Is ‘The Mandalorian & Grogu’ Boring, or Is It VERY Star Wars?

The Mandalorian and Grogu arrived in theaters this past weekend, and it undeniably represented a turning point for the Star Wars franchise. There’s absolutely no shortage of things to debate about: the box office, the bizarre attractiveness of Jeremy Allen White’s Rotta the Hutt, and what the heck Leia Organa and Mon Mothma thought of the events of the film’s third act.

But amid all of that, one particular debate about The Mandalorian and Grogu has raged on: whether or not the movie is boring. As some have voiced their dissatisfaction with the movie, or suggested that its storyline would’ve been better told in a fourth season of The Mandalorian, others have simply defaulted into the “let people enjoy things” camp.

Some of that debate has surrounded the structure of the movie itself, and the amount of “side quests” that Din Djarin (Pedro Pascal) and Grogu go on. You don’t have to go far to find tweets or Letterboxd reviews joking that the film almost feels like watching someone else play a video game, with the two protagonists going on a string of missions broken up by occasional “cutscenes” of dialogue. But honestly, arguing that that structure is what makes The Mandalorian and Grogu “boring” is woefully missing the point.

For one thing, Star Wars is certainly no stranger to those kinds of story beats. As far back as the Original Trilogy, we have had interludes of characters doing things that, at first, seem to have no bearing on the main plot. Luke Skywalker’s training on Dagobah, or Finn and Rose’s time in the space casino in The Last Jedi, seem like detours for everything else that the movie has going on, only to become incredibly relevant to the rest of their trilogy’s plots. Even then, even the smallest-scale story beats in The Mandalorian and Grogu still fit into the main plot: it’s just that the central story is already relatively small to begin with, compared to the galaxy-wide consequences of most of the other movies in the franchise.

It also helps that, honestly, the smallest-scale interludes of The Mandalorian and Grogu are the best part of the movie. I could’ve watched a full hour of Grogu and the Anzellans navigating through the forest, which was a charming, goofy, and well-executed bit of puppetry like something out of The Dark Crystal. And once Grogu had to nurse Din back to health, it was charming to learn that, in the words of a tweet from @bhangbhangducx, “Yodas build Yoda huts instinctively like beavers build dams.” Those moments did feel like quintessential Star Wars to me… it’s just a matter of how the rest of the movie is constructed around them.

Is The Mandalorian and Grogu Boring?

You can absolutely make the argument that The Mandalorian and Grogu often suffers from a sense of emotional detachment, which does contribute to that feeling of being bored. Compared to the massive personal stakes and crop of big personalities that Star Wars movies are usually known for, it does feel like something is missing. As a tweet from @AudGee122 eloquently puts it: “…what Favreau and Filoni miss (and Lucas understood) whenever they talk about their bullshit being steeped in westerns/Kurosawa is that those stories were rife with melodrama, and their stoic characters felt otherworldly as a result. Here it’s just default & dull.”

Even then, the movie barely reveals the names of most of its stoic supporting characters, much less any information about them or their personalities that isn’t even relevant to the plot. (We still don’t even know who voices the Hutt twins, which is wild.) Rotta repeatedly goes out of his way to reiterate that he’s “nothing like [his] father, Jabba the Hutt”, as if already expecting the audience to be watching while scrolling through their phones at home. (Every day, Matt Damon’s quotes about streaming movies only prove to be more and more relevant.) And some aspects of the plot don’t have the narrative stakes that they could: you just know that Din is going to be brought back to life and that he and Grogu are going to get out of whatever predicament they’re in, because both characters are too popular to put on ice.

This tone also gets in the way of the story that The Mandalorian and Grogu seems to be setting out to tell. You can walk away from the movie feeling like Din has grapped with his own mortality and respect for his surrogate son, and that Grogu has significantly “grown up” over the events of the movie… or you can walk away feeling like neither character has really meaningfully changed at all. Hell, you can also walk away feeling like the characters have unintentionally regressed from where they were seasons ago: something that fans have been debating all weekend with regards to how Din does or doesn’t show affection towards his son.

So yeah, there is a valid argument to be had over whether or not The Mandalorian and Grogu is boring… but the “side quests” aren’t at fault here. If anything, a lot of fans have wanted to see Din and Grogu in more of those kinds of stories, instead of Season 3 focusing so heavily on the Mandalorian cult and the various ties to Dave Filoni’s animated shows. It’s just that it took so long for us to get back to those kinds of serialized stories, only for some to feel like something is still missing.

(featured image: Walt Disney Studios Motion Pictures)

Have a tip we should know? [email protected]