Apparently, the fact that it’s woke and executive Kathleen Kennedy spent so much time answering the DEI mandates is seemingly irrelevant. The movie just isn’t very good.
Outgoing Lucasfilm head Kathleen Kennedy had no cohesive plan for the franchise, no vision for where it was heading. Instead of deeply thought-out stories for the legacy characters that emphasized heroism or gave them a fitting end to their arc, Kennedy focused on checking the correct boxes. Years later, most casual Star Wars fans, or film fans in general, are greeting “The Mandalorian and Grogu” with the most dangerous emotion possible: apathy, says Fox News’s Ian Miller.
Here are some of the reviews
Rotten Tomatoes gave it 62%.
It is ok for an at-home, quick movie for kids 10-14. Not worth the energy, time, or money for in-theatre. Content collapsed.
Roger Ebert 1.5 stars out of 4
“Star Wars” has become the punchline of that old joke where two guys are complaining about a restaurant, and one says the food is terrible, and the other says, “Yes! And such small portions.”
The Independent
“Stick a fork in Star Wars. It’s done.” Their subheading reads, “With just five minutes of Pedro Pascal and a completely dispirited voice performance from Jeremy Allen White as Jabba the Hutt’s son, this is the dullest and most inconsequential ‘Star Wars’ ever made.”
Mashable
If this is the future of Star Wars, I don’t want it
…the film is still a slog: an unwieldy adventure full of illegible action and the creeping sense of dread that we’ve seen this all before. Not even Din Djarin (Pedro Pascal) and Grogu’s sweet bond can Force lift it to success.
NY Times, Kevin Maher
Would someone please put Star Wars out of its misery? It’s an ailing pop cultural mutant, unrecognizable from the chirpy fable that George Lucas revealed to the world in 1977. It’s almost fully irrelevant now, but for the incessant spew of audience-hating vomitus it has splattered all over the Disney+ platform—see The Acolyte, Obi-Wan Kenobi, Ashoka and The Book of Boba Fett. And here it comes again with this sorry, sclerotic effort, a farcically weak story wheezing from its TV streaming existence into the multiplex and drooling out bits of fanboy lore along the way. There are feeble nods to The Empire Strikes Back here and palsied winks to Return of the Jedi there, as if callbacks from the Iron Man director Jon Favreau had some magical revitalizing power and were not symptomatic of a film and a franchise that exists in a grim creative void.
The Playlist, Roderigo Perez
“Star Wars” fans have spent years complaining that Kathleen Kennedy ruined Lucasfilm, but the reality looks broader and more dispiriting than one executive. This feels like a collective mistake, with Disney brass included: the dilution of a brand once defined by magical movie scale, mythical qualities, and a transportive emotional sweep. Somewhere along the way, “Star Wars” started mistaking brand extension for imagination and fan service for feeling. If Favreau and Filoni are the new stewards of this franchise, then the once-mighty galaxy probably has a bad feeling about its future. Because right now, it feels like it’s dangling over Cloud City, hand gone, saber lost, and no rescue in sight. Because this is definitely not the way.
Andrew Korpah, Clutch Points
Look, there’s no getting around the fact that Scorsese’s argument about Marvel had some merit. These giant franchises sometimes sacrifice storytelling in favor of advertisements, trying to get audiences to pay for a ticket to what’s coming next instead of focusing on the present.
The Mandalorian and Grogu reeks of the same thing. It’s no secret that the adorable Grogu is a needle mover when it comes to merchandise. Disney is never going to let two of its most profitable characters go, making their movie feel like a 132-minute commercial.
Grogu isn’t even the only cute character the movie shoves down your throat. There are a lot of Anzellans, the same species as the equally cute Babu Frik, in the movie.