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Star Wars has always been big on prophecy. Yoda peers into the future like Nostradamus with messed-up syntax, the Emperor cackles that everything is proceeding exactly as he has foreseen, Darth Vader breathes doom through the front grille of his shiny death helmet. And yet not even the most omniscient of Jedi could have predicted that the franchise responsible for practically inventing the modern Hollywood blockbuster would end up as a TV-centric operation with only occasional forays on to the big screen. Which is why it comes as a genuine shock to realise that, ahead of the release of new movie The Mandalorian and Grogu later this month, it has been more than six years since Star Wars last hit the multiplex.
Then again, perhaps the real humdinger is that it hasn’t been longer. The most recent Disney Star Wars film, JJ Abrams’ The Rise of Skywalker, did not so much conclude the long-running space saga as destroy several decades of perfectly serviceable mythology and ruin all sense of congruence with previous films. It was frantic, weirdly apologetic (about previous instalment The Last Jedi) and overstuffed with dodgy fan service. It was essentially a $590m act of narrative panic.
All of which means that Jon Favreau’s big screen outing for the masked bounty hunter and his perky little Force goblin sidekick has a lot of heavy lifting to do. The Mandalorian and Grogu needs to convince casual viewers they do not need to have completed 23 hours of bounty-hunting homework. It must make the galaxy feel big again. And it needs to prove that Baby Yoda is not just Star Wars’ cutest merchandising event, but a character capable of opening up new territory for this most venerable of space operas.
The real zinger here would be to finally take us to the mysterious home planet of the species that gave us Yoda and Grogu. We might learn more about Star Wars and the nature of the Force: are our big-eared friends once-in-a-millennium cosmic accidents, or merely the most notable graduates of an entire globe full of miniature swamp Buddhas?
And yet the problem here is that, as with most enigmas, the mystery becomes less intriguing the more we dig into it. If there really is a race of Force-sensitive extraterrestrials out there, they would either have conquered the known galaxy, or remained bound to their own planet – why bother to invent the wheel, pulley, lorry or spaceship when you can use telekinesis to move giant objects over infinite distances? The point is that as much as we think we need to know where Grogu comes from, we really don’t. If there is to be a trip to Planet Yoda, it ought to take place in a couple of movies’ time, at the end of a trilogy that has revitalised Star Wars on the big screen and shown us that the saga is still capable of genuine wonder – as opposed to just franchise continuity management.
Favreau’s film also has to do more than just give us season four of The Mandalorian on the big screen. Early viewers who were shown the first 25 minutes this week appear to have emerged broadly positive, praising the scale, sound and old-school momentum, though there has also been the slightly awkward suggestion that it still feels a little like a rather expensive television episode. This, really, is the entire problem in miniature. The TV show triumphed despite existing in a period of galactic history bereft of any major dramatic tension. Vader is dead, the Emperor bloody ought to be, and there are only a few vaguely Sithish baddies moping around with the remnants of the Imperial army to help them. It’s the perfect setting for an episodic, extended show whose strength is its ability to delve into all the intriguing little corners of Star Wars lore that movies only have time to mention in passing. But is it the right era in which to set an event movie that Star Wars fans will expect to define the next decade of the franchise? Only Yoda and Grogu (as well as quite possibly several billion of their Force-sensitive brethren) can possibly know.
