Jon Favreau swung for the fences with his first Star Wars movie and not a single person who’s watched the movie realizes it.
Genre: Sci-Fi Adventure
Premise: The Mandalorian and Grogu team up with Jabba the Hutt’s son to take down a local mob boss in the dangerous Outer Rim, then must battle a couple of gangsters who want this trio out of commission for good.
About: There has been much discussion about how this movie will do this weekend. Would it have the worst Disney Star Wars opening ever, besting Solo? Its 4-Day holiday weekend haul is looking to be just north of 100 million, which means it will come down to the wire with who takes the crown.
Writer: Jon Favreau, Dave Filoni, Noah Kloor
Details: 2 hours 12 minutes
Almost everyone you talk to who has seen The Mandalorian and Grogu gives the same review. “It was bland.” “It was vanilla.” “It was a side quest.” But what none of them realize is that Jon Favreau took a gigantic swing with this screenplay. He tried to make one of the best Star Wars movies ever. So, why is nobody acknowledging that? And did he actually… you know… succeed?
Before we get into that, let’s talk about Disney’s beautifully calibrated marketing campaign for our beloved Star Wars duo.
For starters, Star Wars has always gone to its secret bag of tricks in regards to its opening weekend box office. Their movies always come out on a big holiday weekend. Therefore, they get to report the non-official number for their movie’s opening weekend gross ($100 million??) instead of the actual number ($80 million??) for the Fri-Sun weekend.
The most egregious use of this was during The Last Jedi. If I remember correctly, they opened on Christmas, which was a Wednesday. So they counted Wednesday through Sunday for the opening weekend numbers and, as a result, were able to hyper-inflate how much money the movie made.
But that’s old school cheating. New School deceit is what Disney did Thursday, which is to pre-empt the expected backlash for the film by planting a story in The Hollywood Reporter where they claimed it was impossible for The Mandalorian and Grogu to lose money.
The theatrical box office for this film, they claim, is insignificant. The Mandalorian and Grogu is a commercial for Disney Plus and will therefore bring all sorts of new people to the service. In addition to that, Grogu is a super toy and worth a billion dollars all on his own. So, you see, it’s impossible for The Mandalorian and Grogu to not make money.
Look, I think there’s some truth to the fact that Disney Plus subscriber sign-ups and Grogu toys factored into Disney green-lighting this movie. But let’s be real here. The folks who went to see this movie are people who already had the service. And the Grogu toy sales are heavily weighted to that first season, when he became part of the zeitgeist. But come on. Grogu is not a hot toy anymore.
I think the bigger story here is why does Disney think they need to take over The Hollywood Reporter to defend a film before it’s even come out? If you think you’ve got a winning film, you don’t need to preemptively defend it. So, it’s a little suspicious.
The truth is that Disney has become hyperspace sensitive about Star Wars because they haven’t been able to figure it out. I don’t think the franchise is dead, like a lot of these doom and gloom influencers insist it is. But there’s no doubt it’s become “just another thing” rather than “THE thing.” And if they want to make it “THE” thing again, there’s a lot of course correcting that needs to go on.
Just like Han Solo said to Luke in the original Star Wars when Luke tried to jump to light speed, “Traveling through hyperspace ain’t like dusting crops, kid! Without precise calculations we could fly right through a star or bounce too close to a supernova, and that’d end your trip real quick, wouldn’t it?”
Now, here’s the irony. Jon Favreau attempted to enter the precise calculations with his first foray into feature film Star Wars. But the result is yet another example of how challenging screenwriting really is.
Mando and Grogu are helping the New Republic take down the bad guy terrorists in the outer rim, where lots of nefarious stuff happens. They’re tasked with finding the mysterious “top” terrorist, which will require them to help the Hutt Twins find their nephew, Rotta the Hutt, who has disappeared. Rotta is the son of dead mob kingpin, Jabba the Hutt.
They eventually find Rotta on some planet, where he’s been forced to fight gladiator battles to pay off a debt. When Mando shows up to rescue him, Rotta says he doesn’t want to be rescued. He’s only got one more fight anyway. Leave him alone.
After that final battle goes haywire, Mando learns that Rotta doesn’t want to go back to his aunt and uncle (the Hutt twins) because, as the son of Jabba the Hutt, he’s a threat to their throne. He’s pretty sure they’re going to kill him. But Mando, being a bounty hunter, emphasizes that he’s “just doing a job” and doesn’t care about any of that.
So, after some adventurous set pieces with Mando, Rotta, and Grogu, Rotta is returned to the twins. The twins then decide to kill Mando because…. Well just because. Mando survives their giant pet snake attack, but just barely, as he was poisoned during the battle.
As he and Grogu escape into the forest, Mando passes out due to the snake bite, and it looks like he’s going to die. This leaves Grogu all on his own and, for the first time, he will have to figure things out by himself. He ends up lucking out, as some local alien fish farmer gives him the snake antidote. So, Grogu is able to save Mando’s life.
Once he’s back on his feet, Mando decides they have to kill the Hutt twins and save their buddy, Rotta. So the two arm up and bombard the Hutt Twins’ swamp castle. I think you can all assume what happens next (they win). The End.
All right, let’s get to it.
Why am I saying that Jon Favreau tried to write the best Star Wars movie ever if everyone’s saying the movie is blander than unscented hand lotion?
Favreau tried to write an all-time great character in Rotta the Hutt. The fingerprints of it are everywhere. Rotta is his Michael Corleone. He’s the son of this great big powerful presence. He has no interest in working for the family. He just wants to go do his own thing and get out of his father’s shadow.
We’re talking about a Hutt as a key character in this movie. You could argue that he’s the main character. Mando has no personality and never changes. Grogu is too juvenile to arc in any compelling way. This leaves Rotta the Hutt as your major character arc in the movie. Which is why Favreau got the hottest actor in town, Jeremy Allen White, to play him. Cause he wanted to win an Oscar for this character.
So, why didn’t it work?
Well, part of the reason is that, on the page, you can make an alien work. Because nobody’s seeing any images yet. But, on screen, you have no idea how it will turn out. Hutts have notoriously just sat down in Star Wars movies. They don’t have to move which helps make them more believable. But once you start moving them around, especially as much as Favreau did, every bit of CGI weakness is amplified. There were basic close-up shots of Rotta in this movie where his eyes were warped in weird ways.
The reason this matters is because if things are even slightly off, the suspension of disbelief is broken and all those endless hours you spent creating this deep intense tragic character arc go out the window because we look at this creature and he looks dumb. He doesn’t look real.
But let’s say they somehow pulled off the technical side of this character. It still wouldn’t have worked because we don’t want a Hutt character arc. Hutts are meant to be simple creatures. I actually thought the Hutt twins were the best thing about this movie because they served that original purpose that Jabba the Hutt served. Which is that they were big, they were intimidating, and they instilled fear with their words. When those two spoke, it felt like old fashioned Star Wars.
But when Rotta is racing around in a hot rod car throwing out zingers like Adam Sandler, it totally betrays the original concept of these creatures. They were meant to be placed on big slabs of concrete, to tell people what to do, and to be evil. That’s it. No car races. And no arcing. Hutts don’t arc.
Not every character type is meant to have a redemption. Some are created to be one-dimensional and that’s fine! If you want a character arc in your movie, create better characters in Mando and Grogu. They’re the centerpieces. They’re the ones you want to arc. But because you screwed up their creation, you’re now hampered with these issues that can’t be overcome. And the feature treatment really puts a spotlight on that.
I mean, your main character WEARS A MASK. That doesn’t seem like a big deal but think about it for a second. We don’t get to see the expression of our main character for 99.9% of the running time! That’s INSANE. What other movie has done that? I don’t think any movie in history has done it. If you want to point to a reason why people aren’t connecting with this story… you don’t need to look much further than that!
Another big issue with the movie was the lack of stakes. The goal here is to save Rotta the Hutt. What happens to the galaxy if Mando and Grogu fail at this mission? Nothing! This is what I’ve been saying with Star Wars shows. They’re impossible to make work because the stakes are so low.
The Star Wars creative team will clap back, “No. These shows are exploring the characters. Making you care about these people and these aliens. They’re not about big stories. They’re about small intimate ones.” But the problem is that they’re *not* making us care. Mando is such a boring character. The only contribution to his character’s likability is that he takes action. But his personality is drier than a Tattooine beach. When has any well-liked main character throughout time had a weak personality?
The final big mistake the movie made was that the story engine dropped out for the last 30 minutes of the film. The Mandalorian is half-dead and Grogu is sitting around hoping that changes. It’s actually a very interesting sequence because we’ve had another similar sequence to compare it to early this year, in Project Hail Mary.
Nearly the exact same thing happens. In Mando and Grogu, Mando looks to be dead and Grogu has to wait and babysit him. And in Project Hail Mary, Rocky looks to be dead and Grace has to babysit him.
Despite both sequences stalling the movie at the same time, Project Hail Mary’s sequence is a highlight while Mando and Grogu’s sequence has the audience checking their watches. Why? What’s the difference if they’re the exact same plot development?
THE DIFFERENCE IS THE CHARACTERS.
Grace is full of personality and easy to love. Rocky has even MORE personality than Grace and is even EASIER to love. Not only that, but they did a great job carefully setting up that moment with Rocky being dead. They made a point to set up that this alien species looks the same whether they’re asleep or dead. So, we truly don’t know what’s happened to Rocky or if he’s going to survive. It’s a sequence where we’re all on the edge of our seats.
Mando is such a poorly conceived character (low vibration, no personality, always wears a mask so we can’t connect to him expressively) that it doesn’t affect us if he’s in danger. That’s why I always say, before you write your script, make sure your 2-3 major characters are very strong. Cause if they are, you can make a ton of script mistakes. But you can’t do the opposite. A good plot cannot survive weak characterization.
Another realization I had while watching this movie was how drawn out everything was. One of the many genius things about Star Wars was how punchy it was. It felt like the entire team would sit in the editing room and debate FRAMES. Not seconds, mind you. But, “Can we cut a frame here so we can move to the next scene faster?”
Go back and watch Star Wars. It’s extremely punchy. The end of every scene is almost like a cliffhanger that then JUMPS to the next scene. Luke spots Threepio in the back room and Threepio says R2 is gone. Lucas would just HOP right into tomorrow with Luke and Threepio shooting across the desert in their landspeeder. The scenes would pop into each other like that.
Here, it’s like somebody’s falling asleep in the editing bay every once in a while. We’ll linger on with a scene well after it’s finished. And those needlessly extended moments add up. It creates this lazy lingering feeling that a summer movie is not supposed to have.
What Favreau probably knows deep down is that these characters aren’t meant for a feature film. They’re not big enough. Because I was trying to think of what a better plot could’ve been. But then I realized, “It doesn’t matter.” You could write 100 different plots for these two and they’d all land somewhere in the middle. Cause the characters just aren’t big enough to carry the high stakes world of a feature film.
[ ] What the hell did I just watch?
[x] wasn’t for me
[ ] worth the price of admission
[ ] impressive
[ ] genius
What I learned: Don’t try to fit a square peg into a round hole. Trying to turn a Hutt into a tragic character was such a miscalculation on many levels. Hutts were literally designed to be bad. They look that way because they’re bad. I’m not saying that turning a Hutt tragic and giving him some big character arc is impossible. Anything is possible. But if a creative choice has a .01% chance of succeeding, here’s a tip: Don’t try it.
