The start of a very different journey.
What They Say:
A Mandalorian bounty hunter tracks a target for a well-paying client.
The Review:
Content: (please note that content portions of a review may contain spoilers)
The arrival of The Mandalorian has been something that I’ve been waiting on for a long time. Having loved the original trilogy as a kid – eight years old when it first came out – and really digging the prequels for the expansions that it brought, I’ve consumed a lot of the property between books, comics, and TV shows. With the sequel trilogy underway and close to wrapping up, and really enjoying The Last Jedi a great deal for the way it tried to kick things into another level, everything you heard about this series was what I wanted to hear. A great team of directors. Dave Filoni heavily involved, dealing with all the Mandalore material that was a highlight of both Clone Wars and Rebels TV series when they were dealt with. There’s a rich history to it all and seeing it exploited in serialized TV form in live-action has been decades in the making.
And quite possibly the best thing about this is that it doesn’t lean into what’s become cliche because of use in all those other properties. The right tone and pieces are captured here as it leans into a mixture of quiet Western and Japanese samurai serial – especially that last scene that will invoke something for a segment of viewers. Star Wars has always pulled from these places and more and everything hits its marks that says that Favreau and Filoni immersed themselves right into it. In watching this with my mother and my daughter, the episode was entirely accessible for different reasons but if you knew more coming from the prior TV works you got more out of it. There’s a lot of little nuances but it’s not dropped in with a blunt form or anything. It’s simply a piece of the fabric of living on the outer rim.
The premise is simple in that we’re introduced to a bounty hunter that many keep distance from that’s known only as The Mandalorian. Without removing his helmet once in the episode and being minimal of dialogue overall, we see him bring in a bounty, deal with the problems of currency in the outer rim post-Empire, and the problematic jobs you can end up with if the normal routes for getting them aren’t working out. There’s some fun in seeing him take in his first bounty on-screen as part of a collection, but it’s when Greef Carga of the guild sends him to a client off the books that things get intriguing. The job is simply a grab and deliver to a location thing, dead or alive but with alive very much preferred. But it involves Imperials and that’s almost more dangerous to work with after the end of the Empire itself. Just having a moment with a uniformed officer and several very worn down stormtroopers is a fantastic view.
The Mandalorian’s journey takes him to a remote world where he has to deal with the Trandoshans that are guarding what he’s after and that provides for the big action sequence of the episode. We get a few smaller bits along the way that are more CG than anything else, but this one is fun with IG-11 on the same assignment with different details to it. With IG-88 always being of interest from Empire Strikes Back, finally seeing the droid in motion is impressive because it’s not terribly realistic in a lot of ways. But they make it work while at the same giving it the feeling of age and wear as well as a good bit of cynicism with how many times that it intends to self-destruct as the fight goes bad. All of it leads to the ending that’s either going to really capture the imagination or is going to send a segment of fans into a fit of anger. Suffice to say, I loved it.
The opening did a lot of things that I really wanted out of a project like this. It’s Star Wars and yet it’s not Star Wars. Filoni has worked long on animated projects with 20-minute running times that have very defined pacing to it since they were tied to broadcast with commercial breaks. Here, with the differences in how live-action alone changes things and no commercial breaks, he’s able to give us something that’s very relaxed, very old school Western with the mysterious man walking the landscape unhurried. Even the music cues hit that up beautifully so that it captured that tone. I love that he’s minimal of dialogue but still gets in a fair bit of talking so that we get a good hint of personality as well. The other big thing is that we get the small bit of Mandalorian elements to it in how they’re trying to bring back pieces of what was taken from them by the Empire and others over the years. He’s paid with some of that by the client and in turn that’s taken to be melted down and born anew where it belongs – and to be spread to others that see this particular Mandalorian armorer. For those that are vested in the Clone Wars and the history of Mandalore going back to when the first of them became a Jedi a thousand years prior, it’s exciting to have this kind of material inserted here without an extensive backstory or flashback material.
This episode does have fun with guest actors getting in on things. Bringing in Nick Nolte as an Ugnaught is just so strangely right. Taika Waititi, who is directing the last episode of the season, is fun with the style of dialogue for IG-11. I grew up during the Rocky years and Carl Weathers was huge for me from that and films like Predator, so seeing him in a role here and feeling so natural within it just clicks. And was that Brian Posehn driving the landspeeder at the beginning? And like a lot of people, I’m still not sure how or why Werner Herzog is there. I’m not complaining and I hope he’s in it more but it’s just so disconnected in a way that I can’t quite resolve that in a way I guess.
In Summary:
The opening installment essentially did everything I wanted while also getting me to adjust my expectations from a film style pacing or the previous animated TV style pacing. This is moving at its own pace and I’m really enjoying the way it’s bringing us along for the ride. With a strong creative team behind it and plenty of places to go from the beginning here, it’s easy to be drawn to this project. Hell, just the end credits sequence with all the illustration work has me ready to adorn walls throughout my home with it. There’s a lot to like and this is going to be a very fun ride.
Grade: A-
