Episodes 1-3 (directed by, in order, Dave Filoni, Rick Famuyiwa, Deborah Chow)
Star Wars fans have been anticipating a live action Star Wars television series for decades now, but, after seeing the first three episodes of The Mandalorian, I can tell you that all but the die hard fans would have left disappointed.
We've gotten Star Wars on a budget: The Holiday Special, The Ewok Adventures, various animated series, books and comics and video games, and while some of it is legit great storytelling, most of it doesn't have the same resonance as seeing any of the live action films, particularly the original trilogy. The Mandalorian, with Disney's deep pockets behind it, and the early fate of an entire streaming service seemingly resting on its shoulders is a Star Wars film, but as a TV show.
It's not the first TV series to have epic budget and feel like film on TV, it's the first to do it at this scale, where it feels like no corners have been cut. The CGI is top notch. The makeup, costumes and practical effects are painstakingly realized. The cast is phenomenal. The directing talent is way above par. The score is epic. There's an investment here, from everyone involved in the production, to bringing Star Wars to life in an entirely new medium and realizing Star Wars in an entirely different way.
The influences are evident, spaghetti Westerns and classic samurai stories. These were two of George Lucas' influences for his first Star Wars (on top of 1930's adventure serials and movies about either of the 20th century's World Wars among other), but distilling them down like showrunner/writer Jon Favreau has done here creates a distinct focus for the show that maybe other creators in the Disney era (and Lucas himself with the prequels) may have been missing.
There is an experiment at play here, one that audiences may sense, but not quite be able to pinpoint. It's one of reshaping expectations. Not in the same way that The Last Jedi did in a very metatextual sense, rather one that is reshaping how we watch television, how we watch streaming programming, and, most explicitly, how we watch Star Wars. The first and third episode of The Mandalorian clock in just under 40 minutes. The second episode at around 30 minutes. These are not standard episode lengths for any type of television until now, nevermind something that's action, adventure or drama based. Most genre shows of this type typically run "hour long" (with commercials, making for about 44 minutes of actual programming). So this isn't a show made for "traditional TV", the pacing leaves no anticipation of commercial breaks. If anything, these feel like short films, pieces of a whole, but contained on their own at the same time. But they're also Star Wars short films, with the budget to match, and they look phenomenal and feel "of the world" (or, rather, "of the galaxy").
Streaming services have also taught us to binge our programming, to consume it so rapidly that it's hard to tell where one episode ends and another starts. This has a detrimental effect to our long term memory of the programming we watch, and if there's a show that wants you to take your time with each episode, to revisit and disseminate, it's this one. Favreau has said working on The Mandalorian is like playing with his Kenner Star Wars action figures as a child. There's definitely a nostalgia factor into the construction of the show. But it's not like a "hey remember this?" kind of fan-service, but rather, capturing what it was that made Star Wars so magical in the first place... a lived-in world populated by an entire slew of intriguing beings who could each have their own story told about them. What's happening in the background is just as intriguing as what's going on in the foreground. It's not that JJ Abrams, Ryan Johnson, or others have forgotten this, but somehow they haven't quite gotten it as right. And I think I know why...
 |
| Yes, that's Nick Nolte's face adapted into the form of an Ugnaut |
They're making Star Wars as modern filmmakers, with the demands modern filmmakers have to bring the spectacle and the epic scope. But with The Mandalorian the spectacle isn't going to play the same way on home or mobile screens, and the epic doesn't need to happen in the constrains of 120-ish minutes, or at all even. Expectations are different for TV or streaming, which liberates Favreau and the stable of directors to deliver the story differently.
Episode one finds Lucas' apprentice, Dave Filoni jumping from animation to behind the live action camera for the first time. The story is told in quadrants, starting with a prologue of the titular character bringing in a bounty. This segment is perhaps the roughest of the series, and it may be Filoni's inexperience with live action or it may just be everyone still needing to relax into the reality of making live action Star Wars for "TV". It's still very engaging, and the tone is right, but it feels a little rushed, and perhaps even a little overstuffed. (Bonus points for appearances by Horatio Sanz and Brian Posehn).
The second segment is all set-up for the series, introducing what will prove to be the crux of the season, the Mandalorian's next bounty (given to him by Carl Weathers) and the people tasking him with the job (led by Werner Herzog). We also are fed some of the Mandalorian's back story, and a micro-dive into the current status of the Mandalorian peoples.
 |
| This is Gina Carano as Cara Dune... we haven't seen her yet in the show |
The final act finds the Mandalorian teaming up with an IG-series hunter droid (the kind first seen in Empire Strikes Back as part of Vader's bounty hunter team, but never seen mobile and certainly never seen in action, at least not in live action) taking on the very large crew of adversaries who are holding his bounty. This leads to an insane shootout, done in a manner that would only make sense for Star Wars.
This first episode reeks of Star Wars, and while there's plenty of fan service, it's not nudging fan service, but rather building upon things the fans already know and enrichening them within the galaxy far, far away. They're not just visual gags, they add something. This as well is one of our first looks at the galaxy post-Return of the Jedi, pre-The Force Awakens which makes it's fairly unfamilar ground for most fans as well. It establishes the Mandalorian as a respected hunter and as a member of a respected hunting society. It lays a lot of ground work in a surprisingly short amount of time.
The second episode hits hard on the Lone Wolf and Cub vibe that the first episode only hints at with the Mandalorian and his bounty wandering through the desert on the way back to his ship, seemingly having to get through a gauntlet of setbacks and adversaries. Having just established the Mandalorian's competence last episode, Favreau starts writing in some specific traits in this character, namely his short temper and his never-give-up attitude. He's a scrapper, no matter how much he gets knocked down (and he gets knocked down a lot), he's going to get back up again. He doesn't fear the odds and he'll stare down anything.
This episode find the creators really playing with their toys, with the Mandalorian encountering Jawas (familiar from the original Star Wars film, "A New Hope"), and exploring their "sand crawler", both as he climbs the fortress like exterior (with allusions to Return of the Jedi, Raiders of the Lost Arc and even the Adam West Batman series) and later gets a ride inside. Star Wars has always been a mix of sci-fi, fantasy and monster movie and here the Mandalorian also must face a great beast, and for all the lumps he took against the Jawas, it's doubled with the mudhorn he faces. This episode establishes him as the flawed bruiser protagonist in the Indiana Jones/John McClaine vein, which makes him more compelling than indestructible and super-competent heroes we seem to be getting more and more.
The third episode sees delivery of the bounty, but also the Mandalorian's conscience getting the better of him. Without spoiling too much (as if it's not everywhere on the internet already), the bounty was a child and the Mandalorian's past as an orphan ("foundling") obviously gives him a sense of connection to it. There's a deepening investment in the mythos of Mandalorians here. We've seen them explored in The Clone Wars and Rebels cartoons in the past, but this series puts them in a much different place than they were in the past, as refugees, clinging even harder to past traditions. The Mandalorian's guilt overrides him, and he mounts a one-man rescue mission which triggers a sundown showdown with too many bounty hunters to count them all. Again, the Mandalorian finds himself entering a situation that he obviously has no way out of, no hope in succeeding, and yet, there always seems to be a way.
The show is exciting, the story is parsed out slowly, as is character development. It's action heavy, but it also lets its moments breathe, again something that modern cinema doesn't seem to have much time for. It's incredibly dependent upon its score, provided by Ludwig Goransson. With spaghetti westerns in mind, there's obviously a note of Ennio Morricone, which Goransson likes to incorporate with pulsating ambient rhytms and electronic tones, layering in orchestral strings and horns. The dives into the orchestral are probably the weakest moments of the show, at times feeling like knock-off Star Wars from the 80's, but those are scant moments. The score comes alive during the action, sometimes working with noise and sound textures that make it hard to distinguish between the soundtrack and sound effects. There are moments, like when fighting the mudhorn, you have to ask whether that's the score or the noise the mudhorn makes, or is that the sound of the ship's engines or the score. It adds exquisite depth. All of this together, pacing, influence, score, it shares the same sensibilities as Samurai Jack, one of the premiere animated series of all time, but it's a live action show, which, again, seems absolutely unreal, but here it is, finally here.
The only question left is when to we get to marathon this on the big screen?
No comments:
Post a Comment