Cowboy and Alien: THE MANDALORIAN AND GROGU

Star Wars has always been a pulp genre melting pot. You know the litany of influences: westerns, samurai adventures, medieval fantasies, small-town drag races, WWII dogfights, creature features, space opera action serials. In the unique stirring of George Lucas’ mind, the whole production becomes a sui generis construction, a blend of his interests that’s uniquely personal for something so outsized. It’s also been a central pillar of our last several decades of pop culture production. Every science fiction fantasy blockbuster is downstream of its innovations, and the trouble with non-Lucas attempts to extend his world is getting the mix wrong. You shouldn’t make a Star Wars movie out of copying Star Wars; you should go back to the source code. What made for fun with The Mandalorian, the first live-action Star Wars television show, when it debuted on Disney+ seven years ago, was its success in making cinematic images roughly congruent with the movie series, while bottling it up in the roving bounty hunter episodic structure of so many TV westerns of yore. It had a setup to run for years. But given the sluggish pace of modern TV production we’ve only had two more seasons and a handful of vaguely connected parallel series since. We’ve also had a franchise increasingly incapable of getting a movie out of pre-production. So it is that Disney decided to get a Star Wars-shaped thing in theaters for this Memorial Day. Getting a supersized episode of the show off the ground seemed the quickest way to do so. 

Show-runner Jon Favreau helms it himself. It’s not exactly a fourth season of the show. Instead, it’s a two-hour tide-me-over. It looks like an episode of the show, although that says a lot about how TV has gotten glossier and movies have gotten flatter. Nothing much of consequence happens, but we do get to hang out with the eponymous Mandalorian bounty hunter and his tiny green Force-sensitive "Baby Yoda" ward Grogu. They’ve become iconic for a reason, with clean silhouettes and archetypal simplicity. When they first step into frame in an elaborate opening action sequence, there’s a pop of excitement. Just like in the show, they’re off on a mission that branches into side quests then weaves back into the original goal. Every twenty to thirty minutes the minor objective and setting changes while building to one overarching major objective for a climax. We fly to a snow planet to a beach planet to a swamp planet to a city planet and back again. Some locations are neatly imagined with fun whimsical details like a trip to a new location: space Chicago crawling with gangsters and fixed fights. Other locales, like goopy underground tunnels in a Hutt den, are blurry brownish-green eyesores. Favreau, a veteran of this sort of thing through Iron Man and Zathura and Cowboys & Aliens, gives the movie a bland professionalism that dutifully pushes fans' buttons. It’s very familiar and largely unsurprising, cramped and small, but manages some diverting appeal from time to time. 

For long-term fans of the whole franchise, it’s recognizably similar to the small-scale stories tossed off as comic book one-shots or short stories in anthologies during the 1990s Expanded Universe of multimedia spin-offs. Realizing that helps tamp down expectations and allows the movie its best chance of working for you. It’s a light, inessential doodling in the margins of the main storylines. Stormtroopers get shot. We meet lots of little aliens with funny voices. Sigourney Weaver appears for a few moments, barely longer than she’s in the trailer. A couple minor characters from a different show get killed off. X-wings swoop in at the last second. It has all the noises and lights you’d expect from the franchise. Ludwig Göransson’s score bangs and wails with suitable techno-spaghetti western flair. Mando looks cool as takes down waves of bad guys. Grogu’s puppeteered for maximum affecting cuteness and growing power. And yet for this we go to the theater? It can’t help but feel like a diminishment of the franchise from a mythic cycle to just another thing to see. When shows like the literate, political Andor and the vibrant, kinetic Maul: Shadow Lord have kept the series’ vitality alive through streaming, it’s a shame going back to the movies for this universe feels so inconsequential and small.