The Mandalorian and Grogu | Fake Wizards Review

Added: 2026-05-30

[00:00:00]Star Wars: The Mandalorian and Grogu released in theaters on May 22nd, 2026, directed by Jon Favreau and written by Dave Filoni. It is the first Star Wars movie to hit theaters in 7 years, and it arrives with what I believe is such naked contempt for the Star Wars audience that calling it a movie at all feels like consumer fraud. This is three to four episodes of what would have been Mandalorian season 4 stitched together and sold at IMAX prices to people that Lucasfilm assumes are too distracted to notice. Hello, I'm the real-life Fake Wizard, and this is a Fake Wizard's review of Star Wars: The Mandalorian and Grogu. If this video brings you any value, hit the subscribe button as we're posting lots of reviews every single week. The setup here is as simple as Star Wars can be, especially when written by Dave Filoni. Din Djarin, the Mandalorian played by Pedro Pascal or more accurately played by body doubles Brendan Wayne and Lateef Crowder, while Pascal phones in a vocal performance, is working as a bounty hunter for the fledgling New Republic alongside his adopted apprentice Grogu. Sigourney Weaver's Colonel Ward gives them a mission: retrieve Rotta the Hutt, Jabba's son, from captivity on the moon of Shakari. In exchange, the Hutt twins will provide intel on a rogue Imperial warlord named Commander Coin. Simple, it's a fetch quest. Go get the slug, bring him back, movie can continue.

[00:01:31]That's about it. What follows then is a series of those fetch quests strung together with action sequences so relentless and so consequence-free that they function more like ambient noise.

[00:01:44]You could leave to go refill your popcorn, take a phone call, go to the bathroom, make a friend with the movie theater staff, all during any one of the fight sequences. You could then return and find the plot exactly where you left it, which is nowhere because it was never going anywhere to begin with. I feel it necessary to qualify myself for this review. I started making YouTube videos on the Real Life Fake Wizard channel during the release of the Acolyte. I thought that show was so terrible and offensive to the Star Wars canon at large that I wanted to start making videos to talk about it. The original George Lucas saga meant something to me the way it meant something for a lot of people watching this. So, when the first Star Wars anything in theaters after 7 years turns out to be a stitched-together streaming season wearing a trench coat pretending to be a film, that's not good. Part 1. This is a TV season disguised as a movie. The Mandalorian and Grogu is not a movie and we should not judge it as one. It has the architecture of a low-quality streaming show. Go to Shikhar, fight in a bar, escape, go to Nal Hutta, fight in a pit, escape, go here, fight some more, escape. And each of these sequences, while being repetitive, each play like self-contained episodes with their own mini climax and then reset. The transitions between each episode carry all the dramatic weight of a Netflix autoplay countdown. The Clone Wars movie pulled this identical trick back in 2008, stitching together TV episodes and projecting them onto a big screen, and that earned a 17% on Rotten Tomatoes for it. 18 years later, with a near $200 budget and 7 years of development runway, Lucasfilm walked into the same wall on purpose. Part 2. This movie is written with open contempt for the audience. The dialogue in this film is worse than George Lucas, which is really saying something. He wasn't good at writing dialogue. Every line of Mandalorian and Grogu exists to explain what just happened or preview what's about to happen. It is all literal. It is all on the nose. It is robotic. In fact, it feels like Chat GPT version 1 or 2. It like the dialogue here is so poor, it doesn't feel like it was written by a human or an AI version that is available today. Now, the reason for why the dialogue is so robotic could be speculated about for days, but something inside this is factual. This film is the embodiment of the Netflix second screen philosophy. You do not need to be looking at the screen or paying attention at all. You can passively listen to this and completely keep up.

[00:04:31]For example, the Hutts in Star Wars lore, they have the ability to speak basic language like English, but near exclusively speak Huttese as a kind of cultural dominance in their native language. The trailers showed the Hutts speaking basic and it felt odd. In context, it's actually much worse. The creative team used Huttese as a built-in redundancy for an audience they assume is scrolling Tik Tok during the movie.

[00:04:59]The Hutts will speak in Huttese with subtitles on screen and then immediately speak again in common tongue as a kind of way to make sure you don't need to look up and read the subtitles. Part three, the plot armor screen saver. Here is a complete list of moments in The Mandalorian and Grogu where you genuinely believe a main character could be in danger.

[00:05:23]Oh, it's just my hand.

[00:05:25]There is no list. The movie asks you to sit through two hours of action sequences while maintaining zero tension across every single one of them. This movie is not connected to anything important lore-wise. It doesn't set up for anything new in the future to come.

[00:05:40]You never once think Mando or Grogu are in any real danger and therefore there are no stakes. And if there are no stakes, there are no consequences. And with no consequences, nothing matters at all. You can skip this film entirely and miss absolutely nothing in the Star Wars timeline. The status quo at the end is functionally identical to the status quo at the beginning. Nothing changes at all. Part four, hiding behind the dark.

[00:06:08]The Mandalorian and Grogu is visually dark that looking at the action scenes become a chore on your eyeballs.

[00:06:15]Multiple critics flagged this independently, describing the imagery as muddy and the choreography as difficult to track. This is a deliberate filmmaking choice, and it's a cowardly one. Darkness hides shotty CGI the same way a heavy filter hides a bad photograph. It works until someone notices, and then it's all you can see.

[00:06:35]The original trilogy was made with a fraction of the technology and remains legible to the eyes nearly 50 years later. This movie will age poorly tomorrow. Part five, a roster of wasted talent. Sigourney Weaver shows up to play the angry police chief yelling at the rogue cop. She is here for a paycheck, and as soon as she shows up, her performance lets you know immediately. She does not give even the slightest crap about Star Wars. I wish I had some kind of proof to say she had contempt for being in this at all because that's what you get from her performance. That is how it feels.

[00:07:11]Jeremy Allen White voices Rotta the Hutt with a performance so distractingly human inside an alien body that it sounds like someone got cold feet about committing to the character. Critics called the voice off. They're being polite. It's the uncanny valley of voice acting, a recognizable human cadence trapped inside a CGI slug. All the other Hutts sound like Hutts, and Rotta just sounds like, "Yeah, what's up, little bro? How you doing? What's good? Staying well? How's your mom?" Pedro Pascal, despite being the main character, is nearly just a voice actor here. Doubled on set by two other performers for most of the production, and critics described even his vocal turn as, quote, "distant." There is a scene in the trailers where the Hutts remove his helmet, and we see the fully groomed Pedro underneath. The Hutts tempt him by saying they can sell this helmet on the black market, and that by taking this helmet off, they've shamed him in his Mandalorian beliefs. 5 minutes later, they throw the helmet back to him willingly and out of character. Why?

[00:08:14]So they can get Pedro off set and back in the voice booth. Pedro Pascal is not the Mandalorian. The suit guys actually are. A standard movie ticket runs somewhere between $15 and $22, depending on your market, and IMAX runs closer to 25. Every dollar spent is wasted on The Mandalorian and Grogu. The film is not a film. This is not a movie, and we should treat it like the marketing manipulation scam that it is. It should not be judged as a movie. It should be judged as content, and this content is not worth your time. It is an insult to Star Wars and the audience, and it is not a movie.

[00:08:52]Therefore, it's a one out of 10. Do not pay theatrical prices for this. Do not go looking for it on Disney Plus when it inevitably shows up there in probably 8 weeks.

[00:09:03]The money and the hours are better spent on literally anything else.

[00:09:08]Until next time, create, innovate, inspire, and well, cancel your Disney Plus subscription.