What’s it about?
A long time ago in a galaxy far, far away, the Mandalorian (Pedro Pascal) and his son Grogu (himself) are working as bounty hunters for the New Republic, rounding up bad guys after the events of Original Recipe Star Wars. They’re tasked with rescuing a runaway and returning him to his underworld aunt and uncle in exchange for infomration on the location of a bad guy.
What’d we think?
The Mandalorian and Grogu is good clean fun, a small-scale and self-contained adventure that hearkens back to the radio serials that inspired George Lucas in the first place. There are good guys and bad guys, there are cool spaceships and funny little aliens, and if you ask me, that’s exactly what I was in the mood for.
There’ll be plenty of people falling over themselves to ignore the movie and have a broader conversation about Star Wars as a franchise, but this isn’t the platform for that nonsense. As a fun little adventure movie for kids, Mando and Grogu is great. The adventure itself is straightforward, a pretty simple “go here and rescue this guy” plot, the twists and turns aren’t terribly twisty or turny, but the pleasure of this movie comes as much from getting from A to B with likeable characters as from the spectacle of it all.
And there’s more than enough spectacle. The locations vary from a laidback beach planet to Star Wars version of Gotham, to a good old-fashioned swamp. Some stunning establishing shots are basically Top Gun But Star Wars, setting a new high bar for how good a spaceship can look in-camera. In addition to the slick CGI, there’s a heap of great costumes, makeup work, little puppets (some even littler than Grogu), and some big go-motion (not stop-motion, read a book) robots courtesy of Phil Tippett that are some of the coolest looking special effects I’ve seen in a good long while.
I’m a simple man- I like a Star War, I like good puppets, I like a good-looking spaceship. The movie doesn’t try to do too much, erring on the side of being palatable to newcomers instead of catering to die-hard fans. While this might only make it a light snack, it’s delicious.
