'The Mandalorian And Grogu' Is Forgettable
Disney should let us all forget it, please
So I watched The Mandalorian and Grogu (TMAG) with a friend this week. Like me, John is old enough to remember seeing the original Star Wars in a movie theater the year it came out.
We both had Star Wars toys as kids and at one time, shared an interest in the artwork used to develop the visuals of the original trilogy. We both felt disappointed in the prequels, but agree they have aged well because Star Wars movies are so bad, now. In fact, most movies are bad, anymore.
One problem John identified, that had not occurred to me, is how the current creators of Star Wars have none of the foundational references that George Lucas had.
The original auteur of the franchise looked back on Flash Gordon serials for inspiration. He took the Death Star escape sequence from Hidden Fortress, and based the entire Death Star trench scene on the final act of the World War II film The Dam Busters.
Jon Favreau and Dave Filoni have only Star Wars, and much of their canon is now their own creation. TMAG is a Star Wars story only in the sense that it references past Star Wars content.
‘Content’ is the correct word for this movie. It does not really feel like a film. It feels like Star Wars fanfiction.
It feels like two, or perhaps four, episodes of a streaming series that have been mashed together. I am not the first to make this observation. “It’s a disjointed mess”, John says.
Nothing makes sense in this series of quests. The New Republic has somehow run out of boffins and has no intelligence agency, so they must rely on Hutts for information. The Mandalorian could “go to a random planet, and go through old imperial databases” to find the mysterious object of his quest, John notes.
Instead, the story is complicated by the search for Rotta, a son of Jabba the Hutt who rejects his lineage in expository monologues that do not sound like a Hutt at all. Rotta has given up the life of a gangster worm to become a gladiator. This is Ben Solo turning into Kylo Ren and killing his father again.
Naturally, the gladiatorial story prompt ends up with the Mandalorian in the gladiator pit against Rotta, and then they are forced to work together against a collection of monstrosities in what turns out to be a recall of the holochess table from the Millennium Falcon.
Remember the holochess table? ‘Member? In the parlance of caustic cultural criticism, this is called member berries. The term comes from a South Park episode that satirizes modern Hollywood writing.
Instead of recalling the gladiator scenes of, say, Russell Crowe or Kirk Douglass, the new Star Wars recalls the very first Star Wars. They are tickling our nostalgia in the most empty, cynical way.
John, who was far more of a toy collector than me, says the flying getaway vehicle used in the first reel by the Mandalorian’s imperial quarry is a ‘mini-rig’, one of several toys that were made to be smaller and cheaper so that kids could buy them with allowance money.
Likewise, the one-man mini-scout walker that the Mandalorian uses to chase the bad guy in the same scene first appeared in some animated Star Wars series that I, like most of the people who saw TMAG, have never watched.
For all that, the ‘member berries’ are the saving grace of this pastiche of a story. Rotta the Hutt has jealous relatives and the New Republic has no better plan than to have the Mandalorian find Rotta and trade him to the Hutts for information. The whole thing feels unnecessary, flat, and stale.
Grogu develops a relationship with a swamp-dwelling creature that never develops. “You could tell his character was supposed to be a larger character than it was, something other than an alien lizard creature in a rocking chair.” But the scene was necessary because someone had to make a magic poultice for the plot to move forward.
Even the part when Din Djarin, the titular Mandalorian, is unconscious from a poisonous monster bite, so that Grogu must tend to him and find the cure, feels emotionless.
The puppets used in the film move like an old Star Wars action figure most of the time, with five points of articulation. Grogu’s ears do all the emotional expression whenever he rides on Din Djarin’s back, since the Mandalorian can never remove his helmet.
John found the film “aggressively mediocre”, but he was not scathing. It might have performed much better at the box office if it had appeared in the era of Rogue One, he thinks. “It’s not terrible. If this was something I wandered onto back in the 90s, when I had cable”, he might feel different.
In fact, we both admitted enjoying it more than we had expected, probably because we had set our expectations so very low. If not for the ruination of Star Wars, we could both see TMAG as a guilty pleasure.
But Star Wars has in fact been ruined. TMAG ruins the stormtroopers and the combat droids. Too many John Wick-style sequences of Din Djarin effortlessly carving his way through what are supposed to be the most dangerous enemies in the galaxy end up cheapening the experience.
Yes, the imperial stormtroopers never shoot straight. When that happens scores of times in two hours, however, the sense of threat evaporates, and so do the stakes.
TMAG is apparently going to lose money and be forgotten. That is a good thing. It is forgettable, and our collective memory of Star Wars will be improved by collectively forgetting that it happened.
Lucasfilm should be persuaded to put away Star Wars for at least a decade, to forget about it long enough that the audience forgets how bad their forgettable Star Wars content got to be.
Better yet, Disney should get some better writers with wider imaginations to come up with original content for Lucasfilm to make instead of this. Nobody asked for this. It feels unnecessary because it was. This is not the way.