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Tag: 2026

  • The Mandalorian And Grogu (2025)

    The Mandalorian And Grogu (2025)

    The Mandalorian And Grogu is a movie that seems to be at cross-purposes with itself. If you look at the marketing’s styling and the source material (by which I mean the show, rather than Star Wars writ large) it seems obvious that The Mandalorian And Grogu is not supposed to be a huge, tentpole piece of summer cinema; it’s really meant to be a charming throwback to the era of film serials (indeed the very film serials that Star Wars was inspired by the first place). 

    Sure, maybe it’s a bit more like the later period of features like the Zatoichi series or (if you’re feeling especially uncharitable) luchador films, but the idea is: you’re going to show up to see a movie starring “those characters you like” have a sort of inconsequential and probably formulaic adventure, but because you saw “those characters that you like” doing the stuff you like seeing them do, you’ve had a good time.

    It’s not a horrible idea, except for the fact that they made a huge deal about seeing The Mandalorian And Grogu in IMAX, the film cost $165 million dollars, and serials succeeded because the cinema was the only place you could see those characters that you like and we’re all already accustomed to seeing the Mandalorian and Grogu have low-stakes adventures at home. There better be something pretty special if I’m going out and paying the ridiculous IMAX surcharge to see it!!!

    There is not.

    I’ll say up front: I wanted to like this. A major issue with The Mandalorian as a show is the seeming terror Disney has had in, you know, committing to anything featuring major character development post The Last Jedi. Were you moved when Mando delivered Baby Yoda to Luke Skywalker1? Well, Disney definitely felt that you couldn’t bear to see them apart so desperately that they had to reunite them immediately… in a spin-off! I’m not entirely sure why, but I think I imagined that if they were making a film, it was because they really had something they wanted to make. They had some clear, concrete idea at hand.

    They did not.

    I’m not sure I’ve seen a film as devoid of a thesis as this one in a long time. If you’re really reaching, it’s something about fatherhood? Rotta “Stinky” The Hutt bangs on about his bad father enough. Maybe it’s about children growing and coming into their own? Maybe? There’s no reason for me to be reaching this hard, no one making The Mandalorian And Grogu did. It’s incredibly clear no one was originally thinking “oh let’s make a charming throwback to film serials.” They were thinking “we need to get something, anything in theatres to keep the franchise warm.” A transparent act of desperation, and it’s all over the movie. Stinky’s second speech about his dad repeats so fully what he said in his first that it’s one of the clearest signifiers that this was obviously originally a season of TV, reading as it does “well, you probably forgot what he said last week.”

    It’s not that there aren’t fun concepts here. I, on paper, like that the first proper chunk of the film is going for a noir, detective story vibe, but it ends with the (masked) Mando being knocked out with poison gas. Uh, ok. Later, I like the idea of Grogu having to come into his own. But that ends with him being given a magic potion by a random character. Very meaningful!

    Every beat that could lead somewhere meaningful is frittered away to nothing, and instead we get the exact thing that killed things like Solo: a relentless urge to show us Star Wars shit we recognize. Or are supposed to recognize. A guy from Star Wars Rebels is there and I guess we’re supposed to be losing our minds, but I don’t really know who that is. An arena battle happens… and it’s just like the holochess from the Millennium Falcon. I know what that is, but I don’t care, and I don’t need to see it!!!2

    This shit sucks, man. Here’s something that actually is cool that they did: getting Phill Tippett, who worked on the original holochess sequence, to create Chekhov’s cool new robots for a later stop-motion sequence. Now that I like!

    Except for the fact that Jon Favreau can’t shoot action for shit. In every sequence I basically had no idea what was going on. It’s a neat idea to try and do a Hong Kong-action style bar fight, for example, but the only part of the action I could follow was noticing when dudes tried to punch a guy wearing a Mandalorian helmet in the face. That’s going to hurt! It doesn’t make sense even in the moment!

    Every action sequence from the opening sequence also suffers from another major issue, which I call the “this seems very dangerous for a baby to be at” problem. The solution they came up with was “just make the baby disappear for most of the shots” and I gotta say… It doesn’t work.

    If TV didn’t exist, they were banging one of these out every year or six months, and going to the cinema cost a nickel, then sure, this would be fine. But in 2026 this is symbolic of the fact that they just gotta put Star Wars to bed. Make me want to revisit this world. Before The Mandalorian And Grogu was over I was desperate to leave it.

    Follow Mathew on Letterboxd.

    1. Sorry, a horrifying digital cadaver, but close enough. ↩︎
    2. I did like when they showed a picture of Clone Wars-era Stinky. Good joke! ↩︎
  • Good Luck, Have Fun, Don’t Die (2026)

    Good Luck, Have Fun, Don’t Die (2026)

    In Good Luck, Have Fun, Don’t Die, Sam Rockwell stars as a man who claims to be from a future where AI has wiped out half the population and the other half live unable to escape their personal “perfect” AI realities. He takes a NORMS hostage with the belief that some combination of the restaurant’s diners will be able to reach the creator of the AI so they can install safeguards before it’s too late (the film, intelligently, accepts the inevitability of AI and has a sensibly scaled goal as a result.)

    Good Luck, Have Fun, Don’t Die–immediately–takes aim at our modern affliction: that we’re all looking at our phones, all the time. The satire feels a bit broad, with entire classrooms of students all just trapped in an endless scroll, and I’ve seen more than one sneery “ok boomer” take on this. 

    But.

    Last year I worked background for a while on a TV show, which is a job I rather like; there’s a lot of downtime where you can do things like finishing editing that zine you were working on. I haven’t done it in years, and the one huge thing I noticed was that while there was still a small contingent of people who brought books, or wanted to chat with whoever they were sitting next to (whether they wanted to or not…) the largest cohort of people—who were of all ages—just looked at their phone. Now, I look at my phone a lot too, but I was taken by how the majority of them used it: on Instagram or Tiktok, scrolling at high speed, endlessly. Like they weren’t actually seeing anything. Just scrolling, scrolling, scrolling. For hours.

    It looked exactly like it does in Good Luck, Have Fun, Don’t Die.

    Serendipitously, I’ve been reading the recent reprint of Natasha Dow Schüll’s Addiction by Design: Machine Gambling in Las Vegas, which details the concept of the “machine zone.”

    From the book’s description:

    “Natasha Dow Schüll shows how the mechanical rhythm of electronic gambling pulls players into a trancelike state they call the ‘machine zone,’  in which daily worries, social demands, and even bodily awareness fade away. Once in the zone, gambling addicts play not to win but simply to keep playing, for as long as possible—even at the cost of physical and economic exhaustion.”

    Social media, as it currently exists, has been designed in exactly the same way slot machines have. It has been continuously and intentionally evolved, using every trick gambling designers have come up with (and more) to make sure people pick up their phone at the merest hint of boredom or discomfort. And now AI is here to make the skinner box even more personalised than the algorithm has already managed, with the ultimate goal that, eventually, you don’t put the phone down. Ever. 

    A perfect smooth-brained populace, circuses so good they don’t realise there’s no bread.

    You might think I’m being histrionic, but addiction is a disease, and we now live in a climate of a designed disease. We’re all addicted—to varying levels—and we need to start treating it the same way we should be treating any addiction: by being hard on those who peddle the addictive substance, and treating the addicted with care and respect rather than punitive measures. And we need to wake up to this now, before it’s too late.

    Good Luck, Have Fun, Don’t Die get it.

    It feels absurd for a Gore Verbinski movie to be the first thing I’ve seen outside of Adam Curtis documentaries to get it, but welcome to the resistance, I guess?

    Don’t get me wrong. This is a big, fun, silly film. It’s trying to make its point by being entertaining, not preachy, and here’s none of the nihilism of a Black Mirror. It embarrasses Edgar Wright’s The Running Man, a movie that seems like it’s trying to say something angry and real about the world we live in and manages to say nothing at all. And not only is it not a sequel, remake, or part of a franchise, it’s also not “new IP.” It’s just a movie, which is almost the most subversive thing about it.

    It’s a little scattershot, could be a little shorter, Asim Chaudry’s accent is… not good. But it refuses to fall into some traps that might blunt it (there’s no “AI can be good if we just use it correctly” here) and frankly, I’d follow Sam Rockwell anywhere.

    There’s not a lot of movies where I think “I hope a lot of people see this” but this is one of them, not least because it’s just a straight up enjoyable film. I admit I wrote this to post online, on a social network, but Good Luck, Have Fun, Don’t Die chimed so much with my own experience that I now notice, just a little more, when I pick up my phone for what feels like no reason, and to then try and interrogate it.

    Sure, the movie might only be mildly illuminating on the dangers of our encroaching, all encompassing “machine zone”, but sometimes a little extra light on the problem is all you need to actually see it.

    Follow Mathew on Letterboxd.