Tag: star wars

REVIEW: The Mandalorian and Grogu

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.

REVIEW: Star Wars Episode IX – The Rise of Skywalker

A long time ago – 42 years, specifically – George Lucas began what Lucasfilm is now calling “the Skywalker Saga.” And when Lucasfilm allowed JJ Abrams to produce the long-awaited final trilogy of Star Wars, he deliberately chose to model his story on the original trilogy, with similar results. In the first movie, a plucky young hero(ine) stuck on a desert planet meets a cute droid whose files happen to include data that the bad guys are desperate to get. In protecting the droid, the hero meets a new family of friends and discovers a great potential of inner power. In the second movie, the hero separates from the main group to train as a Jedi, while that main group gets progressively more and more screwed. And then in the third movie, the big bad guy turns out to be the pawn of a much worse villain, and in getting the whole thing wrapped up, they cram in a bunch of stuff, and the result ends up being considered the weakest of the three movies.

Episode IX – The Rise of Skywalker is hardly the worst Star Wars movie. That would be Attack of the Clones, which had some of the worst acting and dialogue in any movie period. This film has good acting and likable characters, and it wraps up the main story in dramatically appropriate fashion, but it’s just so busy and takes so long to get there. Plus, while JJ Abrams’ directorial style is often very effective, in this movie, you have the opposite of “lens flare” in that the scenes in Palpatine’s throne room are too dark to see.

But given that Rey is the central character of the trilogy, the reveal of her origins makes perfect sense to me, and it seems like the only way to explain how she developed such natural power before even being trained. And since the central quest of her character was to find her family, the lesson of the story seems to be that family can be self-created.

The other good thing about Episode IX? Maybe all these butthurt fanboys can agree that Rian Johnson wasn’t so bad after all.

REVIEW: The Last Jedi

The main knock that critics had on The Force Awakens (Star Wars Episode VII) was that it too closely paralleled the original Star Wars (Episode IV). To me, that similarity should have been the main subject of the storyline. How is it, that after more than thirty years (real time and in-setting), the Star Wars universe is back to square one? Why did Han Solo leave Leia and return to smuggling? Was it grief over the loss of their son, or was it just Han being Han? Who is Snoke, what is the First Order, and how did they take over from the Empire? Why did Luke not rebuild the Jedi Academy after it was destroyed by the Knights of Ren, and how did they seduce Ben Solo to the dark side? And what does Rey have to do with all this?

SPOILER ALERT: Not all of those questions are answered in The Last Jedi.

In addition to the primary Skywalker/Rey saga, there’s a mission where the cowardly-yet-brave Finn (John Boyega) tries to save the Resistance, or what’s left of it, with the help of two new characters, a plucky engineer (Kelly Marie Tran) and a stuttering scoundrel (Benicio Del Toro, in what may be his most Benicio Del Toro performance to date). Otherwise, fans have been telling people to not spoil the movie. So I won’t. I will just say: GO SEE IT. The Last Jedi offers everything you want to see in a Star Wars movie. Including hope.

Note: This is also a very long movie, about two and a half hours. Yet, I did not feel any bladder urges until the credits started to roll.

The Force was with me.

Review: Rogue One

Rogue One: A Star Wars Story strikes me as being an example of fan fiction that just happens to have been produced by the owners of the intellectual property. I say this as the highest form of compliment.

Fan fiction started off with the Star Trek community, as authors (mostly female) distributed “slash” stories (like Kirk/Spock) detailing gay relationships between principal characters, and other salacious ideas that would never have been approved by producers or censors. But as fandom became more popular (and respectable), fanfic evolved to a more professional quality, and fans even got to making their own video productions, like James Cawley’s Phase II (creating new adventures for the original Star Trek characters years before J.J. Abrams’ 2009 film).  But the main thing these productions had in common is that they were creating original stories for established characters (or an established setting) that the owners of the property didn’t want to produce themselves. But Paramount Pictures, the owners of Star Trek, seem to have reversed their tolerance for such things, quashing the recent fan project Star Trek: Axanar with a lawsuit.

Which from a fan perspective is too bad, because these ideas help expand the concept of what is possible in a fictional setting and ask questions not answered in official “canon.”

For example: What happened in the nearly 20 years between Star Wars Episodes III and IV?

The Star Wars prequels established that Palpatine had been planning to build his Death Star years before he became Emperor, and before Luke Skywalker was born. Rogue One is the story of how the new Rebel Alliance plotted to gain the plans to the space station, hoping to learn its structural flaws. (‘Spoiler alert- they found one.’ -Jimmy Kimmel) It centers on former Rebel Jyn Erso (Felicity Jones) who, like Rey in Episode VII, is a strong, likable heroine who is at the center of the action rather than being a support character or damsel in distress. She is recruited by Rebel intelligence officer Cassian Andor (Diego Luna), who wants her to find her father, an Imperial scientist, but doesn’t tell her exactly why. Their mission goes south but they learn that the Empire has just completed its “planet killer” space station, and when the Rebel Alliance refuses to organize, Jyn resolves to find the plans to the base herself. As such, the movie takes cues from those old World War II movies where commandos have to perform a secret mission in occupied Europe, and you know someone is getting killed, you just aren’t sure who and how.

This greater realism (relative to Star Wars) is increased by the fact that apart from Darth Vader (voiced by James Earl Jones!), there are no Jedi in the piece, although martial arts star Donnie Yen plays a variant of the Blind Master archetype, who was a monk at one of the last temples of the Force. This shift in emphasis is important in at least a minor way, given that while you did have a vast universe to explore with the Star Wars setting, the stories so far have mainly been about the journey of a prospective Jedi into mastery – while Luke (and Rey) had a large group around them with their own stories, once they developed their powers, they started spending more time away from the team. The prequels, meanwhile, were almost entirely about the Jedi Order.

So that in itself makes Rogue One, as launching point for Lucasfilm’s “anthology” concept, very valuable.  It ISN’T really stand-alone, given that the story ends almost exactly at the point where Star Wars (Episode IV: A New Hope) begins. And again, we know how that worked out, and it isn’t too hard to guess what happens to these characters. But they are given a certain level of depth that the main series (especially the prequels) were not known for. Put another way, if you have an acquaintance who for some reason can’t stand Star Wars, you might ask them to see Rogue One with you. It works as a Star Wars story, and it works outside of being a Star Wars story. I hope it is a sign of things to come.