“The Mandalorian and Grogu” is Bargain Bin “Star Wars” (Review)

What even is Star Wars anymore?

A long time ago in a galaxy far, far away, Star Wars was the cinematic event franchise. For decades, those two words conjured images of packed theaters filled with breathless anticipation. But that was before the franchise seemingly committed seppuku on a global stage with 2019’s The Rise of Skywalker, a film that permanently damaged its reputation among fans, critics, and general audiences alike.

That movie saw the once-confident franchise bending over backward to undo developments from previous installments, all in an attempt to appease some of the loudest and most toxic corners of the fanbase. The result was a devastating hit to the series’ legitimacy, something further weakened when Disney pivoted Star Wars into an almost exclusively streaming-focused property to support Disney+. Over time, the franchise slowly bled cultural relevance, leading us to 2026, where the first theatrically released Star Wars film in seven years is Jon Favreau’s The Mandalorian and Grogu, essentially a feature-length continuation of the Disney+ series.

If that sounds like a strange way to reintroduce the franchise to theaters, your instincts are probably correct. Rather than feeling like a grand cinematic return, The Mandalorian and Grogu often come across as a slightly upgraded version of the content audiences have already spent years watching at home. While the film is not without charm, it ultimately feels like a strangely assembled corporate mandate rather than a project driven by genuine creative passion.

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TOP FIVE THINGS ABOUT “THE MANDALORIAN AND GROGU”

5. A Misunderstanding of “Episodic”

It is my firmly held belief that the meaning of the word “episodic” has been completely distorted in recent years. As streaming platforms continue incentivizing creators to stretch stories far beyond their natural limits, the purpose of what an actual episode should accomplish has become increasingly misunderstood. Nowhere is that more apparent than in the work of Jon Favreau.

Favreau has served as the primary writer for every season of The Mandalorian, along with the widely criticized single season of The Book of Boba Fett. That gives us four full seasons of Star Wars content written largely without a traditional writers’ room, and unfortunately, it reveals a deeply flawed understanding of episodic storytelling.

Take The Empire Strikes Back, for example. It is undeniably an episode within a larger story, yet Luke, Han, and Leia all enter the film as one version of themselves and leave fundamentally changed. Each character experiences substantial growth, emotional conflict, and irreversible shifts in worldview by the time the credits roll.

Contrast that with Din Djarin and Grogu in The Mandalorian and Grogu, who feel almost entirely static across the film’s two-hour runtime. By the end, they are essentially the exact same characters they were at the beginning. While this approach already weakened parts of Favreau’s television work, it becomes even more damaging in a theatrical format. This is not truly episodic storytelling. It is narrative stalling, creating stories so dramatically inconsequential that future audiences could easily discard them altogether without missing anything important.

4. The Pacing, or Total Lack Thereof

The Mandalorian and Grogu begins in a way that is steeped in both the traditions of Star Wars and other pulpy, serialized franchises like Indiana Jones or even James Bond, by having a cold open that drops the audience in with the titular protagonists mid-mission. It’s a move that makes sense, but it sets an unfortunate precedent for the rest of the film’s runtime because every subsequent scene feels like its own individual cold open.

This is a film full of entirely disparate sequences, all of which Favreau and his co-writers attempt to tie together with the jankiest duct tape imaginable. The resulting work quickly devolves into a monotonous dirge of a film, one in which it feels as though the same series of beats keeps getting recycled over and over again. Mando shoots up a room full of antagonists, enters into some poorly staged melee fight with a CGI enemy of some kind, Grogu does something cute, and then there’s a scene of two characters attempting to have a conversation that is inevitably delivered and edited with all the energy of a board meeting.

I have never been as outright bored during a Star Wars movie as I was during this one.

3. A TV Movie

Jon Favreau has continued to play coy throughout the press tour for this film, repeatedly suggesting that while he did write a fourth season of the Disney+ series The Mandalorian, this movie was supposedly conceived later as a separate project. However, it is painfully obvious that the film is essentially several television episodes stitched together, right down to unintentionally recreating The Simpsons Movie’s “to be continued… immediately” joke without any of the humor.

On top of that, the entire production looks and feels like something designed primarily for Disney+, not for a theatrical experience. From the flat lighting and occasionally unfinished-looking VFX to the claustrophobic set design and painfully obvious reliance on The Volume for background extensions, nearly every creative choice makes the film feel smaller than it should. Even some of the directing choices are strangely baffling, resulting in visual storytelling that often feels muddled, inconsistent, and occasionally confusing.

Everything about The Mandalorian and Grogu feels oddly insular and constrained, which is the exact opposite of what audiences want from Star Wars returning to the big screen.

2. Ludwig Göransson’s Musical Score is a Bright Spot

Look, if there’s anything I earnestly enjoyed about this film, it was Göransson’s music. In any given scene, you can count on his contributions to be easily the most articulate and thoughtful. So much of the film feels like Favreau just coasting on fumes, but Göransson’s work here is actually bringing something fresh to the table rather than simply recycling the same themes and motifs of his work on the first few seasons of the TV series.

1. Nothing New

One of the major set pieces in The Mandalorian and Grogu features Mando squaring off against Rotta the Hutt in a gladiatorial arena populated by creatures designed as fleshed-out homages to the Dejarik board, otherwise known as “space chess” for people with actual responsibilities, from the original 1977 Star Wars film. So, to recap, we have off-brand Boba Fett alongside off-brand Yoda fighting off-brand Jabba the Hutt while surrounded by what essentially amounts to living action figures.

At a certain point, you have to ask: Is this all Star Wars is now? Just endless references to older things? A pale imitation of moments that once sparked genuine emotion? Jon Favreau clearly has a very specific approach to Star Wars storytelling, and it is almost entirely devoid of anything genuinely new. Instead, his creative philosophy often feels like tossing recognizable franchise elements into a blender and serving the resulting sludge back to audiences who are expected to clap because they recognized something from before. Watching the film can sometimes feel less like engaging with an actual story and more like sitting through a two-hour YouTube Easter egg breakdown.

The marketing for The Mandalorian and Grogu repeatedly framed the film as “a new hope” for “a new era,” an especially loaded phrase within this franchise. But if this truly represents the future of Star Wars, an endless hallway of increasingly warped reflections that only mimic familiar imagery at the most surface level, then I think the franchise may have finally lost me altogether.

RGM GRADE

(D)

The Mandalorian and Grogu is an utterly deflating viewing experience that left me feeling completely numb. Star Wars used to represent passionate filmmaking and unforgettable cinematic experiences that stayed with audiences for a lifetime. Now, it seemingly represents content for content’s sake, and that is a goddamn shame.