WiC Watches: The Mandalorian
The Mandalorian (Pedro Pascal) in Lucasfilm’s THE MANDALORIAN.
The Mandalorian: “Chapter One”
I jump into the premiere Disney+ episode of The Mandalorian with high expectations, hoping for a fun dustup of a space western with Star Wars-ian trappings starring a complex antihero driven by motivations both light and dark. I also trust showrunner Jon Favreau, who has a proven track record with action, humor and character-building. This is the man who kicked off the Marvel Cinematic Universe, lest we forget. Will he and his team get this right?
The opening sequence is spine-tingling. Even though this scene was revealed last night at halftime on Monday Night Football, I loved watching it in context. The show immediately plunges into wild western movie mode, with the lone Mandalorian walking into the frontier saloon packed with rough customers. After slugging his way through a raft of thugs, he finds his target and delivers his first line: “I can bring you in warm, or I can bring you in cold.”
You had me at “warm.”
It all feels so familiar, but in a good way. The Mandalorian is loaded with nods to the original Star Wars trilogy, from land speeders and stormtroopers to people encased in carbonite, from rat’s nest spaceports to known alien races like Jawas, Kubaz and Bith. It even playfully continues the oddball use of the term “parsec.” The main story kicks off with our bounty hunter being sent on a mysterious underground mission by the devious Greef Carga (Carl Weathers) and a shady dealer known only as the Client (Werner Herzog). We meet a mysterious Mandalorian armorer (Emily Swallow), and get hints of a traumatic past and a charitable streak for our lead character. It’s all engaging.
Staying true to its western heart, The Mandalorian features a crotchety old frontiersman Ugnaught (Nick Nolte) and a bronco busting sequence (with a Blurrg), complete with a horse-whisperer style resolution. The hero tracks his highly dangerous quarry and reluctantly teams up with a gunslinging bounty droid (he hates droids) as they take on a warren of armed bad guys.
CAUTION: SPOILERS BEYOND THIS POINT!
The Mandalorian. IG-11. Disney:Lucasfilm
The nature of the “asset” is a cool twist, with the Mandalorian executing his newfound bounty droid buddy as it prepares to “terminate” a fledgling member of Yoda’s green, fuzzy-eared species. At the end of “Chapter One,” our suspicions are confirmed: our rough-and-tumble bounty hunter has a heart of gold.
Now that my “Chapter One” watch is over, I sense that we are being given the Boba Fett project fans have wanted for so long. The producers of The Mandalorian have made it expressly clear that their protagonist has no relationship to the infamous Boba Fett of the Star Wars movie series. That said, there is no way The Mandalorian can escape Boba Fett’s cult status, and they’ve used the connection to their full advantage in the marketing. Since the Boba Fett of the original films was a minor character with a small amount of screen time who never removed that fabulous Beskar helmet, he had the intriguing mystery of a faceless character.
The Mandalorian Disney/Lucasfilm
If you’ve seen the PR images and trailers for The Mandalorian, you’ve surely noticed how prominently that helmet is presented, and that familiar Mandalorian helm screams Boba Fett. It’s a smart move. It works story-wise, since the Mandalorian race produces legions of mercenaries and bounty hunters clad in the traditional Beskar plated steel, and it creates an anointed and salable tabula rasa, a blank slate, for Pascal’s new character to emerge from within.
The Mandalorian intentionally leans on classic Western movies, including the spaghetti westerns starring Clint Eastwood as The Man With No Name, and the climactic action sequence in “Chapter One” hearkens back to the famous final shootout scenes in The Wild Bunch and Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid. It all works and it’s all a lot of unabashed Star Wars fun.