Theatrical poster for Star Wars: The Mandalorian and Grogu showing Din Djarin in beskar armor with Grogu on his shoulder against a desert horizon.

The Mandalorian and Grogu

★★★☆☆3/5 6/10
Pedro Pascal and Grogu jump from streaming to the big screen — gorgeous spectacle wrapped around a script that never quite finds its footing.
Directed by Jon Favreau Released
Starring Pedro Pascal, Jeremy Allen White, Sigourney Weaver, Jonny Coyne, Hemky Madera
Movie Science FictionActionAdventure

This was the summer movie I’d been waiting for ever since the final season of The Mandalorian on Disney+. Jon Favreau brings Din Djarin and Grogu to the big screen for the first time, and on a pure spectacle level he absolutely delivers — the opening sequence alone is worth the IMAX ticket. But somewhere between the launch pad and the third act, the script forgets which characters it’s writing for.

What Works

The visual effects are easily the richest the franchise has put on screen since the original Rogue One aerial work. ILM leans hard into practical-on-LED Volume photography, and the desert and asteroid set-pieces have a tactile, hand-built weight you rarely get in late-stage IP cinema. The cinematography gives Tatooine a real sense of heat and dust again — every shadow has weight, every reflection on the beskar feels earned.

The first twenty minutes are a near-perfect short film: Mando and Grogu running a New Republic salvage op against the remnants of an Imperial warlord’s fleet. The action geography is clean, the gags land, and seeing Grogu in a theatrically-rendered close-up — every wisp of fur, every blink — is genuinely moving for anyone who’s followed the series.

What Doesn’t

The writing, though. The writing felt sloppy in a way that I really wasn’t expecting from Favreau and Filoni. Mando is out of character several times across the runtime — making decisions that contradict the very code the series spent three seasons building. A specific second-act choice involving the Hutt cartel reads less like growth and more like a screenwriter needing to get him into the next room.

The real waste is Jeremy Allen White as the adult Rotta the Hutt. White is one of the most physically intense actors working right now, and stripping him of his body and burying him under Huttese vocal processing neutralises everything that makes him compelling. The performance is technically fine; the casting is a misuse of an asset. Sigourney Weaver’s Colonel Ward fares better, but her arc is resolved with a beat that should have taken another fifteen minutes to earn.

The pacing also stumbles whenever the film tries to do galactic-political throat-clearing — there’s a lot of “this matters for the next Star Wars movie” exposition that doesn’t pay off in this one.

The Verdict

A beautifully-mounted Saturday-matinee Star Wars movie weighed down by a screenplay that doesn’t trust its own leads. The visuals and the duo’s chemistry will carry you through, and there are at least three sequences I’d happily rewatch on a big screen. But it left a slightly bad aftertaste — the sense that Favreau directed a 9/10 movie out of a 5/10 script. Definitely a good one-time watch, but I don’t see myself returning to it the way I do the Season 1 finale.

Rating: 6/10