I enjoyed it ... all right. Good clean fun, lots of action, adorable animatronics, easter eggs galore, humor, a great soundtrack, yadda, yadda, yadda. Very lightweight in the story department, I thought, shaking my head at some obvious mis-steps undermining key sequences in the film.
Over the next day or so, I saw people mostly gushing over what to me had only been a diverting piece of cinema and (coming as it did at the end of a seven-year SW film drought) no big deal. I liked it, sure. But I didn't love it. Wasn't tremendously drawn to watch it again and again in the theater as I have every SW film since -- well, since 1977.
And then:
Someone smacked me in the face with what an idiot I had been.
How? By pointing out that Rotta the Hutt is Stinky from The Clone Wars animated theatrical release.
Had I turned my brain off, just because the film was so removed in sequence from the stories I spent the prior week immersed in? I watched the 2008 movie literally four days earlier. The Mandalorian and Grogu even shows a slightly older Stinky early on in the movie.
Yet I somehow failed to process that Jabba the Hutt's kidnapped son in that 18-year-old cartoon and Jabba the Hutt's kidnapped son in this brand-new live-action film are, duh, one and the same.
Thankfully, a Threads post brought this home to me and rebooted my Star Wars cognition, by saying how much the poster would love to see Rotta and Ahsoka Tano reunite in the future.
Pieces fell one-by-one into place in my head ... and they wouldn't stop falling.
Rotta the Hutt grew up to be the person he grew up to be, in part, because of the way Ahsoka treated him during one of the most traumatic experiences of his life.
Grogu, too, had his life saved in infancy by the determination and dedication of a Jedi, Kelleran Beq, in one of my favorite sequences of the entire Mandalorian series.
That hermit who helps Grogu in the swamp isn't just an extraneous piece of plot armor to explain how Grogu is able to save Mando from the poison that's killing him. Instead, this is a deliberate example of someone taking the time to help a child in need -- just like Ahsoka and Kelleran, except that no one had to give him the assignment. He just did it.
Continuing on through my Threads feed, I came across other people making other, seemingly unremarkable comments about the film. And with each one, I realized that when I sat in that auditorium and watched The Mandalorian and Grogu, I'd been watching it as a standalone film and authored story that just happened to be set in the Star Wars universe, rather than watching it as a work grounded in the massively greater story that is Star Wars as a whole.
I had been alert to the possibility that it might just be a long episode of The Mandalorian TV series, and when a portion of the plot reached what appeared to be almost full resolution, I thought, "Oh, this is where an episode break would have been."
I watched the sequence of Grogu in the swamp on Nal Hutta as a nice segment in his character arc, and found myself annoyed that the filmmakers hadn't allowed Grogu to succeed on his own, but leaned instead on this convenient hermit as a device, infantilizing The Child instead of letting him grow as fully as he might.
In short, my writer's knowledge of storytelling craft got in the way of what the story intended to tell me all along: that as we grow up, everyone around us has the chance to make a difference in our lives. Some choose to be Ahsoka Tano. Some choose to be Owen and Beru. Some choose to be Bail Organa. And some choose to be Din Djarin or the swamp hermit. There was a larger tapestry hung up on that screen for me to see, but I let my penchant for the constraints of writing conventions overwhelm the root purpose of all art -- to offer up meaning for those open to it.
I'm now really excited to see the film again before it leaves the theaters. Maybe I can do a better job letting myself see, instead of judging surfaces and assuming what's below is simple artifice.
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