By George & Josh Bate
Lucasfilm and Disney hosted special fan events on May the 4th giving lucky Star Wars fans the opportunity to watch 30 minutes of The Mandalorian and Grogu. We were fortunate enough to be in attendance during one of these preview screenings and were blown away by what we saw.
The first 18 minutes of The Mandalorian and Grogu was showcased at CinemaCon last month (and you can check our detailed recap and review of that footage here), but the May the 4th event offered even more footage, clocking in at around 30 minutes. Unlike the CinemaCon footage, the special fan event was screened in glorious IMAX and, as such, exhibited incredible visual scale and sound design. Let’s dive into our thoughts on the new footage….
To most fitting word to sum up what we saw of The Mandalorian and Grogu on May the 4th is ‘cinematic.’ One of the concerns many have lodged against the new Star Wars movie is that it is taking characters who, up until this point, have existed solely on Disney+ and translating them to a new, much grander medium. Questions have been raised as to whether Jon Favreau’s movie would feel like a full-fledged Star Wars movie, or if it would merely play like an extended episode of the series projected onto a bigger screen. After watching 30 minutes of the movie in IMAX, we can confidently say that the former holds true.
Jon Favreau directed arguably the most cinematic and movie-quality episode of The Mandalorian with Chapter 9: The Marshal, and the Iron Man filmmaker draws on these sensibilities once again in his new movie. After opening text orienting audiences to the point in the Star Wars timeline, the film propels into a layered series of action sequences, involving a Daredevil-esque hallway fight, Din Djarin operating from the shadows like Batman, and everyone’s favorite father-son duo taking down three massive AT-ATs all by themselves. The footage was impressive to say the least, especially when the aspect ratio changed and filled even more of our field of vision. This is an action sequence with a scale and scope never featured in a Disney+ series before, which immediately quells concerns that the movie would simply feel like another episode of The Mandalorian.
Throughout the footage, Ludwig Göransson’s score consistently gave us goosebumps and played such a significant role in the viewing experience that the music felt like a character unto itself. Göransson has not scored a Star Wars project since The Book of Boba Fett, even though his iconic scenes appear through The Mandalorian Season 3. And immediately one can tell that the three-time Academy Award winner has returned to compose the score. Göransson relies on the classic Mandalorian theme and even uses one of our favorite and most underappreciated pieces of Star Wars music (the score that plays at the end of Chapter 13: The Jedi), but he also switches things up quite a bit. The familiar themes are remixed and the orchestral music that typically features in Star Wars movie is accompanied by tenets of hip-hop and techno.
Backed by Göransson’s score, the film moves along from its prologue to a brilliant opening credits sequence. Seeing Martin Scorsese’s name in the credits sequence of a Star Wars movie felt surreal, as did hearing the booming Mando theme on the big screen. Favreau also opts against using the logo that has featured in promotional material and instead uses the same font from the show in displaying ‘The Mandalorian and Grogu.’
If seeing Scorsese’s name light up the big screen of a Star Wars credits sequence was surreal, we don’t know how to describe how awe-struck we were seeing Sigourney Weaver appear in the film. It’s one thing to see the Alien and Avatar star appear in trailers and promotional images – it’s an entirely different thing to see her acting in an actual Star Wars movie. Needless to say, we’re still not over the fact that we get Ellen Ripley in a galaxy far, far away.
But Weaver isn’t just there to make fanboys’ jaws drop. Her character Colonel Ward sets up the plot of the movie. Ward informs Mando that they are tracking down the mysterious Captain Coyne, an Imperial warlord who they are unable to identify. The Hutts know how to find Coyne, but, in order to provide this information to the New Republic, request that their nephew Rotta the Hutt be delivered back to them after he fell in with a bad crowd and is being held against his will by a rival crime syndicate. It’s the kind of plot set up that fans of the series will be accustomed to – complete a given task for someone, which will then get you closer to completing your overarching mission. The story certainly seems exciting, especially as it ties back to a character we haven’t seen since 2008’s The Clone Wars movie. However, we hope that the narrative eventually takes on greater stakes and has bigger implications for the broader galaxy. More recent promotional material has implied that this is Mando’s “greatest mission yet” and that it will determine “the future of the galaxy.” We’ll wait and see if these statements hold true, but we’re holding out hope that the film explores a story grander in scope.
From the initial story set up, we see Mando journey to Nal Hutta, confront the Hutt Twins from The Book of Boba Fett, and journey to a planet inspired by prohibition era Chicago, where he hopes to find Rotta the Hutt (we also get a really neat nod to The Clone Wars movie that had our whole theater cheering). After gracing our ears with Martin Scorsese saying the name ‘Rotta,’ the footage concluded with Rotta kicking ass in a gladiator arena. The visual effects to bring the muscular Hutt to life are incredible and detailed, and we can’t wait to see more of the role Jeremy Allen White’s character plays in the film.
To succinctly capture our thoughts on the first 30 minutes of The Mandalorian and Grogu, you should know that we had massive smiles on our faces for virtually every second of the footage. Of course, it was amazing to see a new Star Wars movie on the big screen, but it also felt like we were watching the beginning of an epic, sprawling, old-school adventure movie akin to Raiders of the Lost Ark. If the special preview of Favreau’s movie is suggestive of anything, moviegoers are in for a treat when The Mandalorian and Grogu hits theaters on May 22.