Films and Fiction

With just three months to go until Star Wars returns to the big screen, we finally have a full-length trailer for The Mandalorian and Grogu, which appears to give a very good indication of what to expect from the movie.

The trailer opens with a shot seemingly riffing off The Force Awakens–we’ve truly hit a dead-end if we’re now nostalgia farming that movie–and then switches to a scene that just made me sad.

Din Djarin starts the engines on his new Razor Crest, the original Star Wars theme swells… then it’s abruptly cut off as Grogu messes with some buttons, stalling the ship.

I’m sick of this kind of humour now. We’ve been subjected to it for over ten years now, in every single movie, as the MCU popularised it and every franchise had to get on the ironic, self-aware bandwagon. Sincerity is to be destroyed at all costs, and any chance of profundity lost for the chance to make a cheap joke.

This really sets the tone for everything else that will follow. There are a bunch of mashed up scenes that hint at the plot, or lack of one. Mando is looking for a Hutt, presumably Rotta, but he’s also taking a job from Colonel Ward (Sigourney Weaver) of the New Republic to hunt down some Imperial warlords and prevent a war.

I’m not sure how all this fits together. There’s no sense of a real narrative thread to connect it all, no suggestion of why Mando is hired for the job or how he’s connected to these characters. No doubt like in the show, he will just be a static object who moves through the story without really being integral to it, just there to take a lot of hits and do some cool looking action stuff, all while protected by his literal plot armour.

There’s a suggestion that this might be the end of The Mandalorian, that Grogu might have to move on, because he’ll live so much longer than Din and will need to learn to fend for himself. If only there were some sort of New Jedi Order he could have joined…

The rest of the trailer is just the usual stuff. Grogu doing cute things and eating; Mando shooting a lot; cameos from Embo (my favourite bounty hunter) and Zeb from Rebels; lots of big monsters to fight.

For some reason Din Djarin has taken off (or had removed) his helmet again, despite there being two seasons where his sole character development was to throw off the restrictions of his Mandalorian cult and let Grogu see his face. Then Pedro Pacal fell out with the show and they decided to make him a faceless suit of armour again for a whole season. The helmet rule is dumb anyway, but I wish they’d get it straight at least.

It’s a sign of how poorly planned and executed the show has been, that here we are after three seasons, with a movie that’s mostly a single episode plot stretched out to cover two hours. It will probably be okay as such, fine, not too bad, a bit of nonsense entertainment, probably worth watching on Disney+, and enough to satisfy those who just want to see Grogu bumbling around.

I don’t see any attempt to raise the stakes to movie level. There’s no mention of Thrawn or set-up for Jakku, it all feels very run of the mill, a mix of all the usual things wrong with The Mandalorian, Star Wars, and entertainment.

The fact this is the first Star Wars film in seven years is not a good sign. I don’t know why Lucasfilm chose this to make their return to theatres. Most fans who still care will likely be disappointed, and many casuals won’t be interested.

If there’s to be any hope, it must be reserved for Star Wars: Starfighter next year, because this is not the way.

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