The Mandalorian, Disney+, episode 1 review: Star Wars meets Sergio Leone in a gritty, ridiculously fun scene-setter
Warning: contains spoilers
Unless you’ve spent the past year frozen in carbonite, you’ll be aware of Disney’s ambitions to wrest the streaming television sceptre from Netflix.
Its Disney+ service has now debuted in Europe and the UK. It's chiefly a depository for Disney's vast back catalogue, Marvel, Pixar and Star Wars movies and Simpson episodes, with a few big-budget originals as an added bonus.
Pride of place in the launch schedule goes to The Mandalorian, the first live action Star Wars television series and a blockbuster-in-waiting that aims to do for light-sabres and rubber-faced aliens what Game of Thrones did for dragons and over-sexed wizards.
As any Star Wars fan will tell you, Mandalorians are an order of intergalactic bounty hunters. They’re instantly recognisable from their stylish swooping helmets and mediocre conversational skills. To date, the most famous was Boba Fett, last seen (chronologically at least) being eaten alive by a giant space-worm in Return of the Jedi.
He is, however, likely to be usurped in the affections of Force fanatics by the titular “Mandalorian”, portrayed - we are assured - by Game of Thrones/Narcos star Pedro Pascal. (He never removes his helmet in the opening instalment so it could be Noel Edmonds under there for all we know.)
It’s hard to discuss the Mandalorian without touching on Disney’s grand ambition to use it as a battering ram to break Netflix’s stronghold on streaming. In contrast to its binge-watch rival, the eight-part series will be released weekly.
That is presumably to build buzz – the one aspect of modern TV fandom that eludes Netflix, owing to its insistence on dropping an entire season at once (so that we burn through it in a weekend and then move on to the next thing).
At just 39 minutes the pilot is clearly intended as appetite-whetter. It finishes on a great cliff hanger as The Mandalorian discovers that the “50 year-old” target he has been paid an Emperor’s ransom to kill is actually a cute baby version of Jedi sorcerer Yoda. Is it the Yoda, reincarnated? Or a distant relative perhaps?
We don’t know as the episode fades more or less immediately to black. Show runner Jon Favreau knows a lot about hooking an audience, as the director of the original Iron Man and of Disney’s Lion King remake. He works his magic astutely here. When the action cut and the credits rolled I raised my arms and screamed "nooooo…", like Darth Vader at the end of Revenge of the Sith.
A data dump for Star Wars nerds: The Mandalorian is set between the fall of the original (and best) Galactic Empire at the end of Return of the Jedi and the rise of the fake empire First Order in Disney’s original reboot movie, The Force Awakens. As the audience would demand, winks and callbacks abound.
These include a bounty droid straight from the Empire Strikes Back, a Return of the Jedi Kowakian monkey-lizard roasting on a spit and a junior, ice-bound version of the Exogorth that swallow the Millennium Falcon when Han Solo and Princess Leia were on the run from the Empire.
Amid the fan service, there is plot too. The Mandalorian – we do not yet know his name – is hired to track down Baby Yoda by a mysterious baddie played by Werner Herzog. “The Client” hangs about with trigger-happy stormtroopers and, with the Empire vanquished, craves a return to “the natural order of thing”. A hint, perhaps, that we have meet the founding father of the First Order?
If Werner Herzog playing a proto-Darth Vader in a Star Wars TV series bankrolled by Disney feels strange – it would have sounded completely bonkers decade ago – then rest assured The Mandalorian quickly ups the ante. Carl Weathers, aka the original Apollo Creed, is the Mandalorian’s paymaster.
Nick Nolte pops up as a porcine alien who teaches The Mandalorian to clop about on an alien steed that is 10 per cent dinosaur, 90 per cent snot blob (for the record, Nolte portrays an Ugnaught moisture farmer). Later we meet IG-11, the aforementioned bounty droid, voiced by Thor: Ragnorak director Taika Waititi, whose exchanges with The Mandalorian during a fire fight at the complex where Baby Yoda is held are hilarious.
Elsewhere, Favreau and episode director Dave Filoni blatantly call back to old Westerns. The action kicks off with a glorified salon shoot-out; throughout the staccato dialogue is patterned less on George Lucas than Sergio Leone, an impression heightened by the Morricone-esque music cues
It isn’t perfect and at moments even feels slightly shabby, a $120 million season budget notwithstanding. Some of the sets exude the lived-in grittiness of the best of the new Star Wars movies, Rogue One. But in places – such as when Pascal’s character consults with the head of his bounty hunter order – everything has the slightly wobbly quality of Doctor Who in its penny pinching years.
Not that this detracts from the charm of a series that starts in relatively low key fashion but seems certain to leave everyone, and not just Star Wars ultra-diehards, wanting more.