I finally watched The Mandalorian and Grogu, and it wasn't that bad. It really wasn't. In fact, and I'm as surprised to be typing this as you are to be reading it, it is comfortably the most visually impressive Star Wars film I have ever sat through, and probably the best Star Wars movie in a very long time. Granted, that's a bar which has been lying on the floor for the better part of a decade, but a bar is a bar and this one clears it.

And yet.

And yet I spent a not inconsiderable portion of the running time thinking this would be a better film if Pedro Pascal wasn't in it. Now, I have nothing against Pedro Pascal. He's a perfectly fine actor who has been in a great many things. But much as he was miscast in The Fantastic Four, he is miscast here, and the proof is in the pudding: the moment he takes the helmet off is the single worst moment in the movie. That is not how this is supposed to work. Two hours of a faceless bounty hunter is meant to build towards the reveal being a payoff, not a letdown. The snake creatures he fights, incidentally, look as though they've wandered in from Dark Souls, and I mean that entirely as a compliment. They're the best thing in it.

Here's my problem with Mandalorians generally, and bear with me, because this is a digression but it's a relevant one. Back in the 1980s, West End Games published the Star Wars roleplaying game, and the guidance handed down from Lucasfilm was essentially: no Mandalorians, no Old Republic, no Clone Wars. These weren't hard rules. They were guidelines, Lucasfilm politely asking people not to bolt extra lore onto the universe. Fine. But if you are going to ignore that guidance, and evidently everyone has, you could at least have come up with something better than this. Boba Fett was a cool toy. That's it. That's the whole of it. He had a jetpack and he fell in a hole. And now an entire warrior culture has been reverse-engineered from his outfit. The Mandalorians deserved better.

Then there's Grogu. Baby Yoda. He made me smile, of course he did, he was designed by very expensive people to make me smile. But after two hours the smile starts to set, and the film tips over into self-parody. What I wanted, what would have lifted this from "not bad" to "actually rather good", is some genuine character development. Let him speak at the end. He's in his fifties, for heaven's sake. Yes, Yoda was ancient at 900 and we know this species doesn't rush anything, but Grogu can pilot a spaceship and pull off feats considerably more advanced than saying his first words. Perhaps he's non-verbal. Perhaps he communicates telepathically with other Force users. Either would be interesting. Either would be a choice. The film makes neither.

So what is it? It's a TV movie. A very handsome, very expensive TV movie that has wandered into a cinema by mistake. Kids will love it, and I don't say that dismissively; kids loving a Star Wars film is the entire point of Star Wars films. It's just that the rest of us are left admiring the scenery while waiting for something to happen behind the helmet.

Not bad. Not that bad at all. But not the way, either.