Tag: Disney

Star Wars: The Mandalorian and Grogu (2026) [spoiler-free]

2/4 stars

On Facebook this afternoon I read a comment from someone gushing over The Mandalorian and Grogu, saying it was like “sitting through an entire season” of the TV series. I am afraid I cannot help but agree. The movie very much feels like an extended episode of the Mandalorian TV show, with a narrow unexpansive story that doesn’t justify the silver screen.

“Baby Yoda” has become a cultural icon for a lot of people; his casual appearances not limited to merchandise, but also memes and fan art much in the same way as Betty Boop or Tinker Bell a few decades ago. I suspect that the movie was mostly made for Baby Yoda fans in mind. The film certainly doesn’t bother much with any loose ends or plot arcs of the TV series and it can be approached without having seen the show at all. What we get instead is a barely significant side adventure featuring the Mandalorian (Pedro Pascal) and, of course, Baby Yoda himself, Grogu. But there is nothing here that expands the Star Wars galaxy an inch. The current intrigues of the New Republic after the fall of the evil Empire are not touched upon and the personal lives of the two leads are not altered in any way that future seasons of the TV show need worry about. All in all, The Mandalorian and Grogu is the sort of story best suited for TV or one of the innumerable comics and novels set in the Star Wars universe. There is nothing here that merits a theatrical experience and I personally suggest saving your 15 dollars and wait for its release on Disney+.

I shall spare plot details for the spoiler-conscious save to say that the main plot involves The Mandalorian, now working for the New Republic, taking orders from Rebel navy pilot, Colonel Ward (Sigourney Weaver). She wants him to track down remaining Imperial warlords, but one of his targets is elusive and info on his whereabouts is known to the Hutts who want a favor in return. The Mandalorian and Grogu will cross paths with one Rotta the Hutt (Jeremy Allan White) whom the Hutts want returned to them. But, Rotta has ambitions and dreams of his own and conflicts of interest soon turn the Mandalorian’s mission into something much more complicated.

But enough about all that. The movie is only a few days old and Star Wars mixed with spoilers tends to explosive results on the internet. What I can say is that White’s voice acting as Rotta is nothing to write home about. In his defense, the dialogue he is given is the sort of uninspired, depthless, on-the nose junk given to characters in adventure-oriented cartoons. Jeremy Allan White conjures no enthusiasm in the role and he felt entirely out of place every time he speaks.

The weakest elements in the movie are the action sequences and special effects, which is a damned shame when speaking about a Star Wars movie. The effects are nothing we haven’t seen before on any of the Star Wars television series and there is not a memorable shot or anything groundbreaking to be seen in its over two hour runtime. The action sequences come and go entirely too often, with the Mandalorian plodding through the plot from one fight to another each following a pattern of minion fighting, boss fight, and deus ex machina. I felt I was watching a video game more than a movie. All of the sequences are shot extremely fast and often under murky lighting so that I was never able to get a good look at any of the creatures and droids that our hero battles with. The fight scenes are all a visual blur and they unfortunately make up about 80% of the film. After leaving the theater I felt that I still could not say what any of the baddies looked like.
I saw the movie at a local theater in my hometown which makes me hesitate to comment on the film’s sound design as it is possible the issues lay in the theater’s setup rather than the movie itself. But some of the things I heard weren’t pleasant. The movie is heavy-handed with explosions and they are so loud that they drown out the music and other sounds in the mix. This may be a failure of the film’s sound-mixing or something that will improve when I rewatch it at home. But, my local cinema’s fault or not, this ended up being one of the loudest Star Wars movies I have seen and not in a way for the better.
By the end, the movie had me feeling exhausted with nothing interesting to reward me for having seen it.

I would like to say the movie isn’t all bad though. There are moments I genuinely liked. Grogu, for one, is given a great deal to do compared to the TV show and the scenes that focus entirely on him are some of the movie’s best. There is also a small cameo of Martin Scorsese playing a four-armed monkey that I found delightful and I sorely wished for more of him. The obligatory bits of comedy found in these sorts of pictures were put to good use here and, indeed, the small moments between the Mandalorian and Baby Yoda when things are quiet were when the movie was most entertaining.

But the movie’s story and action set pieces are nothing but a load of ho-hum. Traditionally Star Wars movies, even the weaker entries like Solo or Rise of Skywalker, manage to sweep the viewer off on a grand adventure that moves the Saga in new directions and treats our starving eyes to new images and places in the imagination. The Mandalorian and Grogu does none of these things. I wanted the film to take me to a galaxy far, far away. Instead, it took me to a galaxy not much farther than my living room.

Rogue One: A Star Wars Story (2016)

4/4 stars

“Rebellions are built on hope.” This is said twice in Rogue One: A Star Wars Story and each time it is said it’s to galvanize the cynical to action. The phrase is not wasted on its audience nor used to preach to the choir. It’s directed at those who need it the most: the complacent and the cowardly.
Hope is not a happy subject. It is, in fact, a very sobering and serious one. There is nothing lightweight or naive about it. Hope demands a lot. It often comes attached with sacrifice and tragedy. The fact that Pandora’s Box contained hope should not be surprising to anyone who understands what hope means and what it asks of us.

Rogue One is the second Star Wars film made by Lucasfilm after Disney purchased the company and after the rather tepid and lightly-treading The Force Awakens, it was a step in the right direction. Star Wars is more than childish escapism. It’s also about something. It preaches hope without guarantees, abandoning self for larger causes, and faith while under fire. The series also has a lot to say about hatred, forgiveness, redemption, and what vengefulness does to a soul. In many ways Star Wars provides an accessible extrapolation of the Sermon on the Mount and explicable context to “blessed are the meek.”

Rogue One offers up the same message and theme as the original Star Wars movie, but on the other side of the coin. While Luke, Han, Leia, and company make it out alive, the characters in this film do not. Untouchable main characters are safe and digestible, but leave out something. The most worthwhile endeavors, Rogue One tells us, come at great cost. Like in the original Star Wars, director Gareth Edwards and the Lucasfilm Story Group manage to craft a colorful cast of mismatched and attachable characters; and in doing so they succeed in the film’s final scenes to hammer home the ultimate importance of hope, especially when it is all one has.

Career criminal Jyn Erso (Felicity Jones) is picked up and recruited into the Rebellion by Cassian Andor (Diego Luna) and a smart-mouthed (-vocalizered?) droid named K-2SO (Alan Tudyk). Turns out her father Galen Erso (Mads Mikkelson) is a top Imperial scientist and a lead designer on the dreaded Death Star whose construction is nearing completion. What begins as a quest to extract (i.e. secretly assassinate) Galen becomes something much bigger when it is revealed that Jyn’s father had purposely planted an exploitable flaw in the Death Star that gives a small chance for destroying it. Unfortunately Galen’s message does not elaborate on the specific nature of the flaw and a race ensues to steal the Death Star plans and deliver them to the Rebellion in order to discover the station’s weakness. Standing in their way are the entirety of the Imperial military and the machinations of Grand Moff Tarkin (impressively recreated by CGI mo-cap) and the ambitious and overcompensating Orson Krennic (Ben Mendelsohn). Along the way our heroes pick up a variety of interesting characters: the blind Force-sensitive monk Chirrut Imwe (Donnie Yen), his more grounded and cynical protector Baze Malbus (Jiang Wen), and an imperial defector named Bodhi Rook (Riz Ahmed).

The characters in Rogue One stand apart from the heroes of the Original Star Wars Trilogy in their lack of perfection and their worldly disregard for moral idealism. Jyn sees the Empire as an unstoppable reality and prefers to keep herself uninvolved with her head down. Cassian makes ethically compromised decisions for what he believes is the greater good. “We’ve all done terrible things on behalf of the Rebellion” he says early in the movie. It is not until Jyn’s father is killed in a botched operation does he begin to see the bigger picture of what it means to be one of the good guys and what is and what is not acceptable for a good man to do no matter what.

What makes Rogue One among the best Star Wars films is its uncynical honesty (a sadly rare combination in film and literature in this day of anti-heroes and angry young men). A lot of snake oil preachers give us an unrealistic view of the world when teaching moral values. They deny the ugliness of the world because it is too hard for them to reconcile their teachings with it. Rogue One denies nothing and tells us to be good anyway. The characters operate on a lot of ifs and long shots. There is no guarantee that they will succeed in getting the Death Star plans or survive the attempt and more difficult still is there is no guarantee that the plans will contain anything useful. And later on as we have seen there is no guarantee that the Rebellion will succeed in destroying the Death Star even if a weakness is found. A lot of people die for these uncertainties. The guarantees are absent. Only hope remains. But rebellions, after all, are built on hope.

Balanced with Rogue One’s themes is a wildly entertaining adventure. The special effects on display are some of Star Wars’s best and the action sequences are well-sustained and paced with plenty of emotional investment to keep the viewer enthralled. The final scenes are full of tragedy and show the grim reality of sacrifice amidst unwelcoming odds. But tragedy is neither the final note nor word of the film. It is hope.