The Mandalorian and Grogu should have been a mostly-puppets movie
To my endless regret, I saw The Mandalorian and Grogu. I've never seen better proof that Disney has no idea what The Mandalorian even IS, as an IP within the Star Wars IP. They have no idea how to use this shit. The Mandalorian is NOT about Pedro Pascal... it's about a cute puppet baby.
The one thing that makes The Mandalorian different from every other part of the Star Wars IP, its unique draw, is that it has Baby Yoda in it. If you're going to make a Mandalorian movie, you gotta stick as much Baby Yoda in there as possible.
Nevertheless, the movie is absolutely packed with adult-scale full-body Unreal-engine ass 3D animations of human people doing human people fighting and whacking large aliens on the head in underlit combat setpieces.
I was watching it in a theater full of children, many of them so small that that they needed to constantly ask their parents what was going on. The kids had very little reaction to this modern blockbuster combat animation. They went CRAZY for the puppet, though. And their parents did too!
The movie also has an extraordinarily low-energy cast, with Pascal turning in his classic flat-affect performance (which I hate, but whatever). But Sigourney Weaver does this, too. And there's a shockingly bad character, Jabba the Hutt's son, voiced by Jeremy Allen White, who is also extremely low-energy and flat in his performance compared to what we know that actor is capable of. There is an X-Wing attack sequence where five out of the six pilots are all bringing a flat affect, with none of the whooping and yelling that other Star Wars dogfight sequences usually include. The only guy bringing any kind of range to his performance is Paul Sun-Hyung Lee, who already plays a character in the show and therefore has a real character performance to fall back on.
But crazily enough, the best vocal performance in the movie is from MARTIN SCORSESE, who plays a food cart vendor on an alien planet. I was so relieved to finally encounter an emotionally dynamic performance. I had no idea it was fucking Scorsese until I left the theater!!
Also, it's impossible to see anything that happens in this movie. It's just too dark. But I am not smart enough to say much about this! Moving on...
I have a pitch for what could have saved this movie. I think it should have been nearly all puppets. I'm going to spoil the plot of the film now as I pitch you my script rewrite for The Mandalorian and Grogu: Puppet Edition, a movie which would have done at least twice as well as this one.
I would have started this movie with a cool ass sequence where The Mandalorian does a fuck ton of backflips and cool gun tricks and like Adult Human Man Scale Action Shit. Whack that on the start of the movie like a promise. In the movie that shipped, he's kidnapped two different times, the first time what feels like around forty minutes into the film. I would move this up. Get The Mandalorian kidnapped like fifteen minutes into the movie. Cut his boss, Sigourney Weaver, down to a video call role. She sends him on some mission and it goes bad immediately.
In the movie, the second time Pedro Pascal is kidnapped is at the start of the third act. He's separated from Grogu at this point and Baby Yoda subsequently has to figure out how to fly to the Hutt planet and save him, despite being a cute baby puppet who doesn't talk. Luckily, Grogu has the help of four other tiny baby puppets, who are all clones of Babu Frick. This is the best part of the movie and it's insane that it isn't the entire fucking movie.
So let's move this up! Mando is kidnapped. He's thrown in a spaceship without Grogu. Grogu is alone on an alien world. Let's make it the bloodsports world based on Chicago from the middle of the movie. Grogu is alone, but he knows where Mando went.
Let's say he grabs a stowaway ride back to wherever Mando lives. His house is a big setpiece scene; let's just reuse that. When Grogu gets home, the four Babu Fricks are working on Mando's busted spaceship like they are in the movie. They're shocked and alarmed to learn that Grogu is alone. They put him in their miniature, baby-puppet-scape starship - the funniest thing in the film - and fly him off to Jabba The Hutt's Son, who they know well.
If I'm making this movie, I'm firing Jeremy Allen White. Terrible casting decision. My Rodda Hutt is going to be gross and slimy. He's hanging out somewhere, still resentful of his family situation, but fully embracing the crime lord lifestyle. He eats small puppets that look like bugs and lizards and his tongue is gross and slimy and he keeps threatening to lick people. I think it's crazy that the movie never has a scene where a Hutt actually tries to eat Grogu, so let's add one here. Terrifying!! But he's like, "Ha ha, I'm joking, your dad was kidnapped by my aunt and uncle who want me dead, so I'll support your rescue mission. For some plot reason it will help me regain control over my father's crime empire. Here, take this help from me."
The help should consist of more SMALL PUPPETS. Let's add, like, a Salacious Crumb type guy. Let's make sure none of the characters are played by humans and none are taller than three foot. Jabba kits out Grogu and gives him a squad and the squad is all fucking puppets. Make some of them genuinely gross and some of them genuinely cute. These characters should look like the swamp monsters from The Dark Crystal. Go nuts.
They all get in the tiny spaceship and go to the Hutt planet. At this point Grogu and the numerous tiny puppets now filling out the cast should sneak into the Hutt palace just like they do in the movie. The Mandalorian is going to be tortured by the Hutts, but instead of torturing him with a big snake combat scene, they're going to do some classic Hutt torture by feeding him to a monster that will slowly digest him, freezing him in some kind of scary substance, or putting him in a rancor pit. Let's make it classic.
Grogu and his buddies should then try to save Mando by doing PUPPET SHIT. They should be swinging around on ropes and falling on people's heads and whacking them with sticks and stuff. There should be a variety of weird puppets who do weird puppet stuff. Unfortunately they all get kidnapped, and the Hutts are like, "YUMMY, I love to eat little guys who are the size of a baby and also a puppet. I am putting you in my Gross Hutt Food Zoo."
The entire time I was watching this film, I was completely shocked that there was no sequence where the Hutts tried to eat Grogu, and no sequence where the Hutts tried to eat ANY little sentient critter. We're putting that back in the IP for sure. Grogu and his puppet friends end up trapped inside the place where the Hutts keep all the creepy-cute little animals they eat on their throne. Some of them are animals but some are merely small sentient beings, like Grogu's puppet friends. Grogu makes allies with them by being cute and they make a plan to escape.
At this point we should double the number of cute fucking puppets in this movie. They all get out and run around the Hutt palace causing chaos and looking for The Mandalorian. They finally find him and set him free, and then we reward the losers in the audience by adding an adult-scale, human-type-person doing sick-ass, Unreal-Engine-animated combat into the last thirty minutes of the movie. HOWEVER, so that it doesn't suck, we are salting this experience with tons of puppet shit.
The movie ends in the exact same way but instead of having to watch boring crap that sucks ass, we get to watch puppets the entire time.
This is my pitch. It is insane that this is not the movie they made. The puppet-only sequences in the movie are so long and elaborate that I've been wondering whether there was a version of this movie that was much heavier on puppets and got replaced by "normal guy" type shit because it's cheaper to film in The Volume, or whatever. Disney are cowards.
One last thing before I go. I've mentioned that in the actual version of The Mandalorian And Grogu, Jeremy Allen White plays Jabba The Hutt's son, a huge Hutt with a disgustingly expressive face and a six-pack. The movie constantly struggles to create dynamic scenes where he does Action Guy Shit. Hutts are just not meant for that, but they tried anyway, and the whole movie is creaking with the effort of it.
And to convince you he's good, they make him act like a bro and be super nice to Grogu. He is constantly saying things that are almost exactly the text of this post.
As Jabba the Hutt's son I'm often gatekept from progressive spaces due to preconceived notions about my family. At the same time, I acknowledge the reasonable concerns my presence would raise, and I'm working every day to unlearn the harmful attitudes instilled in me on my father's pleasure barge.
chasin.bsky.social
This is fucking dumb and they should never have done it. It is yet another sign that these people don't seem to understand what Star Wars is, despite being gigantic superfans of it. Hutts are supposed to be gross and slimy and funny and the scariest thing they do should not be hitting the hero with an axe - it should be licking the hero or trying to eat them.
I felt completely insane while watching this film. Whatever they were trying to do, they failed... but the plan was also rotten from the start. If you're going to make a movie out of a TV show, there NEEDS to be something bigger and weirder and more ambitious about it, and there NEEDS to be something different about the experience.
For The Mandalorian, the obvious solution is puppets. I am certain that the only reason they didn't do this was expense. A shame!!!!