Created by Jon Favreau
Staring Pedro Pascal
Rated M
Score 3/6
Beginning five years after the events of Return of the Jedi and the fall of the Galactic Empire, The Mandalorian follows Din Djarin, a lone Mandalorian bounty hunter in the outer reaches of the galaxy. He is hired by remnant Imperial forces to retrieve the child Grogu, but instead goes on the run to protect the infant. While looking to reunite Grogu with his kind, they are pursued by Moff Gideon, who wants to use Grogu’s connection to the Force.
Though Disney+ does have some interesting titles a few of which I have not seen anywhere in years. It should also be noted that I have found that Disney+ is glitchy and at times unresponsive, this makes Disney+ come across as a second-tier streaming platform. However, I am willing to concede that the glitchiness and unresponsiveness had something to do with the time of day I was using the platform.
Coming to The Mandalorian well after the finale for the second season has been released, it is extremely easy to binge watch this series considering that there are eight episodes each with a runtime of around half an hour (I binged both seasons in about a week). My first thoughts of The Mandalorian was that it was a pretty piece of world building with the fingerprints of television action series’ from the 70’s and 80’s. It was great to see live action versions of the spaceships that I had previously seen animated, or illustrations done by Star Wars fans. it was good to see that there was an homage to Akira Kurosawa in the fourth episode of season 1. For those of you who might not remember Lucasfilm also paid homage to Kurosawa in “Bounty Hunters” the seventeenth episode of Season Two of the Star Wars: The Clone Wars.
After watching The Mandalorian I have only just realized seen more movies featuring Gina Carano then I thought I had, if memory serves, I even made jokes about her ability as an actress. Carano is clearly a better actress then what she was in her earlier movie roles. As for the twitter controversy surrounding Carano on The Mandalorian, taking into consideration the fluff nature of the series, the fact the series should be something of substance and the quality of movies that have also faced twitter backlash in recent years. My cynical self cannot help but suspect that the controversy surrounding Carano was some sort of marketing ploy. Though I am not overly familiar with Giancarlo Esposito’s work, but I felt that his character Moff Giedeon was underutilized. I enjoyed both Carl Weathers’ and Werner Herzog’s performances.
There seemed to be a missed opportunity with the finale of season with the choice of music used in the final scenes where they used music by Ludwig Göransson and not John Williams. There are fan edits of those scenes that show by using Williams’ music instead of Göransson’s the emotional level of the scenes in question are dialled up from a five to a ten.