Remember when a new Star Wars movie felt like an event? The marketing would kick off months ahead of release, teasing mysteries, new villains, and the next chapter in a mythology we couldn’t wait to return to. It wasn’t just another franchise. It felt operatic. Important. Magical. But somewhere along the way, Star Wars stopped feeling special.
Yes, Disney’s takeover changed things, and Kathleen Kennedy’s baffling decision to launch an entire sequel trilogy without a mapped-out plan certainly didn’t help. But the larger issue is that Lucasfilm has slowly watered down Star Wars into content rather than cinema. The TV shows can be entertaining enough in the moment, but most of them add little to the larger mythology George Lucas created. They feel episodic, disposable, and weirdly small.
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Even the strongest Disney-era projects have struggled with this. Obi-Wan brought back Ewan McGregor and gave us a young Leia, but the story ultimately added little to the larger saga. The Book of Boba Fett felt equally unnecessary. Rogue One had an interesting premise, but traded the fantasy-adventure spirit of Star Wars for something dour and earthbound. Solo asked audiences to accept a recast Han Solo for a story nobody was really demanding in the first place.
And now we have The Mandalorian and Grogu, a movie that somehow feels less like a theatrical event and more like three episodes of television stitched together and blown up for IMAX.
That’s not entirely surprising considering The Mandalorian itself has always operated more like a “baddie of the week” adventure serial than a sweeping space opera. Sure, Grogu is adorable, and Pedro Pascal remains immensely likable, but after three seasons and now a feature film, why does it still feel like neither character has meaningfully evolved? Why do we still know almost nothing about Grogu’s species or origins? Why does the story still feel so emotionally and mythologically small?
The film opens promisingly enough with a slam-bang action sequence that briefly reminds us why we fell in love with Star Wars in the first place. There are recognizable ships, familiar iconography, and hints of larger galactic stakes. For a moment, it feels like maybe this series is finally about to grow into something more substantial. Then the actual plot kicks in.
Mando (Pedro Pascal) and Grogu are tasked by Rebel sympathizer Colonel Ward – played by a wildly underused Sigourney Weaver – with tracking down a mysterious target. To locate him, they need to rescue Jabba the Hutt’s kidnapped son, Rotta the Hutt, who has apparently become a muscular underground fighter voiced by Jeremy Allen White with all the enthusiasm of someone reading grocery lists aloud. Naturally, things go sideways.
But the problem is that none of it ever feels particularly important. The movie spends so much time focused on Hutts, side missions, and episodic detours that you start wondering what any of this has to do with the larger Star Wars universe. In the original trilogy, every action affected the fate of the galaxy. Here, the stakes often feel closer to John Wick in space.
Halfway through the movie, when Mando essentially completes one mission only for the film to pivot into another storyline, you can practically feel where one television episode ended and the next began.
To be fair, the second half improves somewhat once Grogu becomes more active in the story. The movie finally slows down long enough to let moments breathe instead of just lurching from one chaotic fight scene to another. But even then, it still never fully escapes the feeling that this is a side quest rather than a meaningful chapter in a saga. And that’s really the heart of the problem.
Star Wars was never meant to be just a collection of standalone adventures. It was a serial. Each chapter built mythology, deepened characters, and expanded the emotional stakes of the galaxy. That sense of ongoing mythic storytelling is what made audiences return generation after generation. Disney and Lucasfilm seem to have forgotten that.
There are also fundamental issues with these characters as cinematic leads. Grogu, as lovable as he is, can only emote so much as a puppet. Meanwhile, Mando spends most of the movie behind a helmet delivering deadpan dialogue. That dynamic can be amusing in short bursts, but it creates an emotional wall that becomes harder to ignore in a feature-length film. At a certain point, “isn’t Grogu cute?” stops being enough.
Strangely, for a franchise that has increasingly embraced strong female characters over the last decade, The Mandalorian and Grogu feels weirdly regressive. The movie doesn’t pass the Bechdel test. Sigourney Weaver’s Colonel Ward is the only significant female character in the entire film, and despite casting one of sci-fi’s queens, the script gives her almost nothing to do besides deliver exposition and occasionally bark orders.
Beyond that, the galaxy itself feels overwhelmingly male and oddly generic. The bars, missions, bounty hunters, and action scenes all carry a very “bro movie” energy, like the film was designed specifically for the subsection of fans who just want armor, fights, explosions, and things they already recognize from previous Star Wars projects. But Star Wars was never only for that audience.
Part of what made the original trilogy so timeless was that it appealed to everybody. Kids, adults, women, men, hardcore sci-fi fans, casual moviegoers. There was romance, fantasy, adventure, humor, mythology, weird creatures, political rebellion, and emotional stakes all existing together. It felt universal.
Here, everything feels oddly narrow. The emotional range shrinks alongside the storytelling, leaving behind a movie more interested in cool poses and shootouts than wonder, humanity, or genuine connection.
The action sequences don’t help matters either. Jon Favreau directs most of the combat as noisy chaos rather than suspenseful storytelling. Compare it to the way Spielberg stages action as carefully guiding your eye moment by moment to build excitement and tension. Here, characters just sort of collide in CGI-heavy mayhem until the scene ends. The result is visually busy but lacks visceral excitement.
Visually, the film also suffers from a problem that has plagued many Disney-era projects: the galaxy no longer feels otherworldly. One of the joys of the original and prequel trilogies was discovering planets with distinct identities and visual personalities. Here, too many locations just resemble slightly modified versions of Earth. Markets feel like ordinary night markets (complete with an Asian man behind the hot plate). Public spaces are mostly filled with people. Even scenes that should feel richly alien come across oddly generic and cheapened.
And where are the creatures? A New Hope gave us the Mos Eisley Cantina, packed wall-to-wall with unforgettable weirdos. Here, entire rooms are populated almost entirely by ordinary-looking humans. Once the scene has Mando interact with a horned bad guy, but he feels like he stepped out of an episode of “Buffy the Vampire Slayer.” The galaxy feels smaller, safer, and less imaginative.
Even Ludwig Göransson’s score often feels disconnected from the larger Star Wars soundscape, sounding more like Tron than the sweeping mythic fantasy music this universe thrives on.
What makes all of this especially frustrating is that the potential is still there. Grogu’s origins remain fascinating. The fall of the Empire and the rise of the New Republic could still provide fertile dramatic ground. Luke Skywalker’s relationship with Grogu could have evolved into something genuinely meaningful, and there was a moment in this film where he would have fit the plot. Instead, Lucasfilm keeps retreating into side quests and nostalgia loops that ultimately amount to very little.
That’s what The Mandalorian and Grogu feels like: a harmless diversion. Not terrible. Just… inconsequential. And that may actually be worse. Because Star Wars should never feel inconsequential.
This franchise became part of our cultural DNA because it felt mythic. The characters mattered. The stakes mattered. The worlds felt vast and magical and dangerous. Even flawed entries still felt like pieces of a larger epic story unfolding. Now, too often, Star Wars feels like content designed to fill a streaming calendar and corporate pockets. The Mandalorian and Grogu may be mildly entertaining in the moment, but it never once feels like the return of one of cinema’s greatest franchises.
Lucasfilm needs to stop chasing one-off adventures and start building a true saga again. Maybe give us a fresh saga with a new Episode One still somehow linked to the things audiences loved in past entries. Give us new heroes, new villains, and stakes big enough to justify the giant screen. Let the galaxy feel strange and imaginative again, instead of like another dusty sand planet with slightly different architecture.
Most importantly, make Star Wars feel essential again.
The Mandalorian and Grogu opens in theaters and IMAX on May 22, 2026.
