“The old take care of the young. The young take care of the old.”

Like a lot of people, I have had a bit of a falling-out relationship with The Mandalorian. The first two seasons of the show are some of the best and most refreshing Star Wars content that we have gotten under the Disney umbrella, and both seasons came out at just the right time, too. We were literally dealing with the end of an incredibly controversial trilogy, and then shortly afterwards, well, 2020 happened. Season two had an absolutely perfect ending that probably should have ended the series as a whole, or at least the Grogu side of things, but then Disney decided to reunite Din Djarin and Grogu literally only a year later in the most underwhelming fashion in The Book of Boba Fett, a show that was mediocre at best. This was then followed by another season of The Mandalorian that was far inferior to the previous two seasons, and what made it even worse was that the writing team never even justified bringing back Grogu at all, other than marketing purposes, of course.

So, since The Book of Boba Fett, or at least over the last couple of years, I just have to be honest, I haven’t been all that invested in this story. However, it’s been six and a half years since we’ve gotten a new Star Wars movie on the big screen, and that was something to be excited about, no matter what. Unfortunately, however, the marketing and reviews that followed it lowered my already not-that-great expectations to the point where excitement was even starting to fade.

And unfortunately, The Mandalorian and Grogu just isn’t that good at all in my opinion. I’m obviously going to start my review with how I usually do things, that being the positives to the movie itself, but speaking genuinely, there really isn’t even that much to talk about on either side, both good and bad, at least not on a super significant level, which is extremely disappointing for this franchise. No matter how good or bad a Star Wars movie is, there has pretty much never (at least in live action) been a case where the film just didn’t really have much of serious note to make out of it, with the only thing coming close being Solo.

However, as I said, I’m going to start off with what I did like about The Mandalorian and Grogu. Unsurprisingly, the action is just as great as you might hope and expect from a Mandalorian movie. There are some really neat extended sequences that establish really well that Din Djarin hasn’t lost his touch at all since the last time that we saw him, and that’s kind of the reason to go and see this, aside from just seeing these characters on screen again. The first mission that the movie immediately starts off with is pretty easily the best and most exciting part of the film, and so it definitely started off on the right foot. The rest of the runtime is full of scenes like this, though definitely a bit to diminishing returns.

It’s obviously nice to see Mando and Grogu together on screen again for the first time in over three years, no matter the case. Their banter and dynamic is so nice to finally see again, and is just as good as it was before. The big standout this time around that was actually quite a pleasant surprise for me was that, unlike the third season of the show, Grogu really makes his presence in the story worthwhile. We finally get to see him do stuff of importance that really seems to finally start to get him out of the “just a cute baby” little schtick that I honestly wish we got to see even more of in the movie, and hope to see in the future. You can really tell here that he has actually grown as a character from his time with Luke as well as with Mando, too.

The last thing I’ll say here is that there are a lot of really cool and neat planets that I enjoyed spending time in. I guess one of the things that never really stood out to me in the show was the planets and locations, but here they certainly do. Even though, with the exception of season three The Mandalorian is beloved, one of the criticisms with it was that a lot of it felt “small” mainly caused by how they shot the series, which was with a stage called “The Volume,” which, if you don’t know, is basically a smaller version of a green screen, but instead the screen actually has rendered images on it so that everything shot still reflects light in such a realistic way that you can’t even really notice it. While it helped make it look more realistic, there was only so much you could do with it, so a lot of scenes felt restricted in a sense, though that was definitely a bigger problem with some of their other shows, notably Obi-Wan Kenobi and Ahsoka. I don’t know whether or not this movie was shot with the Volume (I’m sure at least some of it was), but it really didn’t feel that way. The environments and scenes felt much bigger and grander than they did in the series, and thankfully, the environments themselves were a nice new touch.

My biggest concern with The Mandalorian and Grogu, however, which was only heightened by the marketing, was that it was just going to feel like an extended version of the show, and not really a movie, at least in the more cinematic sense that all of the other live-action films feel like. Sadly, this really did end up being the case for me personally. The entire movie has some really odd pacing where the first and second halves feel distinctly different from one another, and not in a good way. While there is an end goal that is established at the beginning of the story, it never really felt like it was ever culminating to anything all that big or of much significance. Instead, the whole structure of the story is quite scattershot, where our main characters are constantly sidetracked to go to different places and either negotiate with someone or deal with some stuff, and like I said, it never truly felt like it was ever building up to much of anything, which really killed the overall pacing.

This is also the lowest budget Disney Star Wars movie, and you can really feel that, though I’ve seen much better from other movies that cost the same or even less than this. This is the first film in the franchise since Disney took over, where I would honestly say that the visual effects are quite frankly just bad. All of the locations look completely fine, but this film is quite literally stuffed with a bunch of different CGI characters and creatures, and literally all of them are distracting to look at, which is quite shocking coming from ILM. Every other Star Wars movie since 2015 has looked practically completely flawless, with the exception of the de-aged characters in Rogue One, which makes The Mandalorian and Grogu, a movie released over a decade since Disney’s first foray into putting this franchise back into cinemas, look extremely pale in comparison.

One of the major characters here is Rotta the Hutt, who we first saw in 2008 as a baby with The Clone Wars movie, and I have to be honest, I didn’t like his inclusion here at all, which seems to be a bit of a hot take for even the people who also aren’t really huge fans of this film. I actually don’t mind the idea of this Hutt that is quite literally a force to be reckoned with, because even though it is wacky and really out there, it is one of those weird ideas that I’m honestly a bit on board with. What I don’t like is that the Hutts have always been somewhat of a mysterious species in a sense, nowhere near the level of someone like Yoda or Grogu’s species, but still definitely mysterious, and this movie really tries to deconstruct them, even with the other Hutts, to the point where I just wasn’t a fan of where they were going with it. Rotta is also this character that you are really supposed to feel for and sympathize with, which was really hard to do because of how distracting he looks, both from a CGI and even a conceptual level. Adding to that, they for some reason decided to cast Jeremy Allen White to voice him, and in the process, obviously heavily used some sort of tuner to change his voice, which, as you might expect, sounded incredibly artificial and was yet another distracting thing about him.

The last thing I want to note about this film is that it honestly just doesn’t really ever justify its existence. I’m almost positive that Lucasfilm felt obligated to put a new Star Wars movie in theaters, but at the time just couldn’t get the ball rolling on anything (I know Starfighter comes out next year, but that wasn’t even announced until a year after The Mandalorian and Grogu), and thus decided to go with what was working for them on Disney Plus and turn it into a movie, and you can very clearly feel that. Nothing of major significance happens here, with neither of our two main characters really growing or changing at all in any meaningful way, with the exception of some hints with Grogu. This was definitely the most disappointing aspect of it all. Star Wars movies should always be this big cinematic event that has lasting staying power, which even the sequels that I don’t like had. Even Fandango’s list of the ten most anticipated films of the summer didn’t feature this movie, where movies like the new Scary Movie and even Mortal Kombat II, for crying out loud, made the list. This should be pretty concerning for Lucasfilm, and I really hope that next year’s Starfighter movie starts to change the course of all of this.

I went into The Mandalorian and Grogu with extremely modest expectations, just simply expecting to have a good time, and was still let down by the end of it.