THE MANDALORIAN AND GROGU is dividing audiences. It’s based on a tv show that has already been running for three years and which, perhaps unfairly, I turned off after a few episodes. I think it’s one of the those big-budget movies ($165 million) where most of  the budget must have gone to the producers. It looks embarrassingly cheap and is almost offensively ugly in spite of the evidently excellent design of all the non-human characters. Pedro Pascal who is the Mandalorian wears a mask throughout the movie except for a few minutes so they could just film anyone with the suit. Jeremy Allen’s voice-work as Rotta the Hutt is inexpressive and unmemorable. Grogu, the mini-Yoda, is irritatingly ‘cute’ and his scenes strike me as manipulative and overly sentimental. There never seem to be more than half a dozen extras in a frame, even in the action sequences. Some shots look like a video game, an empty military station with two automated figures walking mechanically in the background. I don’t think it was just me being in a bad mood. I saw Star Wars when I was 15 and have seen all the movies since, even read some of the spin-off novels. I’m not the biggest fan but I like the Star Wars world. Even if the series hasn’t produced a single great movie, it’s certainly produced a great cult. I was ready to like this one. But a feature length-film without human faces, a sitcom view of human relationships, and a world that feels like the production of a 60s B-Movie but with better monsters….It was so dispiriting; you only have to compare the original scenes of Jabba the Hut in RETURN OF THE JEDI to those with his nephews here to see how visually incompetent this film is. It’s good to hear Martin Scorsese voice a street vendor, and it’s always a joy to see Sigourney Weaver, even when she’s wasted in a thankless role, such as here. People warned about what the success of Star Wars would lead to and this is the evidence. Very expensive trash with a plot not worth re-telling, crude characterisations, a primitive view of society and power relations, and pretty standard action sequences. It is perhaps telling that humans appear only as leaders or cannon fodder.  I thought it a film only small children would like but this has turned out not to be the case. I’m curious to know what it is that people love about it.

José Arroyo