Judge a Film by Its Size, Do You?
In defense of The Mandalorian and Grogu, and the cinema of the moment.
There’s a bar these two set, and it’s a high one. At the end of the second season a hooded Jedi walks into the dark, a green blade ignites, and a grown man who knows exactly how the trick works is suddenly hanging off the front of his own couch whispering it can’t be, it can’t be. I’ve been chasing that feeling since I was six, when The Empire Strikes Back taught a small boy that the good guys don’t always win. Vader wasn’t really a villain in that film — he was a force of nature: masked, ruthless, untouchable, dread walking into every room. And the heroes lost. Han sealed alive in carbonite. Threepio blown to pieces. Lando’s betrayal. Luke didn’t beat him — he barely survived, and you white-knuckled the one blow he managed to land like it was the last hope in the galaxy. Then, on a Cloud City gantry, the man in black said the words that tilted the floor of the entire saga: I am your father. Six-year-old me just about came out of his seat. No way. Star Wars blindsided me with wonder as a kid. Decades later it did it again — same jolt, just older, and this time it ran straight to joy.
Here’s the part that should ruin it and doesn’t. I’m not six anymore — I know how this gets built. The de-aged face stitched together frame by frame. The reveal held back and timed to the half-second. The score climbing on cue to pull the exact tear it means to pull. I can see every string. By all the rules of how grown-up cynicism is supposed to work, seeing the strings should kill the magic — that’s what “knowing how the trick is done” is meant to do to a person. It does the opposite. The wonder doesn’t survive despite the machinery; it gets bigger because of it, because now I’m not only moved — I can also see how staggeringly hard that moment is to land, and how much love it takes to land it well. Understanding the gears and feeling the awe don’t cancel each other out. They compound.
So I walked into The Mandalorian and Grogu holding the highest bar I own — and I walked in beside three men I’ve known since the nineties. Hold onto that. I’ll come back to it.
The wrong dimensions
The reception split into two camps, and both, I think, measured the wrong thing. The critics’ knock is that nothing happens — everyone ends where they started, it could’ve been a couple of episodes or half a season, it’s “content, not cinema,” a streaming arc blown up to IMAX. Sixty-one percent and a shrug. The other camp, the loud and angry one, showed up with the opposite complaint: that it isn’t serious, doesn’t guard the lore the way they’d police it, doesn’t deserve the name. One side graded a plot-delivery machine. The other graded a lore-compliance test.
Here’s what neither was actually watching for. The thing that made Star Wars Star Wars to a kid was never plot mechanics or canon hygiene — it was wonder. What Tolkien called sub-creation: a world built so fully, and so lovingly, that you believe in it while you’re inside, and walk back out having felt something true. That is the dimension that matters. Judge this film on it — on whether it conjures the magic — and it doesn’t squeak by. It soars. Small is not the same as minor, and a movie is not a checklist.
The moments
Watch what it actually does. Din vanishes into the dark, taking troopers off their feet with a grappling line, men yanked screaming into the black. Then a single blaster bolt fires, and for a fraction of a second the dark goes red — and you catch it: the glow sliding off polished beskar. A quarter of a second. That’s all. And it floored me. Sit with the confidence that takes. The film flickers an image at you and trusts you to be worthy of it. Restraint isn’t thinness. Restraint is respect.
Or the doorway. Din walks toward us; the camera gives us the two troopers waiting on the far side that he can’t see, so the geometry of the room becomes the suspense. A step short of the threshold he paints the floor with fire and crosses through the confusion already solving the problem. People call that “action.” It’s choreography. It’s blocking. It’s legible space — you always know where everyone stands, which is the one thing almost no modern blockbuster bothers to give you anymore. It’s poetry, and it’s nearly a lost art. And it’s a body, not a CGI smear: a lot of that physical grammar belongs to Lateef Crowder, one of the stunt performers under the beskar, whose hand-to- hand work gives Din the weight and brutal economy of a man who genuinely knows how to end a fight before it starts.
The AT-AT sequence does the thing I didn’t know I was starving for: it takes you inside — the carriers, the cockpit, the controls, angles no one shoots because the wide shot is “enough.” It treats the hardware with the reverence of someone who loves the machine. Beneath the Hutt’s dais, the dragonsnake uncoils in a single image lifted straight off a Frank Frazetta canvas — and that comparison is the whole argument. Frazetta never painted plots. He painted moments so charged they implied an entire story you’d never be shown. That’s the older art this film is practicing: the pulp serial, the mythic illustration that moves. It’s the soil Star Wars grew out of in the first place.
There’s even a beat where another hunter out-hunts Mando at his own trade, and if you know who that is, the screen lights up a second time — privately, just for you. That isn’t fan service. It’s fidelity rewarded. And the closest thing to a plot is small and good on purpose: Rotta, son of the most infamous gangster who ever lived, clawing to be his own man out from under that enormous shadow, betrayed by an old Imperial, throwing in with Mando to get free. One clean human want. The film doesn’t need twelve.
What the Stoics knew
Two old traditions taught me to prize exactly this, and I’ll name them plainly.
The Stoics were forever pointing at the present moment as the only thing that is actually real. “Confine yourself to the present,” Marcus Aurelius kept reminding himself, because the past is spent and the future is a rumor. A story sprinting forward is always living somewhere it hasn’t arrived. A film content to be here — to rest in the firelight on the armor, to love the cockpit, to let a child stack mud into a roof — is practicing a kind of attention the Stoics would have recognized on sight. Presence over progress. That is not the lesser thing. In art, as in a life, it is the harder thing.
What the Inklings knew
The Inklings gave me the other half. Tolkien had a word, eucatastrophe, for the sudden joyous turn, and he insisted the lump it leaves in your throat isn’t sentiment but a rumor of something true. He had another word, Recovery: the way a good myth wipes the glass clean so you see the ordinary world freshly again — a horse, a hill, a father, a son. That is what the great Star Wars moments have always done. Not advanced a plot. Cleaned the glass. Made you a kid again, able to be astonished.
Eleven words
Which brings me to the line I haven’t been able to set down. Late in the film it’s Grogu doing the caring — nursing a poisoned Din, building his ridiculous, perfect little mud hut, the foundling become the protector. And somewhere in there:
“The old protect the young, then the young protect the old. This is the Way.”
For three seasons “This is the Way” sounded like a warrior’s code — the helmet, the discipline, the dogma. That one sentence quietly turns it into something else entirely: a covenant of reciprocal care across the generations. Not a creed about fighting. A creed about the cycle. The Stoics had a name for embracing that cycle whole — amor fati, the love of your entire fate, mortality and all — and memento mori lives right inside those words too: you protect the young because one day you will be the old who needs protecting. The torch only means anything because it gets passed.
The Fellowship
That’s the vertical thread — one generation holding the next. But there’s a horizontal one, and it’s the reason this particular night will stay with me.
I saw this film with three men I’ve known since the nineties. We grew up on this stuff together. And one of us just took a job out of state, which means there’s a good chance this was the last time the four of us will sit in the dark like that for a very long while. I knew it walking in. It put a thumb on the scale of every frame.
The Inklings weren’t theorists in an ivory tower; they were a circle of friends who crowded into a pub to read each other their myths out loud. Tolkien knew the shape of this better than anyone — his own boyhood fellowship was scattered and mostly killed in one war, and he spent the rest of his life writing about companies of friends who form, and walk a road together, and are broken by the world anyway. The book I’d just finished, The Fellowship of the Ring, ends on exactly that note: the company breaks. Everyone who loves these stories carries the same quiet knowledge — the fellowship is always temporary. That’s not the tragedy of it. That’s the weight of it. The reason it counts.
So there I was, watching a movie about who protects whom across the turning of a life, sitting shoulder to shoulder with the friends of my youth, knowing the configuration was ending. Memento mori doesn’t only mean you will die. It means this will end — this table, this row of seats, this exact set of people in the dark. Which is precisely why you show up for it.
They know the way
None of this is an accident, and it’s worth saying who to thank. Dave Filoni and Jon Favreau know these characters — not as IP to be managed, but as people they plainly love. You feel it in every frame: the restraint, the deep-cut grace notes, the refusal to explain the magic away. They understand the thing the loudest voices forgot — that the job was never to advance a saga or pass a purity test. It was to make you feel, for two hours in the dark, the way you felt the very first time. That’s stewardship. That’s knowing what it means to hand the magic back to the people who never stopped believing in it.
And well you should not
I came to this film with two Star Wars jolts already in me — the no-way surprise that lit me up as a boy on Bespin, the rescue that floored me as a man — and it handed me the thing sitting underneath both: the quiet machinery of people holding each other across time, up and down the generations and across a row of theater seats. I never needed it to move the saga forward. It moved me, exactly where I sat.
They graded the story and called it minor. I watched the light come off the armor, and the fire spread across the floor, and a green child build a roof out of mud, and I heard eleven words about who keeps whom — beside three men I may not sit beside again for years — and I think it was perfect at precisely the size it chose to be.
This is the Way.
— Mark