In this review, Deniz Arslan shares his thoughts on The Mandalorian and Grogu (2026) directed by Jon Favreau. Just a heads-up incase you haven’t seen it yet, there may be mild spoilers ahead…
After Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker, a deep sense of hopelessness settled over many of us Star Wars fans — the feeling that nothing in this universe could ever be as good again. Especially after that final scene where Rey introduces herself as a Skywalker. But anyway, I’m not even going to get into that.
Then, later that same year, when The Mandalorian premiered on Disney+, it honestly felt like witnessing a miracle. It was unlike anything I had seen before, and the first season in particular completely mesmerized me. Up until that point, the only Star Wars project from the 2010s that had made me feel something similar was Rogue One in 2016.
Although my hope took a bit of a hit in the following season when Luke Skywalker showed up with a CGI face that looked almost as ridiculous as something out of a JibJab video, The Mandalorian still managed to preserve its quality — both visually and narratively — all the way through to the end of Season 3. So, when it was announced, while we were waiting for Season 4, that Mando and Grogu’s next adventure would instead be a theatrical film, I honestly wasn’t excited about the idea at all. Because to me, it sounded like the end of their story.
Usually, when a TV series gets a movie, you assume they want to conclude everything with some kind of grand finale. But this film is nothing like that. Honestly, I think that’s the clearest sign of how much it feels like a project made purely for money.
As much as I was relieved to see that Mando and Grogu’s story wasn’t actually ending, watching this movie in a theater felt no different from watching it on television. This really is nothing more than a two-hour episode of The Mandalorian. And that’s where I think the film’s biggest problem lies: in the very idea of bringing the series to the big screen. Because what we get here doesn’t feel like a story told on a cinematic scale — it feels like an extended TV episode.
The Mandalorian & Grogu takes place a few years after the third season of the series. Din Djarin (Pedro Pascal) and Grogu are now working for the New Republic. They are no longer just a lone bounty hunter duo wandering through the galaxy, but are instead taking on more organized missions. The story begins with a relatively simple task involving the pursuit of an Imperial remnant, but things quickly spiral into a larger conspiracy tied to the Hutt cartel.
Colonel Ward, played by Sigourney Weaver, gives them a new assignment: the Hutt Twins — Jabba’s cousins, whom we previously met in The Book of Boba Fett — want them to rescue their nephew Rotta the Hutt in exchange for information. Rotta, of course, is Jabba’s son — you might remember him from Star Wars: The Clone Wars. Now grown up, he has transformed into a massive, muscular warrior who is being forced to fight as a gladiator in an arena.
From there, the story deepens a little more and introduces a few plot twists. At one point, when Mando is on the verge of death and completely helpless, Grogu steps up and fights desperately to save his father. Honestly, this was probably my favorite part of the film — the emotional core of the story. Seeing Grogu finally begin to grow up. Even though I wanted the film to reveal more about Grogu’s origins, watching him mature as a character was still genuinely satisfying for me.
One thing I genuinely appreciated about the film is that it doesn’t collapse under the weight of the dozens of greedily produced Disney+ Star Wars shows and the increasingly convoluted cinematic universe mythology that has piled up over the past ten years. Instead, it tells a simpler, more standalone adventure focused almost entirely on this duo. Because I know I could happily watch a two-hour movie of these two doing absolutely nothing except sitting around together, I unfortunately can’t agree with the overwhelmingly negative critical consensus surrounding the film. For me, the movie was genuinely fun.
But again: this was not something worthy of a theatrical release. Especially when I remember the jaw dropping cinematography of the show’s first season, seeing this movie drowned in those disgusting gray colour palettes that every modern blockbuster seems obsessed with — and filled with truly, and I mean truly, awful visual effects — completely pulled me out of the experience. This is a production that feels almost entirely stripped of the visual aesthetic that made Star Wars so captivating for decades.
And I’m not even going to start talking about the design of the Hutt Twins. They are absolutely atrocious. They’re so bad that I honestly wish they had done the exact opposite of what George Lucas once did — instead of CGI Hutts, I genuinely think I would have hated them less if real actors had simply played the characters.
Still, despite everything, The Mandalorian & Grogu manages to tell a good and entertaining story. Thank God they didn’t completely fail in that regard at least. But even so, the fact that this project was released in theaters strangely feels like it killed a lot of the magic surrounding The Mandalorian for me. Judging by the box office numbers, it seems audiences may have felt something similar. I guess the whole “the first Star Wars movie in theaters after 7 years!” marketing campaign wasn’t nearly as effective as they thought it would be.
That concludes our review of The Mandalorian and Grogu
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