Once upon a time there were only three Star Wars films. Younger fans can probably no longer imagine the days when the original trilogy (1977 to 1983) stood alone.
In the late 1990s, Star Wars creator George Lucas brought three prequels to cinemas. And when he sold the rights to the Star Wars franchise to the Disney empire in 2012, new films followed at a rate of roughly one per year — until Disney pulled the emergency brake, largely because of Han Solo.
Following the box office failure of "Solo: A Star Wars Story", Disney halted its conveyor-belt strategy. J.J. Abrams' concluding Star Wars film, "Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker", still made it to cinemas in 2019, but after that Disney shifted its focus to streaming. Star Wars became series fodder for Disney+, with mixed results.
Yet while Star Wars disappeared from the big screen, one streaming series kept the cinematic feeling alive: "The Mandalorian."
Now, "The Mandalorian and Grogu" is bringing Star Wars back to cinemas after a seven-year absence.
The bounty hunter and his foundling
The first Star Wars live-action series created two audience favourites: Din Djarin — nicknamed "Mando" and played by Pedro Pascal — a ruthless but principled bounty hunter who always conceals his face behind his armour. And Grogu: the innocently sweet baby Yoda foundling who holds untapped powers of the Force within him.
The pair are thrown together on alien planets at the wild edges of the galaxy. Their adventures are told with straightforward tension, free of the accumulated narrative baggage and battle overkill of the feature films. Across three seasons so far, "The Mandalorian" does feature fierce combat and state-of-the-art effects, but deploys them sparingly.
Sometimes the Mandalorian and his small green, pointy-eared companion simply sit for minutes at a time in the cramped cockpit of a spacecraft. As the stars drift past, Grogu — still known to many younger fans as Baby Yoda — secretly tries to use the Force to pull a silver gear-shift knob towards him, until the taciturn warrior reprimands him once again. In other quirky scenes, Grogu stuffs all manner of frog-like creatures or colourful biscuits into his mouth.
It was presumably this enormous fan affection that led Disney to entrust the cinema comeback of Star Wars to the Mandalorian and Grogu.
Series fans may find something missing
Some fans of the series may, however, be disappointed by the cinema version. "The Mandalorian and Grogu" preserves the spirit and world of the series only in part.
Apart from the title characters, few of the series' beloved figures make an appearance. The Mandalorian warrior order, which accounts for much of the series' atmosphere, is barely touched upon — with only brief references to the particularly resilient Beskar metal that Mandalorians use for their armour. The world of the series is given little room to expand here.
And those who want to see the bigger picture and who, after seven years away from cinemas, might be hoping for new developments in the Star Wars universe, will not find much that is new either.
The story essentially rests on a brief note shown at the opening: a few years after the Rebellion's victory — as seen in "Return of the Jedi" — scattered remnants of the Empire are still at large in space, and Mando and Grogu are here to help track them down.
That said, Mando and Grogu do encounter some interesting characters along the way. Among them are the twin cousins of the cult villain Jabba the Hutt — and Jabba's son Rotta, who subverts the villainous image of the giant worm-like space mafiosi and provides some spectacular scenes. The Hutt combat sequences, which would not look out of place in a wrestling ring, are bizarrely entertaining.
For the filmmakers, however, the focus was on the development of the two title characters. Director Jon Favreau describes the film as a coming-of-age story for young Grogu.
Mando, meanwhile, is maturing as a father figure — or so his portrayer Pedro Pascal described it in an interview with dpa in early May, arguing that Mando develops more in this film than in any other version of their stories.
Grogu's greatest moment
The dynamic and development of the two title characters are genuinely the film's greatest strength. One passage in which Grogu must look after both of them alone is among the best and most moving of the just-over-two-hour story — perhaps because those minutes are strongly reminiscent of the groundedness of the series.
But when those minutes are over, the next battle breaks out in "The Mandalorian and Grogu" very quickly and rather arbitrarily. It feels as though the filmmakers were worried about boring their cinema audience. Yet fans of the series might actually wish for the opposite: more of those touching Mando-Grogu moments and less action.
Some of the fight sequences are, moreover, extremely violent. Some of the monsters — with their hideous jaws, venomous fangs, enormous bodies and brutal ferocity — that set upon Mando and Grogu may be a little extreme for younger viewers, despite the film's age rating of around 12 or PG13 in many countries.
Director Jon Favreau seems well aware of this, previously telling dpa that Star Wars has always been about the adventure being exciting and the world being dangerous. Parents have to decide for themselves what their children can watch, he argues, but said the films always offered a feeling of hope and reward for doing good things.
The greatest mistake Mando's enemies make
The question remains whether "The Mandalorian and Grogu" can herald a great Star Wars comeback at the cinema. Curiosity after a seven-year absence should be more than enough to ensure box office success. And perhaps film critics should not make the same great mistake as so many of the Mandalorian's enemies: underestimating his small, pointy-eared companion.
Because Grogu is a genuine scene-stealer in the cinema film too — with new nimble movements and baby sounds, his disarming blend of innocence and growing responsibility, and the charisma of a hidden Jedi wisdom.
This film might not be the one that will write the next chapter of Star Wars cinema legend — but little Grogu, all on his own, just might.
