The Mandalorian and Grogu doesn’t feel like a real Star Wars movie.
It is a real Star Wars movie, of course—the first in six years, the first since Rise of Skywalker.
Adapted from the hit Disney+ series The Mandalorian, the film marks a strange point in the franchise’s life cycle—there’s something uncanny about it.
What Is The Plot Of ‘The Mandalorian and Grogu’?
A few years after Return of the Jedi, the titular Mandalorian, known as Din Djarin (Pedro Pascal), is working for the New Republic alongside little Grogu, who fans affectionately refer to as “Baby Yoda.”
Djarin accepts a mission to track down Jabba the Hutt’s son, Rotta, and deliver him to the Hutt Twins, crime lords who are keeping Jabba’s illegal business ventures running.
Rotta the Hutt (Jeremy Allen White) is significantly more in shape than his famously rotund father, and spends his time battling monsters in a crimelord’s gladiator arena, technically a debt-prisoner, but enjoying a lowly sort of celebrity.
After rescuing Rotta, Djarin gets pulled into a dangerous conspiracy, as Rotta reveals that the twins want to murder him and secure their claim to Jabba’s criminal empire.
As Rotta is fond of reminding viewers, he doesn’t share his father’s penchant for organized crime and wants to make his own way in the universe.
The Twins manage to capture both Djarin and Rotta, and Djarin is rescued from certain death by Grogu, who enjoys a full-fledged hero moment.
Despite his near-death experience, Djarin heads back into the Twins’ palace for a climatic showdown—the film ends with Grogu getting a chance to push the ship’s hyperspace button.
The adventure is fun, but non-consequential. At best, it feels like watching a compressed season of The Mandalorian.
At worst, it feels like watching an AI-generated movie.
Why Does ‘The Mandalorian and Grogu’ Feel AI-Generated?
Very often, AI-generated footage contains uncanny, remixed versions of pop culture characters, reenacting iconic movie moments—much of AI video is nothing but references.
Star Wars has circled into a self-referential loop so many times that the franchise feels like a photograph of a photograph, an echo bouncing endlessly down an empty hallway.
This fixation on the past has killed much of the hype that normally surrounds a new Star Wars theatrical release.
The Mandalorian and Grogu is so achingly reverent to the original Star Wars trilogy that it seems to only exist to provide easter eggs and callbacks to those magical three films.
The Mandalorian was always a bit nostalgic (the leads are modelled after Boba Fett and Yoda) but the simple “adventure of the week” format was deeply appealing, even refreshing, when the series first arrived on Disney+.
Now, seven years, multiple spin-offs and a movie later, the two have been stretched beyond their narrative limits—there’s nowhere left for the pair to go.
Instead of character growth, the film reheats iconic scenes from classic Star Wars.
Viewers are treated to the sight of an AT-AT walker collapsing, echoing a similar scene in The Empire Strikes Back. At one point, Grogu builds a hut that greatly resembles Yoda’s famous Dagobah dwelling.
One of the film’s most important scenes sees Grogu levitating Jabba’s good son, Rotta, saving his life. Again, it’s not an original moment.
The rescue echoes a famous scene in episode two of The Mandalorian when Grogu lifts a rampaging Mudhorn to save Djarin, which was already a homage to Yoda levitating the ship on Dagobah during the original trilogy.
References, inside of references.
Even Djarin and Rotta’s arena battle references the classic trilogy, as the monsters they face are the creatures seen on the “Holochess” board during A New Hope, in which C-3PO and R2-D2 play with Chewbacca, a minor (but memorable) worldbuilding detail, expanded.
Perhaps this isn’t new—Star Wars has been taking small moments from the original trilogy and padding them out for decades now—almost everything seen on screen in those first three films has been resurrected, fleshed out with backstories and unnecessary details.
This isn’t always bad, or creatively limiting—the prequel series Andor managed to carve a bold new direction for Star Wars by taking the idea of a fascist Empire seriously.
The Mandalorian and Grogu ends with the titular two in exactly the same place they began—the entire film was spent looking wistfully at the past, the future of the franchise seemingly forgotten.