The Star Wars galaxy has always been rife with freaks. I use this term affectionately. And you know exactly what I mean: funny little guys (non-gendered) and oddball life-forms that beep and boop or squawk or trill. Droids, and creatures, and indescribable being who – from a single look – you’d willingly give your life for. Right from the beginning you had Chewie, and the Jawas, and R2, and the Gonk droid. And ever since, the galaxy just got wilder and weirder. Ewoks! Kowakian Monkey Lizards! Anzellans! Hutts and Gungans and whatever the hell Ben Quadinaros is! These delightful oddities are the lifeblood of Star Wars. And I can think of few films in the saga that embrace that idea so wholeheartedly as The Mandalorian And Grogu.
Jon Favreau’s big-screen Mando adventure is unique among live-action Star Wars movies. Because, these films have always been primarily driven by human faces – whether that’s Luke and Han and Leia in the original trilogy, or Anakin and Obi-Wan and Padmé in the prequels, or Rey and Finn and Kylo Ren in the sequels. Rogue One’s ragtag squad is entirely humanoid, Solo driven by… well, Han Solo. But you go lengthy stretches of The Mandalorian And Grogu without ever seeing a human face. The iconography of Mando himself is the T-visor helmet. His apprentice is a little green puppet. Here, his enemies are giant slugs, whose henchmen are robots, and his back-up consists of a big purple alien and some more little puppets (these ones grey). It is a film that fills the screen with wall-to-wall freaks.
It’s the closest thing we have to a Star Wars monster movie.
And honestly, who couldn’t love that? There are the occasional humans in the mix; the odd Imperial warlord here or there. Plus you sense that Sigourney Weaver was cast in the relatively small role of the New Republic’s Colonel Ward in some part to ensure that Pedro Pascal had someone else to go on the press rounds with him.
This is the first Star Wars film that really could exist in this way; unless you’re making an animated film about, say, animals, human faces are what anchor the action. But the profile of the Mandalorian is bigger than any one person; it’s not just that there are several performers behind Din Djarin, but that the image of the Beskar-helmeted bounty hunter and his Force-wielding son has become instantly recognisable in its own right. And with that as the core of his film, Favreau filled the rest of the adventure with as many creatures and droids as possible – some of them actors in make-up, some practical effects, some VFX additions.
This might be my favourite thing about The Mandalorian And Grogu. I get why the film arrived to a mixed reception; it is not significantly bigger than Mando’s streaming outings, nor is it a film that builds on that show particularly, or one that evolves the overarching New Republic storyline. But it is an all-out adventure filled with the most Star Wars of Star Wars creatures, all intermingled together. You feel – or, at least, I felt – Jon Favreau’s glee at getting to play with all the toys, all at once: heroes in head-to-toe armour, multiple puppet units, CGI creatures, stop-motion elements, often interacting within a single scene. It’s the closest thing we have to a Star Wars monster movie, with its Dejarik arena brawl, the dragonsnake showdown, and the final Hutt face-off.
And then there’s Rotta the Hutt. The big, buff slug who proves one of the most surprisingly prominent figures of the movie. Before release, fans scratched their heads, wondering how a gladiator Hutt voiced by The Bear’s (very nice but very serious) Jeremy Allen White – and introduced as a baby in The Clone Wars movie – could possibly work. And it turns out, he sort of doesn’t. It is a bizarre concoction, strange and sincere and very silly too. The incongruous combination of that Hutt physicality and that gentle voice is the whole point of the character, and yet also a deeply odd thing to parse.
But then, you get to that scene where Rotta and Grogu are sweetly frolicking together on a beach, and it’s one of the most oddly touching moments you’ve seen in a movie this year. In the months since, I have come to embrace Rotta the Hutt, love him even, as if he were my own son. Except, of course, I would encourage him to be his own man.
It isn’t just Rotta the Hutt that deserves a second chance. It’s The Mandalorian And Grogu, too – a film that undeniably underperformed at the box office. Maybe it did need a human face to anchor it after all (Pedro Pascal’s unmasked mug only gets around five minutes of screen time). Or maybe it’s just too tricky to translate even the biggest of Disney+ hits into global blockbusters. Maybe that small-stakes story approach wasn’t enough to attract Star Wars casuals. But now that it’s on Disney+, the duo’s adventure is worth a watch – even if just to revel in its deep love of Star Wars’ greatest freaks.
The Mandalorian And Grogu is streaming now on Disney+
