The Case for Small Star Wars

Seven years. That’s how long it’s been since a Star Wars movie was in theaters.

Seven years since The Rise of Skywalker, a mess of a film so desperate to please everyone that it pleased no one.

Seven years of Disney+ shows of varying quality. Seven years of a storied franchise spinning its wheels.

I still love this series despite all the ups and down, Star Wars played a huge part of my childhood, and very little matches the high this franchise can offer when it operates at its very best. But I should be honest about my expectations for The Mandalorian and Grogu, because the floor I had set for this movie was basically underground.

I had a specific image in my head: the entire galaxy is in danger, Thrawn is back as the big bad, Ahsoka, Ezra, Boba Fett, Bo-Katan, and CGI Luke show up, we get yet another story centered around the Darksaber. I was pretty much anticipating a Filoni All-Stars movie… That’s where the last season and a half of The Mandalorian show lost me, Filoni just got too in love with bringing back all his favorites from the cartoons and the stakes got bloated. I was bracing myself for movie full of fan service and cameos dressed up as story.

But instead this movie is just Mando and Grogu going on a space adventure… and there’s a simplicity to that premise that I truly found refreshing after years of blockbusters with ‘world-ending’ stakes (whether it’s Star Wars or your favorite superhero film).

So yeah, I’m genuinely shocked that this movie dials it back. It’s the type of restraint we hadn’t seen since the first season of The Mandalorian. Our heroes jump from planet to planet, each one looking different, encountering monsters and aliens, some threatening, some helpful. You got your serious moments with stoic (and boring) Mando, but it’s all the silly that ultimately won me over: Scorsese giving a genuinely committed performance as a monkey-ish sandwich maker / criminal informant, Rotta the Hutt all jacked and grown up with the voice (and eyes?) of Jeremy Allen White, rolling in the beach with Grogu, reminding Mando he’s a good dad because his own dad was terrible. And as much as I want to resist the cuteness of that damn baby Yoda (because I know he’s been designed to sell merch!), all his puppetry just gives him way too much charm and personality… he gets a ten-minute segment where he goes on his own solo adventure and it’s some of the best Star Wars has ever been. Playful, tactile, completely unburdened by the weight of the saga.

Don’t get me wrong, this is not a great movie. Some of the action is sloppy, the CGI isn’t always clean, the movie looks dull (how did we go from Greig Fraser in Season 1 to David Klein in the cinematography department?), and the visual effects on the Hutts either deserved more time or a return to practical effects. But this side-adventure is actually what I want from Star Wars in-between the big swings… yes, give me the next epic saga (Disney should be begging Rian Johnson or Tony Gilroy to come back), but also give me these low-stakes adventures that expands the world by making you care about the smaller players in this universe

The first season of The Mandalorian is the closest Disney has come to honoring some of Lucas’ original inspiration for Star Wars. It’s Flash Gordon, it’s a Western, you just replace the the lone gunman with a bounty hunter and the frontier towns with planets. I figured Disney got scared of these smaller films after the underrated Solo fizzled at the box-office, so I hope they continue investing in more movies like this instead of turning them into bloated TV shows and pushing them to Disney+, just give me better production values and more interesting characters.

One final note… that man Ludwig Göransson is the real MVP of the movie. He has an uncanny ability to create sounds that feel epic and grand and completely unlike anything else, and his score for this film is some of the best Star Wars music since the prequels. His theme sets the mood from the moment the film opens, but it’s more than just replaying the Mando tune we all know, it sounds new, it sounds different, but more importantly it sounds like an epic movie, and it does all the heavy lifting that gets you to lean into what is mostly an uneven film.

The fact that I don’t actively hate The Mandalorian and Grogu might just be my surprise of the year, but what can I say, I would have loved this as a kid, but even now as an adult, I was entertained despite its flaws… Star Wars doesn’t need to save the universe every time. Not every story needs to be essential or mythic, sometimes a fun little adventure is enough for a good time.

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