Did "The Mandalorian and Grogu" Extend Star Wars' Losing Streak?
What made Star Wars good to begin with?
The Catholic Church and Star Wars: Those two institutions have let down people in my life more than words can describe. I’m neither a Catholic nor a Star Wars guy, but many people close to me are one or the other — a few cursed bastards are both — and watching them wrestle with the implications of swept-under-the-rug child abuse/tragic botching of probably the most beloved IP in entertainment history has been hard to watch.
It’s hard to overstate how much reputational damage Star Wars IP has suffered: The ninth Star Wars movie grossed only half as much as the seventh. The Mandalorian and Grogu just had the lowest opening for a Star Wars movie in the Disney era. The Acolyte is discussed with the hushed tones that one might use to describe an uncle who went on a shooting spree. Things are so bad that I just likened late-era Star Wars to a horrific child abuse scandal and the comparison strikes me as deserved.
So, I went into The Mandalorian and Grogu hoping for a win. The fact that the movie’s opening weekend didn’t stimulate anyone’s midichlorians barely matters: Those numbers are partly due to the fact that movie theater business model is so antiquated that theaters might as well be old West saloons. What Disney really wants for this movie is for it to be highly rewatched on Disney Plus; Disney wins if parents in the year 2040 find themselves saying “If I have to watch that goddamned Baby Yoda movie one more time I’ll blow my fucking brains out.” But that will only happen if the movie — which is a spinoff of one of the few Star Wars things in recent years that worked — is good. So…is it?
You’re not going to believe this, but IMHO: Yes, this movie was legitimately good. That is a shocking statement — I’m someone who enjoys TV and movies so infrequently that I legitimately wonder if my brain is broken. Me saying “I enjoyed that Star Wars movie” is like a Wahhabist Imam saying “that drawing of the Prophet Muhammad is awesome.” But I call ‘em as I see ‘em, and I truly did think that The Mandalorian and Grogu was a fun, well-made action movie in outer space.
Which pretty much fucks me with a pickaxe — I do these columns specifically to shit on hilariously misguided monuments to hubris. And if I don’t shit on something I lose my comedy license, so how ‘bout this: Let me compare some things that I think earlier Star Wars movies got wrong with what I think The Mandalorian and Grogu got right.
The 16 years between the original Star Wars movies and the prequels put the franchise in a weird spot: Their biggest fans fell in love with the movies as kids but had become adults. So, if your goal is to recapture the Star Wars magic, do you make a movie for kids or a movie for adults? And, follow-up question: If you make a movie for kids, should it contain a pratfalling space rabbit who speaks in a space-Caribbean patois that practically forced the word “problematic” into the English language?
The Phantom Menace was geared at kids; I saw it in theaters with one of my diehard Star Wars friends, and by the second act I could practically smell the embarrassment seeping through his skin. The next two movies tried to correct this error, but raised the question of whether George Lucas is even capable of making movie for grown-ups. Lucas’ ham fisted solution to the movie-too-kiddie problem was to advance a convoluted plot involving trade economics, and I happen to have a graduate degree in that shit and even I didn’t give a wookie’s dick about the plot.
Movies 7, 8, and 9 tried to recapture the series’ adult fans by aggressively calling back elements of the first three movies. This worked some, but came at the expense of new characters that never really caught on. Star Wars Episode VIII: Emo Luke Watches His Friends Die boldly attempted to make Luke more complex in a gambit that brought to mind Jack Lipnick’s monologue about the dangers of “fruity movies about suffering”. It was an effort to make a movie that appealed to adults and kids that ended up appealing to neither. Episode IX: The Studio Executives Strike Back would have easily won the Academy Award for Pandering if such a thing existed; I saw it with my wife, and when I asked her recently what she remembered about the movie, she said “I remember being bored.”
IMHO, what these movies got wrong was that they misunderstood what it meant to make a movie “like” the original Star Wars. Lucas tried to run the same plays that worked the first time; the sequels tried to literally remake the first three movies as much as possible. I think The Mandalorian and Grogu succeeded because it stopped trying to recreate the original characters and plot points and tried to mimic the original feel.
My unsentimental, non-Star-Wars-guy view of the first movie is that it’s a mediocre B-movie for about 80 minutes that suddenly gets awesome when they start having dogfights in space. The first two acts are only made tolerable by an amazing John Williams score, a few great effects like the Imperial Star Destroyer in the opening shot, and Harrison Ford having the most Big Dick Energy in any galaxy. But the plot is mediocre, the dialogue is terrible — I honestly think it would have flopped if there hadn’t been 40 minutes of effects-laden ass kicking at the end. But there were 40 minutes of effects-laden ass kicking, Gen X had their minds blown so thoroughly that the shock wave is still echoing through space, and the rest is history.
The Mandalorian and Grogu keeps it simple and goes straight to the ass kicking. Instead of crushing us with a galaxy worth of plot, lore, and characters, they simply say “Here is a bounty hunter who hunts bad guys, if you want to know exactly who he is and what the conflict is about, that information can be found in the Who Gives A Shit system.” There are basically two characters, one is played by a good actor (Pedro Pascal) and one is a puppet who is so damn cute that he makes Lambchop look like a drug-addled prostitute. And not for nothin’: The movie couldn’t get woke even if it wanted to, because it’s a guy in a mask and puppet who doesn’t talk. That might not sound like a big deal, but I promise you that executives were grateful to not have the insatiable ghouls on social media scrutinize their casting choices.
The result is two hours of meaningless space fun. Does the movie build on the original trilogy, and expand Jedi lore, and perhaps explain what the fuck midichlorians are and whether they can be cured with penicillin? Hell no, but from where I’m sitting, the space fun is the cake and the lore is just frosting. Maybe I’d feel differently if I was a Star Wars guy; maybe they do demand lore and will feel that this entry is too slight. And come to think of it, the fact that I liked this movie probably means that it’s financially doomed. But it seems to me that the Star Wars franchise has been degraded because people thought that they could recreate the Star Wars feeling by making Star Wars again. But actually, “the next Star Wars” will actually be something totally different. And maybe this movie wasn’t Star Wars again, but for me, it felt surprisingly close.
Of course, the real irony here is that like in many other franchises, by far the highest quality Star Wars stuff is the stuff that actually was fully aimed at kids - ie the animated series (Star Wars The Clone Wars and Star Wars Rebels).
The joys of animation is that, unlike live action, it is generally considered a ‘kids’ medium and so most executives, whilst still willing to give a decent budget, don’t especially care about it so tend to pretty much give the creators free rein when it comes to how they produce it. In the case of the Clone Wars, the team thus pretty much decided “f*** it, so long as there’s no gore or swearing we can pretty much do whatever we like, so we’re going to take this kids show and instead write it for adults, making it full on war show homaging as many classic WW2 movies as we can whilst still keeping things entertaining enough for the young ‘uns”. Thus, not only is it arguably the best quality content Star Wars has produced, but with the talent Lucasfilm had at its disposal, many of their sequences and arcs are arguably up there with some of the best adult action shows going.
If you want a good illustration, check out this scene from the Star Wars equivalent of D-Day - all of the cinematography, sound design, framing, and other filmmaking aspects are genuinely better than about 90% of modern films even now: https://youtu.be/5DAywBKyatc?si=k1bizPnG9edwnty-
This has convinced me to ot see this movie.