the time of the live action TV show, they are mostly deprived of their home world, and operating as freelancers, especially bounty hunters, in the rest of the galaxy. On the big screen, Mando is a guy in shiny steel armour who does missions for the New Republic. He says “This is the way” once or twice. There is a brief sequence in which he is miffed because the bad guys force him to take his helmet off. Not so much a space samurai with an interesting back story and code of honour: more an overpowered viewpoint character in a third person shoot-em-up computer game.
The point of Grogu is that he looks like Yoda (who is the elderly Jedi who trains Luke in the Empire Strikes Back). He wears similar armour to Mando, but also does levitation and healing by means of the Force (which is the energy field which gives Jedi Knights their power). By the end of the movie he has even acquired a stick like Yoda’s and is seen meditating. But his personality and attitudes are those of a toddler, stealing food and being mildly naughty and doing double takes at the wonder of creation. There is a kind of mystery associated with Grogu: around his origins, his relationship to Yoda and Yaddle (the female of Yoda’s race briefly glimpsed on the Jedi council in Phantom Menace), and about whether he has really forsaken the Jedi way to become a Mandalorian. None of this is remotely implicit in the movie: if anything, he is in the Jar-Jar Binks role: comedy relief to counteract an overly powerful protagonist.
But granted that our heroes have been denuded of nearly all their points of interest, any twenty five minutes of the movie is terrific fun. It’s essentially a tapestry of missions and side missions and McGuffins. The Hutt Twins (who we met in the Boba Fett TV show) are prepared to tell the New Republic where a nasty Imperial Warlord lives if, and only if, the New Republic rescue Rotta, Jabba the Hutt’s surviving son, from the planet on which he is being held as a gladiator. (In the cinematic prequel to the Clone Wars cartoon, Anakin and his new apprentice Ahsoka had to rescue a very cute baby Rotta from Lord Dooku.) Everyone has got bored with subtitles, so the Hutts can now form coherent English sentences. It turns out that Rotta is a really nice guy who quite likes being a gladiator, and that the Hutt twins want to kill him to secure their control of the crime empire. So Mando won’t hand him over. So in vengeance the twins send a bounty hunter to capture Mando….
And so on, and so on, and so on. It is relentless. Mando escapes from the Twins, but in the process is bitten by an always fatal Dragonsnake. Grogu successfully nurses his foster-dad back to life and Mando says “The old protect the young and then the young protect the old this is the way”. There was a brief moment of joy when I thought that was the end of the movie, but inevitably Mando announces that it is his duty to go back to the castle and slay his captors. (This is important, because the Code used to say “No-one can ever see a Mandalorian’s face; but it now says “No-one can ever see a Mandalorian’s face unless he kills them”.) So: more robots, more explosions, more duels, more fights, more monsters, and an extraction by a fleet of X-Wings. The last time I felt this inclined to cry out “please, please, make it stop” was in the third Hobbit movie.
It looks fabulous. I enjoyed the glimpses of the rusty trade federation robot dressed in skins. I enjoyed the extended, whimsical sequence in which Grogu is Mando’s sole protector. I thought the pre-cred opening sequence in which Mando single handedly takes on some Imperial Walkers on an ice planet was as a good as Star Wars action sequence as I have seen. I enjoyed Rotta, even though he says that he is not his father slightly too many times. (I have seen this movie before: he will end up shooting a policeman, hiding out in Sicilly, and taking over the Family.) I enjoyed the fact that the aliens Rotta fights in the arena are the same as the figures in Han Solo’s holographic chess set. I even enjoyed the fast-food truck run by a four armed chimp (possibly voiced my Martin Scorcese). I wish that fast food outlets in the Star Wars universe looked less like fast food outlets any where else, but that ship probably sailed when Anakin and Amidala caught a greyhound bus from Coruscant to Naboo. I enjoyed the little Minions who helped Grogu rescue Mando. They are actually called Anzellans and are the same race as the fellow who took Threepio apart in Rise of Skywalker.
Compared with other two hundred and fifty minute fight scenes, it really is perfectly okay. You are being encouraged to watch it at your local Imax if you want it even bigger and even louder. I’d recommend streaming it in easily digestible chunks. If you don’t watch Star Wars TV shows, you may find it fresher than I did. On the other hand or you may find it is completely impenetrable. People who think The Mouse raped their childhood presumably do not read my reviews. I am still hugely looking forward to Ahsoka Season Two. I think there are rumours that we might get more Acolyte.
1: Also: The Lord of the Rings, Don Quixote book 2, and everything which isn’t the Colour of Magic.
2: Star Wars is the title of the stand-alone film which came out in 1977: A New Hope is what it is called when considered as part of a wider saga. Also, Frankenstein was the name of the creator, not the monster.
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