There’s just no way Star Wars: The Mandalorian and Grogu wouldn’t play like a distended TV episode. Now, for a couple of seasons on Disney+, the adventures of Pedro Pascal as a helmeted bounty hunter and his little puppet buddy “Baby Yoda” were a nice enough distraction. Directed by Jon Favreau, who also made this film, the series hit its modest stride as a “monster-of-the-week”-type show, with an overarching narrative but much less grandiosity. In 40 minutes or less, that works; a film, though, needs much, much more.
To his mild credit, at least Favreau has the good sense to throw us into The Mandalorian and Grogu‘s action in media res. The film expects us to know the basic concept, who the two title characters are and what they’re up to, and, of course, the ongoing chronology of the new Star Wars universe. In this case, it’s after Return of the Jedi (do not fact-check me on this) owing, if nothing else, to the role the Hutts have to play in the plot. To wit: the Mandalorian (ostensibly played by Pascal) heads out on a series of fetch quests, which have him rescuing Rotta the Hutt (voiced unnecessarily by Jeremy Allen White) in exchange for information about the remnants of the Empire. There’s more to it than that, but really, really, not by much. Along the way, Grogu teams up with those little Babu Frik guys (again, no fact-checking), which is cute, and eventually, the mission is accomplished.
The question to ask is: so what? Zooming in and expanding the scale of an episode of The Mandalorian invites this kind of scrutiny. Where the show remixed various cinematic tropes to somewhat novel effect, the film does so with ever-diminishing returns. Setting aside Star Wars lore, it’s possible to pick out all the borrowed bits, everything Favreau and franchise steward Dave Filoni assumes we won’t recognize. Sorry, with a film this thin, it becomes the only thing to do.
