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Tag: star wars

  • 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! ↩︎
  • Star Wars: The Empire Strikes Back (Parker Brothers, 1982)

    Star Wars: The Empire Strikes Back (Parker Brothers, 1982)

    Developed/Published by: Parker Brothers
    Released: 7/1982
    Completed: 21/04/2023
    Completion: Got a high score of 1216 on easiest, but also played it in smart bombs/solid walker modes. I could do better!
    Trophies / Achievements: n/a 

    As a hardcore follower of everything I’ve been up to, I’m sure you already know I’ve been working my way through Llamasoft: The Jeff Minter Story, but what you won’t know, probably, is that when I reached Attack of the Mutant Camels I had a minor crisis: do I go on and play it without the foreknowledge of The Empire Strikes Back for Atari 2600, or do I go back and play that, even though it’s jumping several years on from where I’ve got in the Atari 2600 catalogue? But today is also the last day to pre-order a physical copy of exp. 2601, so writing about another Atari 2600 is almost promotional.

    It gets me started on playing through all the Star Wars games chronologically, too, because it’s, surprisingly, the very first licensed Star Wars game. You’d probably think that would be Star Wars in the arcade (the very first arcade game I ever played, fact fans!) what with it being based on the first movie and everything, but nope, it’s this, released over a year earlier but still two years after The Empire Strikes Back. It’s unclear if the decision to go with The Empire Strikes Back was an attempt to catch the (two year old) zeitgeist or was design led–there’s an interesting contemporary interview with the designer Sam Kjellman and programmer Rex Bradford in the January 1983 issue of Electronic Fun with Computers and Games where Kjellman says “we considered the Death Star scene in the first movie” but there’s not much to make of it either way (there’s a great paper prototype image in the article, though.) And weirdly… Atari’s arcade Star Wars would be released the same month as Return of the Jedi in cinemas!

    The Empire Strikes Back is a post-Defender game–one of the earliest, in fact, to not simply be a direct clone, following really only Choplifter on Apple II (Chopper Command, ironically also helicopter based but a “true” Defender clone predates it on the Atari 2600, though). Using the Battle of Hoth as its setting, the player controls a snowspeeder and is attempting to defend Echo Base from the approaching AT-AT Walkers, with a game over if they manage to make it to the base (which unfortunately isn’t marked in any way other than it is, I guess, just off to the right somewhere.) Unlike the movie, however, where AT-ATs are famously impervious to the snowspeeders attacks, here you are stuck shooting them to death, with each taking 48 shots to die, colour cycling so you know how damaged they are, because you can’t knock them over or anything. In fact, rather hilariously, the manual makes a point of the fact that you can’t shoot their legs, which is probably the one bit of them that would make sense to shoot.

    There are, however, lots of surprising quirks and designerly touches to what would, otherwise, be a fairly straightforward shooter. The game has the usual overblown “32 games” claim that 2600 games basically always did (4 modes in single and two player, with five difficulty levels, basically) but the modes include the ability to make the walkers solid (which actually feels sort of more right, even if it is harder) and to add “smart bombs” which the walkers can fire and which follow you around and you need to shoot to survive (which I can take or leave). Whichever mode you play, walkers occasionally reveal flashing weak points you can shoot to destroy them instantly, which creates this interesting risk-reward as you have to fly around them to try and shoot the weak point in time, putting yourself in danger.

    Most interestingly, however, you can actually repair your snowspeeder by landing it, up to two repairs per life, with your snowspeeder able to take up to five hits. And if you can survive for two minutes without dying, you “use the force” and are invincible for 20 seconds and can then repair your snowspeeder up to two more times. So the game also layers on damage management–you don’t want to be constantly repairing, because you lose precious time and you only get two, so you have to very carefully track how many hits you’ve taken, especially as the walkers get more and more powerful the more you take down. There’s honestly quite a lot going on.

    There is, however, no ending to the assault, as it’s a pure score chase. Released earlier in the 2600’s lifetime it might have been saddled with a time limit (after two minutes and forty-five seconds the rebels escape…) but it’s definitely better this way even if you really don’t get a breather. This fact, however, leads to the rather absurd fact that Video Review magazine enlisted SF author and legendary prick Harlan Ellison to write a review of this despite the fact that he had never played a video game and clearly hated them. Readable in a couple of his essay collections (I borrowed a copy of Sleepless Nights in the Procrustrean Bed from archive.org, which cements how essential its borrowing library is for research) it’s a genuinely rather unhinged screed in which Ellison accidentally implies that he’s had sex with a non-zero number of ten year-olds:

    “No ten-year-old I’ve ever encountered can write Moby Dick, create a Sistine Chapel fresco, or fuck with any degree of expertise.”

    I guess at least he didn’t enjoy it???

    Anyway, he spends most of it whining that you can’t win, referencing the Myth of Sisyphus because, you know, he’s sooo clever. 

    I’m not particularly interested in having an argument with a long-dead self-confessed nonce–in fact I rather enjoy that he was so pleased with his zingers that he wrote a post-script a year later where he crows over the video game crash. And I suspect he forgot all about this by the time he would, hypocritically, declare himself “greatly amused by the prospect of ‘a game that you cannot possibly win’” with Cyberdreams 1995 adaptation of I Have No Mouth and I Must Scream (according to the Digital Antiquarian in a brilliant article as always.) But I will say that Kjellman and Bradford’s take on The Empire Strikes Back is better than it really has any right to be. The controls are far from perfect, and the game struggles massively with the fact that your snowspeeder’s position on screen often makes it hard to react quickly to walkers or their attacks. You can almost see the Llamasoft inspiration in how much the game makes you feel like you’re an annoying fly, buzzing around a quadruped, as you have to carefully “loop” your snowspeeder around in front of or behind the ship trying to maximise your hits (unless you have to suddenly dash for a weak point.) But there’s something there, and you can strategise–the manual recommends a farming strategy where you weaken the front and back walkers so you can have more time destroy the ones in the middle, and while it’s hardly Geometry Wars or anything, there’s a pleasure in attempting it.

    Enough of a pleasure, actually, that I played this for much longer than I expected. For 1982–the year of Dig Dug and Deadline–The Empire Strikes Back ain’t bad! Lighten up, Harlan!!!

    Will I ever play it again? I could be convinced to. I suspect I’d rather play it again than the next Star Wars game chronologically: Star Wars: Jedi Arena.

    Final Thought: Ellison ends his postscript, joyful at the video game crash:

    “At moments like these, I find my reluctant acceptance of the transient nature of the human race ameliorated. Perhaps the cockroaches won’t take over in my lifetime.

    On the other hand, the spirit of James Watt is still with us.” 

    The heck did he have against James Watt???

  • Star Wars Pinball (Zen Studios, 2013)

    Star Wars Pinball (Zen Studios, 2013)

    Developed/Published by: Zen Studios / LucasArts
    Released: February 19th, 2013
    Completed: 25th March, 2014
    Completion: It’s pinball. You can’t actually complete it, so yet again more truthfully: I just stopped playing.
    Trophies / Achievements: 27%

    Pinball is in a wee bit of a renaissance, recently. Not the physical machines (god no) but in video game-o-form, with FarSight Studios more or less kicking the whole thing off with their excellent digital re-creations of classic pinball tables in things like Pinball Hall of Fame and now their ongoing project The Pinball Arcade, which has enough of a following that they’ve managed to run fairly pricey Kickstarters for new tables and otherwise keep up a pretty regular run of new tables.

    So people who like this—admittedly fairly niche—line of game design are well served. What I think has been so important to the whole thing is a little odd, though, considering that it’s something I pretty much hate in every other kind of game. It’s achievements. 

    You see, I don’t actually think it was until I went to the Pinball Hall of Fame in Las Vegas that I ever really understood how to play Pinball. For pretty much my entire life up to that point, every table was an inscrutable jumble of flashing lights. You put in your 50p, and the entire aim of the game was “don’t let it go down the hole in the middle… or those holes down the side, but you can’t really do anything about that.”

    Not to say I didn’t like some tables! I always loved the Data East Star Wars pinball machine (which we’ll probably never see remade, thanks to this) Twilight Zone and so on. But understand them? No. It was only by spending almost an entire day at the Pinball Hall of Fame, working my way up from the most basic tables to the most modern, that I got this gradual understanding. Tables that have one feature up to tables that have a bazillion. Started to be able to pick out what I was trying to do to make points happen. Started to learn what an incredible game design challenge a pinball machine is.

    Not everyone would have this opportunity, and honestly, it still wasn’t enough. And that’s where FarSight stepped in. They added “goals” to every table, which result in achievements. Get the “Standard Goals” and you’ve basically learned the table. Get the “Wizard Goals” and you’re amazing at that table. They’re nice, granular ways to learn the table, always giving you something to aim for other than a high score, and if you’re so good that you’ve got them all, then you’re aiming for some pretty astonishing high scores and the challenge alone should be enough to keep you going. It’s really an incredible way to start to get pinball, and off the back of it I learned to really like what seemed like a confusing yet simultaneously boring table like Black Hole.

    Anyway, Star Wars Pinball is a stand-alone game from Zen Studios, basically FarSight’s only competitor with Zen Pinball. They create their own tables—which are a bit more magical, more Devil’s Crush video game pinball, than strictly realistic—and they have no fucking idea how to use achievements to teach the tables or give players an interesting challenge/range of goals. There’s three per table, every one (bar one, a Yoda-based bonus on the Empire Strikes Back table) is insanely hard to do unless you are amazing; in fact the Boba Fett table’s goals are more or less “do everything on the table” and one of the Clone Wars (spit) table’s is “do this one thing flawlessly three times in a row, NO MISTAKES.”

    It’s garbage. 

    Will I ever play it again? No.

    Final Thought: What if you don’t want goals, you just want to score points on pinball tables? The tables are ok, I’d actually say they’re overcomplicated by all the video game stuff. And you are going to get SO sick of the theme. The same quotes from the movies, over and over and over again. Barf.