After a seven year hiatus from cinemas following Star Wars: Rise of Skywalker, it is interesting to see how little hype there seems to be around this movie. Box office followers were certain a month ago that this newest movie would have one of the lowest launches in franchise history. Reports seem to confirm that trend. But box office discussion is as empty and bad faith as the dreaded Dead Game discourse, a meaningless way of discussing a work of art. More substantive are the review scores: 63% at time of writing is technically a pass on Rotten Tomatoes. However, I find critics have been curving the grade for years now to avoid audience backlash. A 63% is probably in reality less than 50%. The audience score at 89% means even the fandom army are not that excited to fight for this one. (Michael, for example, with its hardcore MJ stans, sits at 97%, and that movie has a much worse critic score.) It is hard to say any movie in 2026 will be able to build the kind of excitement that even mid-tier Marvel productions could pull just ten years ago, but The Baby Yoda Movie has gained this reputation online of being a movie nobody is that interested in. That's become the narrative.
Even I was pretty sure I would hate this, and I was there on Friday night, with a Baby Yoda doll in hand, a dapper Baby Yoda doll wearing a bow tie (see picture). I had people on both sides of me with Baby Yoda dolls. So on second thought, this is one of the only movies this year that feels worthy of being an event. 2026 has been a great year for movies so far, but nobody was making Mother Mary into a big family outting. And The Baby Yoda Movie on that scale feels big, big enough I'm bothering to review it. Even if a lot of the space online feels annoyed and frustrated that they have to deal with Star Wars again.
Luckily, if expectations are low, the ambitions met them. LucasFilm is not out here promoting a Rise of Skywalker or anything, no triumphant return to glory. The Baby Yoda Movie feels like the studio slowly tip-toeing back into theaters with the kinds of movies they wanted to make: small, annual events with low stakes about little corners of the greater Galaxy. The fate of the universe is not threatened. In fact, neither is the major duo listed in the Government Name of this movie. The Baby Yoda Movie is a big episode of the TV Show, The Mandalorian. That's it. It is not the series finale, it's not even a season finale, it is not the most important part of either one of these character's lives. You don't need to have seen any of the Star Wars from before to watch this. And if there's a Baby Yoda 2, don't worry about Baby Yoda 1.
This movie has all the gravitas and drama of Ant-Man 2, possibly the least interesting movie in the entire MCU. It is a couple of adventures on a few planets with a darling little puppet at its center fighting goons with his badass dad. And if you can except a movie that is only that, well... that might not be so bad.
It was eight years ago now that I reviewed Solo, a movie that killed the franchise's MCU-esque ambitions. I said "Solo is plastic in the right ways. It is a pointless good time." It was not a particularly great movie by any standard, it was merely... good enough. The sequel finale, Rise of Skywalker was not out yet, and I was ready to let the entire franchise boil away into slop. I did not want to re-fight the culture war The Last Jedi battles again with the reactionary trolls. Back then you could sum up my feelings as "You want the soul of Star Wars to be about nothing and say nothing? Great, you win, it's nothing now. Congratulations." And boy, oh boy, was Rise of Skywalker exactly the movie they asked for, and it was the movie they deserved. I think of Rise of Skywalker as an avant-garde exercise in franchise immolation now. I'm in awe of its terribleness. It feels unique and special in the worst ways.
But all that baggage of being the dreaded Cornerstone of Western Nerd Civilization is irrelevant to The Baby Yoda Movie, which has even less ambition than Solo. Solo . This movie is just about simulacra of classic Star Wars figures. They are avatars close enough to the sacred without violating the platonic ideal. Baby Yoda is, of course, a chibi version of the great frog sage, and the Mandalorian (Pedro Pascal in a voice-role, the body played by Brendan Wayne and Lateef Crowder) is a cooler Boba Fett. Mando is the unstoppable action figure Fett you think you remember from the Original Trilogy, now cooler, more successful as an action star, and much more chrome. We used to think of 'toyetic' as a negative back when "selling out" was something to be dreaded versus today, when it is the upper limit of ambitions for all creators. (I'll sell out, I'll read an ad for Baby Yoda coloring books or flamethrowers if you want, guys. Gas prices are too high to have moral standards.)
However, who said toys were automatically bad? We love toys. There was a trailer for a Toy Story 5 before The Baby Yoda Movie, so clearly nobody wants to give up on childhood. And sure, the ambitions are low but this movie is not quite about Nothing. There is a small There-There. One foot, one inch tall, to be exact.
I haven't really talked about Baby Yoda itself because, you know, what can you say about it? As an object or a character, he's just a cute baby. I cannot deconstruct much about this device as anything other than pure perfection, a masterful manipulation of our primordial need to nurture and love. It is an extremely successful special effect. Baby Yoda works specifically because he is an effect and not a digital cartoon, he has mass. You can hold him in a way that you cannot hold the other aliens who nearly all just made of computer pixie dust. You see this movie because you want to see him knocking on his bounty hunter dad's helmet or jumping on a bed or eating a fish or playing with a gaggle of little Minions-esque aliens who are also delightful puppets. He's tiny and has to run ten steps for every step of the humans. If I saw a Baby Yoda in real life, I would steal him in broad daylight, go on the run from the authorities, and then raise him as my little freak son.
As I mentioned previously, The Baby Yoda Movie is not in any way a significant slice of either Baby Yoda or his dad's life. We're breaking screenplay rules here. Which would be okay, you can have the star not be the dramatic center. The Disney+ TV show was inspired by old Westerns, often those plots are about a traveling cowboy passing through a story, so the dramatic heft can be carried by other characters. (The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly is really about Tuco, not Clint Eastwood, for example.) And indeed we have a whole plot that our father-son team fall into, involving Hutt family politics. Rotta the Hutt (voiced by Jeremy Allen White) is another toy avatar, this time of Jabba the Hutt. He's a buffer, gladiator version, whose safety is key to the greater sandworm monster crime empire. Unfortunately, Rotta the Hutt really does not undergo a major character arc either. He does not make a major decision, and does not learn much. And the big villains are never that terrifying, mostly they're just boss fights that the hero will obviously win. The stakes are low.
The Baby Yoda Movie has a Bond movie opening adventure sequence where Mando takes down some minor Imperial warlord. We're then given a plot, but that entire first adventure also feels like an irrelevant prologue. It is almost like the movie has not actually started until 75% of the story has passed. Then there's a betrayal that raises the stakes, and we separate the core duo. Now we have a Baby Yoda Movie, not just Baby Yoda Sidequesting.
When we get there, it does make for a gripping twenty minutes where we only follow Baby Yoda. He's a character that does not speak. And it's also a puppet with limited articulation. They could make the facial motions more expressive, but to the filmmaker's credit, they keep the gestures spare. They let the language of cinema tell a story of loneliness and caregiving. This is trusting the audience in ways almost no media does now. I wish the whole Baby Yoda Movie had been just this section, a Little Guy alone in the woods, surviving against the odds, with maybe some big shoot-y action at the end.
You can see a huge disparity between how effective the aliens are when they're practical and when they're entirely CG. Baby Yoda is never not incredible. Then we have an entire Star Wars chess board of creatures in the opening act, who are all digital, and they all look terrible. The arena fight in Episode II from over twenty years ago somehow looks better than this. That's simply a failure of filmmaking: muddy lighting, too many monsters happening at once, it's clutter. Sometimes The Baby Yoda Movie looks great, sometimes it has the equivalent of a half-hearted sex scene in a porn movie. We've gone too long between the excitement, you gotta have a Money Shot here just so nobody gets bored. I'm saying: we need more puppets. Jabba was a puppet and still looks disgusting and iconic. Rotta the Hutt has never been anything but pixels and never looks right.
However, the standards for blockbusting filmmaking are so low now that even having one character be done practically is an immense step up. And that is worth the price of admission. If Baby Yoda did not work, I would not be talking about this movie. There's a reason I never wrote a single word about Ant-Man 2. What could you even say about that movie?
What I'm saying here is that the lift does not need to be as great as we're making it. Just a movie being a movie is its own justification. Yeah, maybe The Baby Yoda Movie is a shrunk down pile of what originally was planned to be The Mandalorian Season 4, and you can probably carve the script up into the "episodes" it was built from. But is that a crime? If you really want to see a wonderful little critter on a giant screen, now is the time. If you want to see something more challenging, well, go see Obsession. It isn't like you're starved for choices here, 2026 has been full of great movies if you're looking for them. Why do we need to justify cuteness for anything other than its own sake?
This is a toy franchise, and the movies themselves are now about toys. You can choose to hate that or you can choose to enjoy what you have. The writer and co-director of this movie is Dave Filloni who is the big guy at LucasFilm now. All Dave seemingly wants to do with Star Wars is show off his collection of wonderful things, his beloved Guys. You can't say he's insincere in loving his Guys: that's why we have Zeb and Embo and several other cameos from his cartoons shows in here. He just likes having them around.
It could be worse. Did you see that live action Moana trailer? Now that's a movie that has truly zero reason to exist.
And yeah, Star Wars could be better. But probably not in the ways that the industrial complex of Star Wars Haters at this point want. Do not listen to any of those people. You are incentivized in every way to hate Star Wars, it is a lot harder to be constructive and imagine better things. The review is basically over, but I'm going to indulge for just a moment:
Star Wars is not boring. And there's a lot left to explore or problematize, just get away from the damn Skywalkers. Think about the flaws of the Jedi order, especially the the manichean Light and Dark split, or the nature of the Force as this spirit leading the Galaxy to seemingly endless cycles of warfare and chaos. If you want profound and disturbing heresies on the Force, read up on Knights of the Old Republic 2 or demand we get a Season 2 of the failed Disney+ show The Acolyte. Besides space wizardry, last year we had Andor Season 2 which used all the goofy toy chest items to be an alarm bell on the nature of creeping fascism and the sacrifice of resistance. Star Wars might be dead in the terms of the most mainstream productions, which seemingly cannot help but reproduce nostalgia, but you can ask for more. Literally a week ago I saw the latest Mobile Suit Gundam movie, Hathaway 2, also about space opera toys from the Seventies, and it was about class warfare, the tyranny of comfortable ultra-rich governments, and leading a revolutionary cell in the Third World. You can do something with nostalgia.
Why did Andor work? Because it is not just Star Wars talking about Star Wars and nothing else. That's the flaw here with the entire Disney era, Filloni or not. You need have to something interesting to say about the world and people in order to have something interesting to say with Star Wars. You need a story you want to tell, not just re-tell George Lucas' trash heap. I don't think we'll ever get a studio to fork over millions to make a movie about the 1212 Sack of Constantinople or the Czechoslovak Legion in 1918 or the failed Jewish Messiah Shabbatai Tzvi in 1666, but maybe if we dress up those stories with stormtroopers and lightsabers, we can heist those tales into theaters. Call me, I'll make your next Star Wars. I'll probably put a giant robot in it too just because.
Everybody would hate my movie and some fan will murder me in the streets. It could very well be the worst Star War movie ever made. But you can do more!
In the real world, you got a cute baby Yoda in theaters right now. He's precious and hungry. Enjoy it.
No comments:
Post a Comment