REVIEW

Pointless, Bloated, and Cheap-Looking, ‘THE MANDALORIAN AND GROGU’ Is an Epic Star Wars Crash Out

By Matt Oakes · May 19, 2026

When it was announced that the first theatrical Star Wars film in seven years would be The Mandalorian and Grogu, the fandom’s response was less thunderous anticipation than a collective, deeply confused: huh? The series found genuine popularity on Disney+, but its more recent seasons left even plenty of diehards with a sour taste. The show’s cultural moment has clearly passed its apex, which made the decision to plug the franchise’s long theatrical absence with a Mandalorian-and-Grogu-shaped hole feel, at best, questionable.

Still, I wondered if Dave Filoni and longtime collaborator Jon Favreau, who writes and directs here, had cooked up something intentional and deliberate. Maybe The Mandalorian and Grogu would justify the jump to the big screen. Maybe it would feel like a real movie. Maybe it would expand the visual and emotional language of the series into something worthy of a theatrical release. Because, quite frankly, how could it afford to not? And yet, nothing could prepare me for how bad it would actually be.

The Mandalorian and Grogu does not function as an essential standalone feature. More damningly, it does not function as a feature at all. It has no cinematic shape, no emotional progression, no sense of escalation, and no reason to exist on a big screen beyond the desperate hope that the Star Wars brand still means something. It barely even works as a “special event” super-episode of the already-fading television show.

The biggest problem with The Mandalorian and Grogu is not simply that it is boring, ugly, or dramatically inert. It is that it barely qualifies as a movie. It has the shape and style of content, not cinema. There is no real journey here, emotional or otherwise. The characters do not change. Their relationships do not deepen. Their worldview is not challenged. They begin the film as exactly who they are and end it in the same place, only with more runtime behind them. This is not even “there and back again” storytelling; it is “there, then over there, then another place, and now the credits.” It plays like an episode of television that forgot to have an arc, and then somehow got inflated to feature length.

To their credits, it’s almost impressive how Favreau and Filoni manage to deliver something this half-baked, bloated, underwritten, stiff, boring, and entirely cheap-looking. A film so creatively inert that it feels less like the future of Star Wars than a death knell for the once iconic brand.

To say I was actively aghast at every second of this movie is not an exaggeration. Just as it brings me no pleasure to report how creatively and emotionally bankrupt this entire project is, there was not a single moment in its two-hour-plus runtime that gave me even one modicum of joy. I did not smile. I did not laugh. I was not charmed by Baby Yoda (sorry, Grogu) cooing and making market-tested baby noises. I was not moved by Pedro Pascal’s stiff ADR-booth line readings, which carry the unmistakable low-T energy of an actor who only wandered onto the actual set long enough to reveal his face for a contractual 2-3 minutes.

I finally understand what people mean when they say a piece of media “killed their childhood.” But watching The Mandalorian and Grogu, I felt it. This made me angry not because it ruins some sacred canon timeline or whatever, but because it is so utterly pointless. So dry. So stiff. So removed from anything I like about movies, and from anything I used to love about Star Wars.

Even the Star Wars films that did not work usually offered something: a visual idea, a musical cue, an iconic sound, bursts of momentum. Those elements are wired into my experience as a young kid discovering movies. There is a Pavlovian power to the Star Wars imagery and sound design. Here, that charge is almost entirely absent. Ludwig Göransson’s score, trying to distance itself from John Williams, is actively grating, like bad EDM club music remixing The Mandalorian theme.

And yes, for as much as the sequel trilogy ultimately collapsed into a disjointed disappointment, often cowing to the worst impulses of studio panic and fan demands, at least those movies had momentum. They took you somewhere. There was a story – however misshapen – that pulled you along. The Mandalorian and Grogu does not even manage that. It is so paper-thin that even as a 35-minute episode of television, I would probably be bored and hit skip.

The film reintroduces us to the Mandalorian, the Beskar-armored bounty hunter now working with the New Republic to hunt down Empire sympathizers still scattered across the galaxy, with the Force-sensitive Grogu by his side. The pair are enlisted to track down a mysterious Empire-adjacent figure known as Admiral Coin. To find him, they must take a bounty from the nefarious Hutt twins and locate their missing nephew, Rotta, the son of Jabba, voiced by Jeremy Allen White, who is fighting as a gladiator on a distant planet.

That is, more or less, the whole movie. There are no meaningful twists. There is no real intrigue. There is nothing resembling growth. The Mandalorian and Grogu begin the film as exactly who they are and end the film as exactly who they were. No internal conflict is resolved because no internal conflict is meaningfully introduced. No bond is tested. No choice costs them anything. The movie does not build toward catharsis; it simply arrives at an endpoint. Rotta is the only new character of any consequence, and even he is forgettable outside of the genuinely baffling CGI used to bring him to life. He looks awful in a way that feels almost confrontational. Like truly: how can this possibly be the finished product shown to paying audiences in the year 2026? It’s nothing short of galling.

The movie’s modest budget compared to the sequel trilogy is obvious, but that only explains so much. This is still Star Wars. The bar cannot be this low. The Hutts look inspired by George Lucas’ cursed special-edition FX with some of the CGI appearing so unfinished that it feels like a joke. The world is filled with monsters, aliens, ships, and planets, yet none of it feels tactile, dangerous, or alive. It is make-believe without imagination.

Worse still is the writing. The dialogue is so flat, so monosyllabic, so aggressively functional that it makes you wish it were written by a ChatGPT V1. Every line feels like something you have heard before, but at least there it was delivered with oomph, verve, or at least the illusion of a pulse. Here, there is nothing behind the words. No heart. No feeling. Just dead air pissed through a helmet slot.

This also leaves the performances stranded. Sigourney Weaver, somehow the only other human presence with more than a few lines, cannot muster any visible enthusiasm. And honestly, it’s hard to blame her. The script gives its actors nothing to play besides exposition, mild concern, and the vague sensation that they’re acting against a green foam ball awaiting a render in post.

The result is an endless shuffle from one scene to the next. There is no sense of pacing or stakes. No character development. No dramatic escalation. No reason for anything to last as long as it does. By the 40-minute mark, I wanted to get up and leave. By the end, I felt less like I had watched a movie than survived a corporate Disney punishment.

And just to clear the air here, I want to say that I went into this with an open mind. I’ve done my homework over the years and watched all of The Mandalorian (including The Book of Boba Fett). I watched the vast majority of the Star Wars shows on Disney+ but each one feels harder and harder to actually make it through. My fandom was wavering for years, but then Andor came along and reminded me what this universe can still do when actual writers, directors, and actors are given room to create something with texture, politics, consequence, and human feeling. Andor is genuinely one of the best television shows of the decade, and from a writing, directing, and acting perspective, it is undoubtedly the best Star Wars material ever made.

To come off that and watch The Mandalorian and Grogu feels like a slap in the face. While Andor reached for the stars, this scoops the fetid muck from the bottom of the bantha pen. It is offensive because it dares to be nothing. This depressing coup de grâce may have effectively killed my love of Star Wars going forward. This is not the way.

CONCLUSION: The magic has been force-drained from the Star Wars universe with ‘The Mandalorian and Grogu’, a dreadful non-starter that fails in almost every capacity to actually pass as a “movie”. Lacking in wonder, horribly written, and full of flat characters and bad CGI monsters, this direct-to-theaters slop sets a new low bar for George Lucas’ signature property.