Last weekend before Memorial Day, my sister Natalie, who is an even bigger Star Wars fan than I am, asked me to go with her and her husband, plus my sister Claire and her husband, to see the premiere of The Mandalorian and Grogu in the theatre. It was the kind of family outing we hadn’t had in a while. It was good fun.
This movie is of course a direct extension of the Disney+ TV series The Mandalorian in which a stoic mercenary (voiced by Pedro Pascal) finds a cute little “Baby Yoda” (whom he later finds out is named Grogu) and has to protect him from the Imperial warlords trying to experiment on him for his Force powers. The Mandalorian tries to find Grogu a Jedi trainer, and he ends up being taken in by Luke Skywalker himself, but Luke lets Grogu go when he realizes he wants to stay with the man he considers his father.
So at the start of this movie, “The Mandalorian” (his given name was mentioned in the series, but it’s never used here) has cast his lot in with the New Republic and is only taking jobs that involve hunting down Imperial leaders trying to maintain their power bases after the Emperor’s death. The Mandalorian’s Republic liason (Sigourney Weaver) gives him a job to capture the rogue Ratta the Hutt (voiced by Jeremy Allen White) and turn him in to his aunt and uncle so that they will give information on the whereabouts of a high-ranking Imperial. But then Ratta turns out to be the nicest Hutt in the Galaxy. And he reminds Mando that his relatives are not taking him in out of the goodness of their hearts. As the last son of Jabba the Hutt, Ratta is a threat to their power. And eventually he tells Mando that the Imperial that the Republic is looking for is the same local crime boss who hired Ratta as a gladiator. So the two men, along with Grogu and the Mandalorian’s trusty pilot, assault the officer’s estate and bring him in to justice.
In gratitude, the Mandalorian agrees to get Ratta safe passage to an unknown location, but this earns him the ire of the two Hutt lords, and the second half of the movie is about their scheme to get revenge.
The thing I like about Star Wars “side” projects like this and Andor is that they create a sense of the larger universe occurring outside the “Skywalker Saga.” It’s the sort of thing that explains why Star Wars made such a great role-playing game (at least in the West End Games version) because it was easy to see how you could create your own stories in it. Not only that, but the Mandalorian/Grogu story inadvertently addresses a story problem with original Star Wars: In Episodes IV through IX, the story is about one Jedi student and their non-Force adept friends. But as the Jedi seeks out training, they get separated from their friends and their opposition goes to a much higher power level, so that the Jedi and the other characters are in two separate stories. That can’t happen here. Grogu is extremely powerful in the Force, but is still a child, and small and vulnerable, plus which, he can’t talk. So while he does a lot more on his own initiative in this movie, it still centers on Pedro Pascal and his amazing action stuntmen, even as Grogu and the Mandalorian are inseparable.
At the same time, while the stakes may be lethal in the short-term, there is no grand strategy or storyline involved. The movie is very much like an extended episode of the TV show, where’s it’s just The Mandalorian continuing on his way and adjusting to having this super-powered toddler following him everywhere. A lot of critics seem to find this a disappointing basis for a movie compared to other Star Wars material, but again, this was the same premise as The Mandalorian TV series, and that obviously struck a chord with people.
Ultimately, I feel the same way about The Mandalorian and Grogu that I felt about the TV series: It doesn’t need to exist, but I’m glad that it does.