Star Wars: The Magic is Far, Far Away

I originally started writing this article on September 3, more than five weeks ago, after sitting down to watch The Mandalorian and Grogu. What began as a critique of one movie gradually became something much more personal: a reflection on what happened to the Star Wars I grew up loving.

Yesterday I watched Professor Dungeon Master’s video⁠, where he was ranking tabletop role-playing games, and surprisingly enough, the old West End Games Star Wars RPG ended up near the top. It got me thinking about just how enormous Star Wars once was, not merely as a series of movies, but as a cultural juggernaut that spilled into toys, games, books, comics, tabletop RPGs, and seemingly everything else.

And it is not as though Star Wars has disappeared from my house. My son got one of those super-duper lightsabers for Christmas, the kind that makes the plastic telescoping lightsabers we beat the hell out of each other with as kids look like prehistoric technology. Almost fifty years after the first movie, kids still want to pick up a lightsaber. There is something remarkable about that kind of cultural staying power.

So when I saw that The Mandalorian and Grogu had finally landed on Disney+, I figured it was time. I had not heard particularly great things about the movie, but that has never been enough for me. I wanted to see it for myself. I was not sitting down intending to write a review. I was just going to watch a Star Wars movie.

Then the movie started.

Where Did My Star Wars Go

Star Wars may have the most recognizable opening in the history of cinema. The fanfare. The title explodes onto the screen. The yellow crawl disappears toward the stars. You can identify what you are watching before a character speaks or a lightsaber ignites. It is not merely an introduction anymore. It is part of the cultural language of Star Wars.

And The Mandalorian and Grogu do not use it.

Instead, the movie gives us essentially the same thing the crawl was invented to provide: a couple of paragraphs explaining the state of the galaxy, only stripped of one of the most recognizable cinematic traditions ever created. I remember sitting there thinking, why? If you are already doing the thing the Star Wars crawl has always done, why strip away the part that made it unmistakably Star Wars?

That was the moment this article started. Not because I had decided the movie was bad. I hadn’t. The damn thing had barely begun. But abandoning arguably the most recognizable opening in cinema while still putting exposition on the screen was interesting enough that I wanted to write about it. So I started paying attention in a different way, and unfortunately for The Mandalorian and Grogu, that is when the writer in me took over.

Once I started looking at the movie instead of merely watching it, I started noticing things. How scenes were constructed. How characters established themselves. How information was communicated. Whether the geography of an action sequence made sense. Whether the danger onscreen felt earned or merely announced. Whether the things I was seeing actually felt like they belonged in Star Wars or simply looked like things I recognized from Star Wars.

I had started an article because of a missing opening crawl. I had no idea what the next few minutes were about to give me.

The Empire Has Fallen, and Apparently So Have Its Standards

The first proper scene puts us in a boardroom. The windows tell us immediately that we are in Star Wars, and a group of Imperial holdouts sits around a table while one man laments the fall of the Empire. By the end, he has effectively bullied the room into repeating, “Long live the Empire.”

Except nobody in that room feels particularly Imperial or scary.

Think about the Imperial officers in the original trilogy. Those guys were frightening before Darth Vader ever entered the room. They were cold, disciplined, authoritarian men operating an enormous military machine, and when one of their Star Destroyers appeared overhead, you knew some shit was about to go down. Even the officers who were terrified of Vader could turn around and be absolutely terrifying to everyone beneath them.

Here, I am watching a room full of people who seem intimidated by the idea of merely saying “Long live the Empire.” The scene wants to establish that this man commands fear, but I do not feel it. Nobody in that room scares me. Nobody feels like the inheritor of the institution that gave us Tarkin, Piett, Veers, or the officers sitting around that conference table on the Death Star.

After forcing everyone around the table to pledge loyalty, our new Imperial Heavy reveals that he is essentially running a protection racket. He’s just a two-bit gangster. He wants more money.

Come on, man.

One of the men protests that they are already operating at a loss. The villain responds by essentially asking, “Are you saying I’m not protecting you?” and then shoots him. I suppose this is the moment when I am supposed to understand that this guy is dangerous. Instead, it feels like somebody writing fan fiction about the time they overheard a parent talking about what a Star Wars villain should be. He makes people repeat a scary slogan. He demands protection money like a gangster. Somebody questions him, so he shoots the guy. See? Bad guy. Very bad guy.

But Star Wars never needed this kind of nerf-herder to make the Empire frightening. Grand Moff Tarkin did not need to randomly shoot somebody in a conference room to convince us he was dangerous. Tarkin was a beast. He blew up Alderaan on a whim. Imperial authority came from presence, competence, institutional power, and the knowledge that an enormous and merciless machine stood behind it.

And remember where the audience was when Return of the Jedi opened. We barely knew the Emperor. We had a glimpse, but we had not really met him. Heck, when I was a kid, you could not even walk into Toys “R” Us or KB Toys and buy the Emperor off the shelf with the rest of the Star Wars figures. Kenner made him a mail-away figure. You had to collect proofs of purchase, send them in with some other BS, and wait for the Emperor to arrive in the mail. Even as a toy, the guy carried an enigma with him.

Darth Vader was still our measuring stick for evil in this galaxy, and Vader was terrifying. We had watched him choke men to death and torture prisoners. He cut off Luke Skywalker’s hand and revealed his parentage in anger. Vader disposed of his own officers when they failed him. For two movies, Darth Vader had been the monster in the room.

Then the monster arrives at the second Death Star and tells Moff Jerjerrod: “The Emperor is not as forgiving as I am.” Think about what that meant to an audience in 1983. Not as forgiving as Darth f#%king Vader? What? Suddenly the Emperor does not need to kill anybody. He doesn’t even need to appear onscreen. Vader has established the stakes for him. If Darth Vader, at that point arguably the most terrifying man we know in the entire galaxy, considers himself the forgiving one, what in God’s name is coming?

Then look at Jerjerrod’s face. The fear is palpable. You feel it through the screen, and for a moment you almost feel sorry for the guy. You are sitting there thinking, oh crap, this dude is done. That is Star Wars understanding menace. Vader does practically nothing, and the Emperor is not even there, yet the dialogue, the performances, and everything the previous two films have taught us make the threat enormous.

Compare that with what I have just watched in The Mandalorian and Grogu. This new villain has to demand money, threaten people, force them to pledge loyalty, and finally shoot somebody sitting at the table with him so the screenplay can make absolutely certain that I understand he is dangerous.

The old scene whispers while the new one screams, and somehow the whisper is infinitely more frightening.

There is a difference between writing a frightening character and simply having a character perform frightening acts. I am not even five minutes into The Mandalorian and Grogu, and instead of disappearing into that galaxy far, far away, I am already noticing the writers.

The Walker That Thinks It’s a Motorcycle

Then we get to the snow, and here comes something that looks like somebody took the basic visual language of an AT-AT or AT-ST and asked, “What if we made it a motorcycle?” There is a guy riding the damn thing outside, on a snow planet.

The original Star Wars movies did not simply throw recognizable shapes onto the screen. Their vehicles looked like machinery. The walkers on Hoth felt like enormous armored military vehicles built to move troops and weapons through an unimaginably hostile environment. Whatever the practical engineering questions might have been, I believed those machines belonged there.

This feels different. It feels like someone recognized that walkers are Star Wars, snow planets are Star Wars, and unusual vehicles are Star Wars, so they combined those ingredients into something that looks vaguely familiar without asking whether it feels like it belongs in the same universe.

Then we graduate from “this doesn’t feel like Star Wars” to something more fundamental: the scene simply does not make sense.

The rider gets off his little walker-bike contraption because he is tracking a life form. We know that the life form is Grogu, who is hiding nearby. The rider approaches him, leaving his vehicle perhaps five or ten feet behind him. And suddenly the Mandalorian is sitting on it.

Not running toward it. Not sneaking up behind the rider. Not arriving in some clever way that explains how he got there. He is already sitting in the man’s vehicle. Mando raises it up and shoots him. How? The guy was standing right there.

This is the kind of writing that drives me crazy because the scene only works if a character temporarily loses all awareness of the physical space around him. Mando does not get the drop on this guy because we watched him do something clever. He gets the drop on him because the screenplay requires the other guy not to notice a fully armored Mandalorian climbing onto the vehicle sitting a few feet behind him.

That is not tension or cleverness. It is a shortcut to a hero shot.

The movie keeps asking me to supply credibility that the filmmaking has not earned. I am supposed to believe the Imperial villain is terrifying because he shoots somebody. I am supposed to believe the walker-bike belongs in this world because it looks vaguely Star Wars. And now I am supposed to believe Mando pulled off an ingenious ambush because the camera simply withheld the part where the ambush would have had to happen.

I’m already doing more work than the screenplay.

Grogu, the Puppet, and the Cliff

After dispatching the Imperial guard, Mando tells Grogu to jump aboard, in a moment that already feels strangely flat. Grogu jumps onto the walker and, rather than seeing Grogu, for a second all I can see is somebody tossing a stuffed animal onto the back of the thing.

And before anybody mistakes what I am saying here for a complaint about puppetry. Absolutely not. Yoda was running around Dagobah in The Empire Strikes Back in 1980. I watched those movies as a kid, and I never sat there thinking about Frank Oz underneath the set operating a puppet. I saw Yoda. The artistry disappeared into the character.

Grogu has worked for much the same reason. One of the remarkable accomplishments of The Mandalorian was that this little puppet could tilt his head, move his ears, look up at Din Djarin, and somehow convince millions of people that there was a living little creature underneath that robe.

But when Grogu jumps onto this walker, that illusion completely collapses. I do not see Grogu jumping onto a vehicle. I see somebody throwing a stuffed animal onto it. It genuinely looks like I tossed one of my dog’s toys to my kid while he was riding his bike.

And that matters because technology is not the limitation. Star Wars solved this problem nearly half a century ago. The problem is execution. For a few seconds, the character disappears and the prop becomes visible. Once that happens, the magic is gone.

Then Mando takes this two-legged motorcycle-walker to the edge of what appears to be an enormous, nearly sheer cliff. I am looking at this thing thinking there is nowhere for it to go. So naturally he drives it over the edge, and the fucking thing runs down the mountain.

A two-legged machine goes charging down what appears onscreen to be an almost vertical cliff face, with Mando and Grogu riding on top, and at this point the movie has stopped asking me to suspend disbelief and started asking me to suspend my understanding of gravity.

Fantasy requires suspension of disbelief. Star Wars has always required plenty of it. I will give you hyperspace. I will give you the Force. I will give you lightsabers, sound in space, giant walking tanks, and a two-foot-tall green alien who can move objects with his mind.

But suspension of disbelief is an agreement between the movie and the audience. Give me a world with impossible things, establish how that world behaves, and I will happily come along. What you cannot keep doing is asking me to ignore whatever is happening directly in front of my eyes because somebody thought it would make a cool shot.

Three AT-ATs and the Worst Imperials in the Galaxy

Apparently running a two-legged motorcycle down the side of a mountain was only the warm-up, because suddenly three full-sized AT-ATs appeared along the ridge. Where exactly these enormous machines came from, I have no idea. They are simply there now, because apparently what this scene needed was more Star Wars stuff.

Mando races between the first two before eventually losing his little walker-bike and taking to the air. He manages to bring down one of the AT-ATs by blowing out its leg with an explosive, which is actually the kind of thing I can buy. These machines have vulnerabilities. We have seen people exploit them before. Give me a clever way for a smaller opponent to bring down something enormous and I am perfectly happy to go along for the ride.

Then the movie apparently decides that was far too reasonable.

We cut inside one of the remaining AT-ATs, where a couple dozen Imperial troops are gearing up and preparing for a fight. These guys are armed, armored, packed into an enclosed military vehicle, and they know there is an enemy attacking them. Somehow Mando gets inside, and then he proceeds to take the entire room apart. Blaster fire is going everywhere, there are armed men all around him, and our hero clears the room without getting shot once.

At this point, why should I be afraid of Imperial troops? That is not a nitpick. It is a storytelling problem. Action requires the possibility of failure. I do not need Din Djarin to die, obviously, but I need to believe somebody in the room might actually hurt him. If twenty armed soldiers in an enclosed space cannot land a single shot on one man, they cease functioning as antagonists. They become targets in a shooting gallery.

And Star Wars has been down this road before. Yes, stormtroopers have been the butt of jokes about their aim for decades, but the original movies still understood that Imperial troops represented danger. Leia gets shot on Endor. Luke gets hit in the hand. Rebel soldiers die. The Empire overruns Echo Base. Characters retreat because remaining in a fight can get them killed. The heroes survive because they struggle, improvise, escape, get lucky, and sometimes get hurt.

What I am watching here feels less like a battle and more like watching somebody play a video game with god mode turned on. The AT-ATs look enormous. The blasters are firing. The explosions are going off. The movie wants me to feel the danger, but it has already shown me that the danger is largely cosmetic.

After Mando clears the room full of Imperial troops, we cut between the cockpits of the two remaining AT-ATs. Our big bad is barking orders, presumably because the movie still desperately wants me to believe this guy is commanding some formidable Imperial operation. The problem is that almost nothing happening around him suggests competence at any level.

The commander of the other AT-AT realizes that something is on the roof. This should be a fairly significant development considering that somebody has already destroyed one walker, boarded another, and slaughtered the troops inside. Instead, the guy basically stands there while whatever Mando is doing above him reaches its conclusion, and then the whole damn thing blows up. Another enormous Imperial war machine is gone, and its commander seems to contribute almost nothing to preventing it.

Then we go back to our big bad, and somehow the decision-making gets even stranger. He realizes there may be somebody on top of his AT-AT and orders the pilots to go investigate. The pilots. The people whose rather important job is presumably to operate the gigantic walking war machine they are currently standing inside.

Meanwhile, unless I am completely misunderstanding what I am seeing, there are two perfectly good Imperial troopers standing right there. Send the troopers. Instead, the pilots climb out in their pilot gear to investigate the heavily armed Mandalorian who has been systematically destroying their formation.

At this point the movie is not allowing Mando to overcome competent enemies. It is surrounding him with people who repeatedly make whatever decision is necessary for him to win the next thirty seconds.

That distinction matters. A hero becomes impressive when the opposition is formidable. Indiana Jones is not impressive because every Nazi he encounters is an idiot. Luke does not become heroic because Vader suddenly forgets how to use a lightsaber. Ripley does not become courageous because the xenomorph keeps walking into walls. The stronger the opposition, the more impressive the hero becomes for overcoming it.

This movie is doing the opposite with Din Djarin. Every time another Imperial behaves like an idiot, Mando’s victory becomes less impressive. I am not thinking, “Holy shit, Mando is good.” I am thinking, “Holy shit, these guys are terrible.”

Apparently the only way this screenplay knows how to make Din Djarin look competent is to make everybody around him incompetent.

And naturally, when the pilots climb onto the roof to investigate, Mando is waiting for them. He knocks both men off the AT-AT and sends them tumbling what looks like hundreds, perhaps a thousand feet, down the side of the mountain. Problem solved, except now the movie has created another problem that it apparently has no interest in acknowledging: there is a gigantic AT-AT walking along a narrow mountain ledge with nobody driving it.

The more I look at this sequence, the less the geography makes any sense. These AT-ATs are walking along what appears to be a ledge maybe a hundred feet wide, bordered by enormous cliff faces. The drop beside them appears substantially taller than the walkers themselves, and the movie gives us views where we can seemingly see where this ledge terminates in either direction. So while I am supposed to be concentrating on Mando kicking pilots off the roof, I find myself asking a much more basic question: how in the hell did three AT-ATs get up there?

Seriously. Where did they come from? What route did these enormous four-legged machines take onto this ledge? Where are they going? How are they supposed to get back down? These are not starfighters that somebody can simply land wherever the screenplay needs them. They are enormous ground vehicles, and the terrain the movie itself shows me appears to provide no plausible route for them to have reached the position where the action sequence requires them to be.

Maybe there is some unseen mountain pass around the corner. Maybe there is an Imperial transport somewhere capable of dropping AT-ATs onto tiny ledges. Maybe the geography makes perfect sense on a map sitting in somebody’s production office. But none of that is in the movie I am watching. Once again, I am being asked to invent an explanation for something the screenplay and the visual storytelling should have established themselves.

That is why these complaints keep accumulating instead of disappearing. Any one of them could be shrugged off. Fine, Mando somehow sneaked onto the little walker-bike. Fine, the thing can run down a cliff. Fine, three AT-ATs happened to be waiting on a mountain ridge. Fine, Mando can clear a room full of armed troops without being hit. Fine, the Imperial commander sends his pilots instead of his soldiers to deal with an intruder. Fine, those pilots are immediately knocked off the roof, leaving an enormous walking war machine apparently without anybody at the controls.

Eventually, though, “fine” stops working.

Suspension of disbelief is not an unlimited line of credit, and The Mandalorian and Grogu is burning through mine remarkably fast. The movie keeps constructing action sequences around whatever image it wants next, while apparently giving very little thought to how one image connects logically to another. I should be watching Din Djarin fight his way through an Imperial force. Instead, I am sitting here trying to figure out the traffic pattern for AT-ATs on the side of a mountain.

Paw Patrol in a Galaxy Far, Far Away

Apparently I was premature in wondering what happens to an AT-AT after you throw its pilots off a mountain, because Mando eventually gets inside the cockpit and discovers that our big bad has escaped. Mando gives chase through the walker, and then the villain gets into what looks like the canopy or cockpit of an AT-ST.

And the thing shoots out of the side of the AT-AT and starts flying.

Look, there is absolutely nothing wrong with an enormous military vehicle having some kind of escape craft. That actually makes sense. What gets me is that even the escape craft apparently has to look like another Star Wars walker. It is as though the production designers are terrified that if they put a normal escape pod, shuttle, or some completely new vehicle onscreen, I might become confused and think I accidentally switched over to Star Trek.

It reminds me of Paw Patrol, where everything has to be themed so completely around the character and the toy that even the vehicle inside the vehicle needs to announce what it belongs to. Except The Mandalorian and Grogu is not being made exclusively for four-year-olds, and I do not need every machine onscreen to remind me every thirty seconds that I am watching Star Wars.

Good production design makes me believe these machines were built by people living in this universe for a purpose. Form follows function, even in fantasy. I do not need to understand the engineering specifications of an AT-AT to look at one and understand what it is supposed to be: an enormous armored troop transport and weapons platform. I can look at an X-wing and understand why it has a cockpit, engines, wings, weapons, and an astromech socket. These things may be fantastical, but their designs communicate purpose.

What I am seeing in this sequence feels backward. The filmmakers appear to have started with the basic silhouette of an AT-AT or AT-ST and then worked backward to figure out what else they could make that shape do. What if we made one into a motorcycle? What if that motorcycle could run down a mountain? What if we put three full-sized AT-ATs on a cliff? What if the escape craft inside one looked like an AT-ST cockpit and then flew away? The function seems secondary. The recognizable Star Wars shape comes first.

That is not a small distinction, because it connects directly back to what bothered me when the movie began. The Mandalorian and Grogu discarded the opening crawl, perhaps the single most recognizable piece of cinematic language Star Wars has ever created, and then spent the next several minutes desperately covering the screen in things that look like Star Wars. It threw away something genuinely iconic and replaced it with iconography.

I finally turned the movie off and went to bed.

The next morning I woke up, answered some emails, got the kids off to school, and eventually came back to this article and the movie. My mind had not changed overnight. If anything, I understood better what had been bothering me. I had already written what felt like a thousand words about a movie I was barely ten or fifteen minutes into, because almost every scene kept producing the same problem in a slightly different form.

The movie is constantly telling me what it wants me to believe instead of showing me something that makes me believe it. The villain is dangerous because he performs the screenplay’s checklist of dangerous-guy behaviors. The Imperials fear him because the movie tells them to act afraid. Mando is formidable because everyone opposing him becomes incompetent. The action is exciting because enormous recognizable machines are exploding. The vehicles belong in Star Wars because they have been designed from recognizable Star Wars shapes.

But filmmaking is not supposed to work that way. Do not tell me your villain is frightening. Make me afraid of him. Do not tell me Mando is extraordinarily capable. Give him competent opponents and let me watch him overcome them. Do not tell me an action sequence is dangerous by filling the screen with blaster fire. Put something at risk. Do not tell me this is Star Wars by giving every machine an AT-ST-shaped cockpit.

Show me.

A Little Bit of Star Wars Magic

And then, finally, the movie gives me something I like.

Mando catches up with the fleeing Imperial, the bad guy goes boom, and shortly afterward Mando is picked up by his ship. At the controls is Zeb Orrelios, the Lasat from Star Wars Rebels, and the two of them have a brief exchange where Zeb gives Mando a hard time about killing the guy instead of bringing him back alive.

It’s a nice scene, and more importantly, it is a nice callback. Zeb does not come flying onto the screen while the movie elbows me in the ribs and screams, “Remember Star Wars Rebels?” He is simply there, doing a job that makes sense for where that character ended up, interacting with Mando like these are two people who inhabit the same galaxy.

After everything I have complained about in these opening minutes, I want to be fair when the movie gets something right. This is the kind of connection to the larger Star Wars universe that I enjoy. It rewards people who recognize Zeb without requiring everybody else to recognize him. If you watched Rebels, there is an extra little pleasure in seeing an old character again. If you didn’t, he’s simply the alien pilot giving Mando shit for blowing up the man they presumably wanted captured.

That is how you do a callback. You do not have to stop the movie and explain it to me. You do not have to cover the screen in familiar iconography. Just let the universe be big enough that occasionally somebody I recognize walks through the door.

For the first time since I started taking notes, I stopped analyzing the machinery for a minute and just enjoyed the scene.

Back to the Familiar

Back at Adelphi Base, we meet Colonel Ward, played by Sigourney Weaver, who runs the New Republic’s Adelphi Rangers. She takes Mando out to see his payment, and sitting there waiting for him is a pristine Razor Crest, essentially a new version of the ship he flew during the first seasons of The Mandalorian.

Of course it is.

The original Razor Crest was destroyed during the series, and I actually liked that decision because things should occasionally stay destroyed. Losing the ship meant something. It marked a movement in Din Djarin’s story. Now here comes another one, shiny and factory fresh, ready to put everything visually back where people remember it.

Maybe I am being cynical, but by this point I cannot help noticing how aggressively this movie keeps returning recognizable pieces to the board. We have already brought back Imperial imagery, AT-ATs, AT-ST shapes, Zeb, and now the Razor Crest. Ward’s next assignment sends Mando into the Hutt family story, because the person he needs to find is Rotta the Hutt, Jabba’s son. So now Return of the Jedi and The Clone Wars are getting pulled into the nostalgia machine as well.

There is nothing inherently wrong with any of these things. In fact, I just praised the Zeb appearance because I thought it worked. The difference is whether a callback makes the galaxy feel larger or whether the galaxy increasingly feels like it is being constructed out of callbacks. At some point I need The Mandalorian and Grogu to show me what it has brought to Star Wars, not merely what it remembers about Star Wars.

And through all of this, the familiar Mandalorian musical language keeps rolling underneath the scene, signaling importance, uncertainty, trepidation, adventure. I understand what the music is trying to accomplish, but after everything else the movie has already been doing, even the score is beginning to feel like another hand on my shoulder telling me, “This is the part where you should feel something.”

Then Grogu climbs into the new Razor Crest, gets into one of the cockpit seats, and starts pushing buttons like a six-month-old who has just discovered the dashboard. Mando has to tell him to stop touching things.

And this is where I have another question: how long are we going to keep Grogu frozen at this developmental stage?

Grogu was already fifty years old when The Mandalorian began. Since then he has demonstrated extraordinary Force abilities, trained with Luke Skywalker, made the conscious decision to leave that training and return to Din Djarin, helped save people in genuinely dangerous situations, and become Din’s Mandalorian apprentice. There is clearly a thinking, learning person inside this little creature.

Yet whenever the story wants the cute Baby Yoda routine, he can still behave almost exactly like the toddler we met years ago.

I understand that Yoda’s species apparently develops differently from humans, and I do not need somebody at Lucasfilm to hand me a developmental chart explaining how many Yoda-years equal one human year. But eventually a character has to develop. At what point does Grogu begin communicating beyond noises and gestures? At what point does his increasing understanding of the Force, the people around him, and his own choices begin showing itself in his everyday behavior?

Because there is a commercial reality sitting underneath all of this that is increasingly difficult for me not to see. Baby Grogu is adorable. Baby Grogu sells toys. Baby Grogu became a cultural phenomenon. An older, more articulate Grogu would necessarily become a somewhat different character.

But stories require change. If The Mandalorian is ultimately the story of Din Djarin becoming a father and Grogu becoming his son and apprentice, then Grogu cannot remain the same adorable toddler forever simply because that is the version everybody fell in love with. Otherwise we are not watching a relationship develop. We are watching a product remain on model.

The Razor Crest is back where it belongs. The Hutts are back. The familiar music is playing. Grogu is pushing buttons again. Everybody and everything is being returned to the position where the audience most easily recognizes it.

I recognize all of it. I’m still waiting for the movie to take me somewhere.

Look at the Names on This Movie

There is another thing making this difficult for me to process: look at the names on the damn movie. The Mandalorian and Grogu was written by Jon Favreau, Dave Filoni, and Noah Kloor. Favreau directed it. Kathleen Kennedy, Ian Bryce, Favreau, and Filoni produced it. Kennedy was also still president of Lucasfilm when this movie went into production. These are not people standing on the sidelines while somebody else made a Star Wars movie. Their names are on it.

Favreau’s involvement in particular makes this disappointing. I initially remembered him as having written Iron Man, and that part of my memory was wrong. Favreau directed the 2008 film rather than receiving screenplay credit. But he was nevertheless the filmmaker at the center of a movie that understood how to introduce characters, establish danger, build emotional investment, and trust an audience to understand what it was seeing.

Go back and watch Iron Man. Tony Stark has barely been introduced before we understand who he is. He’s brilliant, arrogant, funny, reckless, wounded, and enormously charismatic. Then the movie tears his world apart. Yinsen matters. Pepper matters. Obadiah Stane matters. Tony’s weapons matter. The suit matters because we watch Tony build it, fail with it, improve it, and gradually transform himself alongside the machine. Even technology has a narrative purpose.

That movie came out eighteen years ago.

Eighteen years later, I am watching a Star Wars movie that Favreau co-wrote, directed, and produced, alongside Filoni and Kennedy, and I keep running into the opposite approach. I do not know which of these people came up with which individual idea, and unless somebody eventually talks about it publicly, neither does anybody outside that production. But I also refuse to play the game where enormously powerful filmmakers and producers somehow become spectators to their own movie whenever the finished product does not work.

Kennedy’s name is on it. Favreau’s name is on it. Filoni’s name is on it. Kloor’s name is on it. They made the movie, and the movie is what I am reviewing.

That is what makes this sad rather than merely bad. There is too much talent involved for the storytelling to feel this thin. I know Favreau can tell me who a character is through behavior. I know Filoni understands Star Wars. Kennedy has one of the most extraordinary producing résumés in Hollywood history. Yet here I am, barely into their movie, repeatedly being told what I am supposed to feel instead of being shown something that makes me feel it.

That’s not the standard these names ought to represent.

George Lucas Sold the Dictionary

If we really want to keep walking backward through the chain of responsibility, eventually we arrive at George Lucas himself. Favreau’s name is in this movie. Filoni’s name is on it. Kloor’s name is on it. Kennedy’s name is on it. Disney owns the damn thing. But none of that would have been possible if Lucas had not made the decision to sell Lucasfilm and Star Wars to Disney in the first place.

That does not make George Lucas responsible for every bad line of dialogue, every ridiculous vehicle, or every creative decision Disney has made since 2012. Those belong to the people making those decisions. But Lucas created this extraordinary thing, protected and controlled it for decades, and then ultimately decided who would inherit it.

Whatever anyone thinks of the prequels, they were unquestionably George Lucas’s Star Wars. They came from the same strange imagination that gave us Tatooine, Darth Vader, Yoda, the Force, hyperspace, stormtroopers, X-wings, and the Death Star. You could love his choices or hate them, but there was an author behind them.

That is part of what feels so different to me now. Disney possesses Star Wars completely, but possession and authorship are not the same thing. Too often it feels like Disney is running around wearing George Lucas’s creation like some kind of Day of the Dead skin suit, draping itself in the recognizable shapes while increasingly losing touch with whatever made those shapes meaningful in the first place.

And maybe that is why this movie is bothering me more than a merely bad science-fiction movie ever could. I am not watching people fail to invent something new. I am watching extraordinarily talented people inherit one of the richest imaginative worlds in modern popular culture and seemingly mistake its vocabulary for its language.

George sold them the dictionary. He could not guarantee they would know how to write with it.

The Star Wars Movie I Couldn’t Finish

It's now the morning of October 10, 2026. It's been weeks since I wrote 99% of this article. I never finished The Mandalorian and Grogu. I didn’t storm out of the theater. I didn’t turn it off in some fit of rage and declare that Disney had destroyed my childhood. I just stopped watching. I figured I would come back to it the next day, and then the next day became another day, and eventually about a week had passed. The movie was still sitting there waiting for me, and I realized something considerably sadder than being angry about a bad Star Wars movie.

I had no desire to finish it.

That is difficult for me to reconcile with the kid I used to be. In 1983, when I was seven years old, my parents came home from a date night after going to see Return of the Jedi without my brother and me. I cried. I was genuinely devastated that they had gone to see the new Star Wars movie and left us behind. I had the old Yoda hand puppet that came out around that era, the one that has become something of a collectible today. Star Wars wasn’t simply another movie I liked. It was part of childhood.

It followed me into adulthood. When I was in college at the University of Oklahoma and got my first cell phone, the first custom ringtone I ever put on was the Millennium Falcon. Years later, when The Force Awakens arrived in 2015, I was there. I saw it three times in the theater. Whatever reservations I might eventually develop about that movie, Disney had gotten me back into a theater three separate times because those words on the screen still meant something to me: Star Wars.

Then it all changed.

I didn’t see either of the next two sequel films in a theater. To this day, I have never watched the final movie in that trilogy. And now a new Star Wars feature starring characters I already know and like can appear on Disney+, requiring nothing more from me than sitting on my couch and pressing a button, and I cannot summon enough interest to finish it.

That is surreal and crazy to me.

Maybe that is ultimately why I have spent so many words dissecting the first portion of The Mandalorian and Grogu. It isn’t because I enjoy complaining about Star Wars. Quite the opposite. I remember what it felt like when I could not get enough of this universe. I remember when Darth Vader merely mentioned the Emperor could fill a scene with dread. I remember when an AT-AT walking through the snow looked like the most terrifying war machine imaginable. I remember when Yoda was obviously a puppet and somehow never felt like one. I remember when the Millennium Falcon was important enough to me that I wanted to hear the damn thing every time somebody called my phone.

Disney did not erase any of those memories. It can’t. George Lucas created something too powerful for that. Those movies are still sitting there, exactly as they were, and generations of people will continue discovering them. My own son got one of those absurdly elaborate modern lightsabers for Christmas. Almost fifty years later, a kid can still pick up a lightsaber and immediately understand what it means.

That is the extraordinary inheritance Disney received when George Lucas sold Lucasfilm in 2012.

And perhaps that is why watching what has happened to Star Wars feels so strange. Disney owns the vocabulary. It has the lightsabers, the Hutts, the Razor Crest, the stormtroopers, the AT-ATs, the familiar musical cues, the characters, the creatures, and every other recognizable piece of the galaxy. It can arrange those pieces into an almost infinite number of combinations.

But vocabulary is not language.

The original films made me believe in an impossible place. The machines seemed to have purposes. The villains had presence. The heroes could fail. The universe seemed enormous beyond whatever corner George Lucas happened to be showing us. Most importantly, the movies did not constantly remind me that I was watching Star Wars. They didn’t have to. I was already there.

Too much of The Mandalorian and Grogu feels like people making Star Wars rather than a story happening inside Star Wars. I can see the callbacks being placed. I can see the familiar silhouettes being repurposed. I can hear the music telling me what emotion should be arriving. I can see the screenplay clearing incompetent enemies out of Din Djarin’s way so I understand how formidable he is. Again and again, I recognize what the filmmakers are showing me without believing very much of it.

I stop seeing Star Wars and start seeing people making Star Wars.

The movie keeps showing me the vocabulary of Star Wars without convincing me that it still understands the language.

And after a week, I realized I didn’t need to finish the movie to understand my reaction to it. The seven-year-old who cried because his parents saw Return of the Jedi without him would probably find that impossible to comprehend. The college kid who made the Millennium Falcon his first ringtone probably would too.

But I’m fifty, in my prime hobbit years now. I’ve got better things to do than force myself to watch Star Wars.

Of all the things Disney has done with this franchise, I cannot think of anything sadder than making that sentence true.