![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
Review: The Mandalorian and Grogu
May. 23rd, 2026 07:41 amHad a fantastic time at the movies yesterday watching this entirely pointless, strategically incomprehensible, frankly fucking batshit addition to the Star Wars movie canon. I have no idea what Disney was thinking. I guess maybe they learnt from the Rise of Skywalker fiasco that trying to pander to everyone at once doesn't work, so instead they decided to pander to basically no one? This one goes out to all the fans who feel they've been seeing too many human faces in their live action movies lately and would prefer a cast made almost entirely of CGI, puppets and masks. To the slug-fuckers. To the Babu Frik superfans. To everyone who's tired of storytelling stakes and would prefer to just kick back and watch a bunch of stuff Happen while a soundtrack composed of equal parts orchestral music and synthwave swells to dramatic peaks at near-arbitrary moments. SO much fun. 10/10 experience.
So basically, this unfolds less like a traditional three-act film than like a highly compressed TV season. Last time we saw Mando, he had pledged himself in service to Bo-Katan and then promptly fucked off to live on a cute little homestead on Navarro. Now, he works for the New Republic while insisting he's an "independent contractor" who's just in it for the bounty-hunting money. For reasons that are supposedly to do with hunting down the remnants of the Empire, he has to go rescue Jabba the Hutt's son Rotta from gladiatorial enslavement. Rotta the Hutt is incredibly jacked and has rippling abs and his own big beat theme song, and for some reason speaks perfect English with an American accent. All the CGI aliens speak perfect English with American accents, except for the Anzellans, who eschew their own established canonical language in favour of speaking broken Babu Frik English even amongst themselves.
Because oh yeah, there's also a big chunk of the screentime devoted to four Anzellans and Grogu all going on a rescue mission together. If you liked Babu Frik in TROS then you will love this part. (I loved it.) If you're one of those joyless fans who likes to get angry about how cutesy critters with silly voices are ruining the otherwise totally serious and artistically disciplined Star Wars movies then you are going to want to throw up.
In as much as this movie can be said to have a heart, it's in the relationship between Din and Grogu, as Din steps more fully than ever into his role as a toddler dad while Grogu fully leaves behind his pram-bound sack-of-cute-potatoes phase in favour of nonstop squirmy, giggly, mischievous motion. There were a few cheap jokes I didn't find funny about Grogu being treated as a pet - Din ordering him to heel, Rotta feeding him scraps like a dog, etc - but overall he really gets to be a person in this movie, a full-blown character who is exploring his power in the world (not Force powers, but ordinary little-person-growing-up powers like "get a rise out of Dad" and "acquire food I'm not supposed to eat"), and it's an absolute delight.
The score was, as I already mentioned, fucking magnificent, albeit mismatched to the actual content of the movie. Even if I hadn't been having so much fun with the rest of it, it would have been worth the price of my ticket just to sit for two hours and listen to Ludwig Göransson's latest in surround sound.
The CGI, on the other hand...wasn't great? I was surprised by how janky it was, given how good the TV show always looks. Zeb especially looked out of place in every shot. He also didn't actually have anything to do; it was like they decided to include him as fanservice for Rebels fans (or possibly just for Dave Filoni's own amusement) but couldn't be bothered coming up with a proper role for him, so he just hung around being Din's pilot on missions for the New Republic (because for some reason Din needs a pilot now). That was disappointing. I love Zeb and I'm not sorry we had him, but I wish they'd taken more advantage of his presence.
But look, my complaints are minor. In terms of actual plot significance, this movie is such a nothingburger that it doesn't feel worth the energy to pick apart. But as a Star Wars fan whose default position is "yay more Star Wars", I cannot deny that this was, indeed, more Star Wars. My GOD it was some Star Wars. It was nothing BUT Star Wars. All the goofiest, dweebiest, most embarrassing parts of Star Wars left in an intensely concentrated sticky paste at the bottom of the pot after all the other ingredients finished boiling off. The gladiatorial slug fight. Fucking hell.
So basically, this unfolds less like a traditional three-act film than like a highly compressed TV season. Last time we saw Mando, he had pledged himself in service to Bo-Katan and then promptly fucked off to live on a cute little homestead on Navarro. Now, he works for the New Republic while insisting he's an "independent contractor" who's just in it for the bounty-hunting money. For reasons that are supposedly to do with hunting down the remnants of the Empire, he has to go rescue Jabba the Hutt's son Rotta from gladiatorial enslavement. Rotta the Hutt is incredibly jacked and has rippling abs and his own big beat theme song, and for some reason speaks perfect English with an American accent. All the CGI aliens speak perfect English with American accents, except for the Anzellans, who eschew their own established canonical language in favour of speaking broken Babu Frik English even amongst themselves.
Because oh yeah, there's also a big chunk of the screentime devoted to four Anzellans and Grogu all going on a rescue mission together. If you liked Babu Frik in TROS then you will love this part. (I loved it.) If you're one of those joyless fans who likes to get angry about how cutesy critters with silly voices are ruining the otherwise totally serious and artistically disciplined Star Wars movies then you are going to want to throw up.
In as much as this movie can be said to have a heart, it's in the relationship between Din and Grogu, as Din steps more fully than ever into his role as a toddler dad while Grogu fully leaves behind his pram-bound sack-of-cute-potatoes phase in favour of nonstop squirmy, giggly, mischievous motion. There were a few cheap jokes I didn't find funny about Grogu being treated as a pet - Din ordering him to heel, Rotta feeding him scraps like a dog, etc - but overall he really gets to be a person in this movie, a full-blown character who is exploring his power in the world (not Force powers, but ordinary little-person-growing-up powers like "get a rise out of Dad" and "acquire food I'm not supposed to eat"), and it's an absolute delight.
The score was, as I already mentioned, fucking magnificent, albeit mismatched to the actual content of the movie. Even if I hadn't been having so much fun with the rest of it, it would have been worth the price of my ticket just to sit for two hours and listen to Ludwig Göransson's latest in surround sound.
The CGI, on the other hand...wasn't great? I was surprised by how janky it was, given how good the TV show always looks. Zeb especially looked out of place in every shot. He also didn't actually have anything to do; it was like they decided to include him as fanservice for Rebels fans (or possibly just for Dave Filoni's own amusement) but couldn't be bothered coming up with a proper role for him, so he just hung around being Din's pilot on missions for the New Republic (because for some reason Din needs a pilot now). That was disappointing. I love Zeb and I'm not sorry we had him, but I wish they'd taken more advantage of his presence.
But look, my complaints are minor. In terms of actual plot significance, this movie is such a nothingburger that it doesn't feel worth the energy to pick apart. But as a Star Wars fan whose default position is "yay more Star Wars", I cannot deny that this was, indeed, more Star Wars. My GOD it was some Star Wars. It was nothing BUT Star Wars. All the goofiest, dweebiest, most embarrassing parts of Star Wars left in an intensely concentrated sticky paste at the bottom of the pot after all the other ingredients finished boiling off. The gladiatorial slug fight. Fucking hell.
