Somebody come and collect Baby Yoda: he needs changing. This was, in so many words, the prevailing sentiment when Star Wars: The Mandalorian and Grogu entered the world last week, to an audience of unmoved critics and (seemingly) reluctant audiences. Adapted from the Disney+ series The Mandalorian – in which a helmet-fixated Pedro Pascal speedruns fatherhood with the world’s most adorable puppet – Grogu is the first Star Wars film in seven years. Over its opening weekend, it made $165m (£122m) globally, an all-time low for a live-action Star Wars film (though only fractionally behind 2018’s far costlier Solo: A Star Wars Story). It’s barely been a decade since The Force Awakens became the biggest North American film ever; what a long, long time ago that now seems.
Critiques of Grogu have largely taken the same lines of attack – the same trench runs, as it were. “It feels uncinematic.” “There’s no story arc.” “What the hell is Jeremy Allen White doing?” Clarisse Loughrey, awarding it two stars for The Independent, called it “the dullest and most inconsequential Star Wars film ever made”, noting that it felt like three episodes of The Mandalorian “stitched together”. (Officially, this wasn’t the case, with writers Jon Favreau and Dave Filoni claiming that they came up with a bespoke story for the film after initial plans for The Mandalorian season four were shelved.) All these complaints are reasonable – Grogu is a profoundly flawed film. (And White’s character, the angsty, musclebound son of Jabba the Hutt, is truly the pits.) But make no mistake, when it comes to Star Wars, The Mandalorian and Grogu is not the problem.
