What a Slugfest! Baby Yoda and Mando are Back

I grew up with Star Wars. I saw the first movie aka Episode IV in the cinema at a friend’s 8th birthday party. With varying levels of anticipation, I’ve watched pretty much every live action canon production since.

So, after nearly half a century of The Force, I’m not coming to the new Lucasfilm production with crazy expectations. But all I can say about Jon Favreau’s 2026 slugfest is, ”what was he thinking?”

It will probably be an unpopular opinion because The Mandalorian and Grogu has plenty for the Star Wars fan to enjoy, from the Martin Scorsese cameo as a food cart owner with many arms to Sigourney Weaver’s reprise of female leader in an alien context. Indeed the stans around me at a preview screening seemed excited by all the knowing nods to the past and the action that surrounds the Mandalorian. But, though highly competent and enjoyable Star Wars comfort fare which will almost certainly kill at the box office because who can deny manly Mando and cute Baby Yoda, this was a tediously safe and formulaic piece of film-making by Favreau who is a much better chef.

Some people hated Jabba the Hutt so much that a film full of his slug race fighting, copulating, and scheming is just a turnoff. Some people are not sufficiently inured to Hollywood violence to enjoy over two hours of a helmeted lone-warrior hitting, shooting, flaming and in myriad ways destroying people. My issues with The Mandalorian and Grogu (please remember, Baby Yoda has a name) are unrelated to these critiques of it as an unrepentant slugfest.

The original Star Wars was essentially just a vast cartoon version of World War II played out in space. The evil Empire stood in for the Nazis, while the rebel alliance was a hardscrabble group of allies coming together, Brits, Americans and others — although of course, foreignness in the Imperial Army was often marked by a British accent.

The great joy of the various new series of Star Wars shows that have appeared in the past few years is their topical and generic inventiveness. The Mandalorian, Andor and Ahsoka took the fertile soil of the Star Wars epic and took a totally different tack from previous Star Wars. Favreau’s Mandalorian took the spare loner samurai aesthetic and realised it on the edge of a galaxy reeling from the destruction of the Empire. Andor was more like LeCarré with the struggle carried out at middle-management: political characters developed as they emerged through the moral grey areas of espionage and rebellion. Even the flawed Ahsoka was prepared to look at women warriors and to think about how people develop after perceived failures.

Despite the surface thrills and spills, The Mandalorian and Grogu had none of that inventiveness, none of the sense of growth. Favreau just put together a Star Wars film by numbers. Hand to hand combat? Check. Ice-walking AT-ATs collapsing down a cliff? Check. Vehicle chase through futuristic landscape? Check (though in bizarrely Blade Runner fashion). Cute and gruesome new aliens? Check (Baby Yoda and the new Ewoks — the miniature Anzellan engineers) and check (Dragonsnake, Mantellian Savrip). Fetishised spacecraft? Check. Token racist alien stereotype: bayou edition? Check. Iconic female head of the good guys? Check — Weaver replaces Carrie Fisher as the leader of the Rebel Alliance or as it is now called The New Republic. And we’re back to World War II, as well — with the new rebel headquarter set up on an air base that resembles one of the U.S. Pacific airbases after the war.

Yes it’s tricky to make an interesting film where the two eponyms are monosyllabic and pre-verbal respectively. Clint Eastwood built a genre on that sort of premise, though, and Favreau himself put together two fascinating seasons of it during the pandemic. But there’s no real scope for self-discovery in this adventure movie where Pedro Pascal (if it is him) acts almost exclusively under complete metal armor and Grogu’s puppeteers have little to go on.

Maybe in an era of rapid change and social disintegration, there’s something deliberately comforting about familiar everything along with the general platitudes that your parents’ sins don’t define you and that the monsters you nourish will consume you. But the absolute lack of a compelling villain or any character development of any protagonists are just symptoms of a film that quite happily fails to transcend its own plastic figurines.