Adapted from the Twitter feed, Friday night, June 5, 2020. Posted Saturday night, June 20.
The Mandalorian searching for the good, the bad, and the ugly: The imagery is an homage to the last scene of “The Searchers” but pose isn’t Wayne, it’s Eastwood, with the cape taking the place of a serape. From the opening scene of the first episode of the new TV Western...I mean Star Wars TV series, "The Mandalorian".
[We finished “The Mandalorian” last night. Still sorting out my thoughts on the last two episodes and the series as a whole. In the meantime, here are my notes on the first three episodes...]
Friday night, June 5, 2020: Started "The Mandalorian" tonight. In the first 5 minutes of the first episode there's more pure storytelling, more visual artistry, more suspense, more drama, more real humor, and more attention to character than there is anywhere in the whole 2 hrs and 22 minutes of "The Rise of Skywalker". And then it keeps getting better.
Ok, so maybe it's truer in spirit to "The Wild Bunch" than to "Star Wars".
The original “Star Wars”, the movie now known as “Episode IV: A New Hope”, was a joyfully gee-whiz conglomeration of the kinds of movies George Lucas loved as a movie-addicted kid: Flash Gordon serials, swashbucklers, war movies, fantasy adventures like “The Thief of Baghdad” and “The 7th Voyage of Sinbad”, “Jason and the Argonauts” and the Steve Reeve Hercules movies, 1950s science fiction, and, of course, Westerns. Han Solo was written as if he was going to be played by the John Wayne of “Angel and the Badman”.
"Solo" the movie failed on many levels and one of the reasons was that the filmmakers didn't understand what kind of movie Han came out of so they didn’t know what kind of movie to make. It’s hard to tell what they were thinking, considering its troubled production, but as far as I can make out, the only movies on anyone’s minds were the other Star Wars movies, and most of the creative effort went into making it match up visually, tonally, and narratively with those. They were intent on making a “Star War Story”, a sequel to the prequels that nobody needed. What they should have made was a good old-fashioned Western.
The question, then, would have been would the producers have known what kind of Western they needed to make?
Series creator Jon Favreau knows exactly what kind of western he wants to make---and make fun of.
“Solo” might have worked as an episodic TV series like “The Mandalorian”, although I think “The Mandalorian” is better than a Han Solo series would have been because it's freed from having to be tied to the original movies. It can go its own way...MAKE its own way.
And "The Mandalorian" can be darker and more revisionist than a “Solo” series because the Mandalorian is Eastwood and Han is Wayne so "Solo" the TV series would have had to be at base a comedy.
Favreau and his creative team of writers, directors, actors, and designers have managed something “Solo” didn’t and J.J. Abrams doesn’t seem to have even considered doing in “The Rise of Skywalker”: come up with original, personable, particular secondary characters, good guys, bad guys, and ugly guys. My favorites so far are the bounty hunter guild’s leader Greef Karga, played by Carl Weathers as the kind of deadly but good-humored and fair-minded (after his own fashion) villain whose eventual comeuppance you’re going to be sorry to see and hope the writers are able to put off until the final episode, and the solitary rancher, voiced by a grimly earnest Nick Nolte, who comes to the Madalorian’s moral and material aid
The rancher’s name, by the way, is Kuiil, pronounced Quill, as in Peter. I’m going to pretend Favreau isn’t winking at “Guardians of the Galaxy”. If he is, he’s earned the right to. It’s Favreau, as the director of the first “Iron Man”, who set the Avengers movies off on the right cinematic path
We watched the first three episodes tonight. I'm sure I'll have a lot more to say when we watch the next three next week. But for now, as Kuiil, who is nothing like Star-Lord, is wont to say when he’s decided a conversation has reached its conclusion....
I have spoken.
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Read the prequel: Chewie and Han together again for the first time.
"The Mandalorian" is available to stream at Disney+.
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