They took off seven years for this? I guess I hate fun.

For context, I’ve never seen any of the TV series. I understand it’s hugely popular, mostly because of the Grogu character. Sure, whatever. I have not been able to avoid that character due to cultural osmosis. I get that the big eyes work for people. That’s just basic evolutionary psychology. So, the point of the character is just that he is cute? Nothing else? Wow. They built a $165 million movie around that? And this is their big return to the big screen? Wow. That does not sound like a very good plan. Sure, maybe I would get more out of this if I had seen the series, but that should not be a prerequisite.

The story is clumsy. It seems that there just can’t be any kind of character growth here. There is no real arc and the escalation feels very forced. Actually, there’s a point in the story near the end where we should be feeling like the stakes are very high, but instead we only get the cute little puppet scuttling around in the woods doing cutesy little things.

There’s constantly these situations that are supposed to be very big and important, but they just don’t really matter. We just move from one boring action scene to the next. Not much to see at any point. Just a lot of colors and lights as if the movie was made for people with no ability to focus on anything.

At one point this supposedly good guy just let’s something horrific happen. The reason from the writer point of view (not character) is that it’s supposed to be funny. So, what was the point with that? They are just showing that our hero doesn’t really care about anything, but they are also constantly trying to tell us that he is trying to do the right thing. So, when the opportunity to do that presents itself, why does he not take it? It actually kind of seems like fixing that would have been too expensive, so they just leave a situation as it is. Let civilians suffer. Just this one thing makes the movie completely indefensible, but there will be a lot of people defending this…

If these people would just learn that being critical for the right reasons would actually result in better movies. We don’t have to be content with being fed this slop. I’m not accusing them of using AIs, but you can make slop without them. This is that. Just something barely organic, but with no nutritional value.

This is just a bad movie. It’s just completely devoid of any meaning, even though they try to force it. Seven fucking years for this… They actually learned that they shouldn’t be inundating us with content and let the franchise simmer a bit… and then they decided to come out with this? This is just some market-tested, lowest common denominator, visionless shit. This is what happens when you feel you need to do something, but don’t have any real ideas.

And the movie will do well and they’ll learn all the wrong lessons. (Okay, it actually seems like it’s going to do decent, but not great business. I would assume there will be a huge second week drop.)