I'm a little over halfway (I think) into The Mandalorian's short first season. Something of a flagship release for Disney Plus, you can tell that cash was poured into this show by the truckload, boasting artistic direction and cinematography that rivals the massive-budgeted films (though it's probably helped by not having quite as many massive space battles, given the smaller scale.)
The show has been pretty universally popular, despite how polarizing the sequel trilogy was. Why is that?
My sense is that it's because it taps into something deep, elemental, and mythic about what makes Star Wars appealing in the first place.
We've become accustomed to twisty, complex plots, particularly given the influence of J.J. Abrams, who certainly had other claims to fame before it, but is probably became really prominent in Hollywood after creating Lost, a show that was famous for its, well, complex and convoluted plot (I'd note, however, that the show was really more the product of Carlton Cuse and Damon Lindelof's leadership, and it's been really interesting to see how Lindelof in particular seems to have learned a lot of lessons from that project, delivering much more satisfying conclusions in The Leftovers - which I haven't seen all of - and the Watchmen miniseries - which I have.)
Lucas himself wrote far more complicated stories with the Star Wars prequels, and, at the risk of beating a dead horse, the complications did not really ring satisfying the way the original movies did.
This all leads to a very difficult question: What is Star Wars?
There are a lot of answers to that: a blockbuster franchise made to sell toys, a distillation of various global cultural influences into an American melting pot of a mythos, an examination of heroism and villainy, a rallying cry to make baby boomers feel better about themselves after the terrible trauma of Vietnam (the war itself or the fact we lost, depending on who you ask,) or Lucas' Tarantino-esque desire to remake his favorite movies all at once.
Star Wars ran away with our imaginations, and thousands of artists and creators have contributed to the broad canon of this fictional universe. That means that yes, every single weird-looking alien in the Mos Eisely cantina scene from the original movie has a name and some sort of backstory.
And it also means that a bit part - Boba Fett, the bounty hunter from Empire Strikes Back and a bit of Return of the Jedi - has had an entire culture around him invented and detailed, entirely based on the iconic design of his badass armor.
I've often semi-joked that the fantasy genre is for audiences who like exposition. I mean, which nerds among us didn't get chills up their spines when we first saw the Fellowship of the Ring and heard Cate Blanchette detailing the history of the creation of the One Ring? Usually, the rule for writing is to try to make exposition invisible - you need people to know the facts so they can understand what's going on, but you want to show, rather than telling. But fantasy is a genre where you can often get away with telling, usually because the exposition is giving you such unusual, otherworldly information that the very idea of it is interesting in and of itself.
But, if you can do that subtly, without calling attention to your exposition with, say, a giant scrolling wall of text at the beginning of your movie, and still get across the big fantasy ideas, you might be onto something huge.
Indeed, despite starting with a scrolling wall of text, the first movie's very first shot is a fantastic example of showing rather than telling. We see a spaceship rush by, lasers blasting back at whatever is pursuing it. And then we see the tip of the ship that's chasing it. And then more of it. And more. And more. And more. There's a principle in comedy where you can do a running gag long enough where it's funny, then stops being funny, and then becomes funny again. This effectively does the opposite. The Star Destroyer is huge, and then it's comically huge, and then it's menacingly huge before we finally see the end of it. And with that, you get a sense of the oppressive scale of this galactic empire, and you're immediately on board with the rebellion seconds into the movie proper.
The first movie is also intriguing to watch in a vacuum, pretending you don't know everything you found out in the subsequent ten films. Things are left extremely vague - what does the rebellion look like? What came before the empire? Hell, who even leads the empire? (We don't see the Emperor until the second movie, and until it got special-editioned, we didn't even have Iam McDiarmid in the role until Jedi.) Given what we find out later on, it's kind of shocking how much Grand Moff Tarkin seems to be Vader's superior, which expanded universe sources have had to work had to justify.
The movies have tended to focus in on the Skywalker saga - following Anakin and Luke, and then Ben. And while you can bet your ass I wanted Jedi force powers as a kid (ok, honestly, I'd still like them) one element of the series that always seemed to resonate was the dangerous outskirts of the Galaxy. Yes, there's a whole futuristic civilization there, but we're introduced to Luke on Tatooine, which is portrayed as some mixture of small-town America, the Wild West, and Arrakis from Dune. The lawless frontier, while seemingly not that important to the larger-scale conflicts with the fascistic Empire and its remnants later on, is also where Star Wars seems to be most comfortable.
So, the Mandalorian chooses that as its setting.
And, borrowing a tone and storytelling style from the Spaghetti westerns that inspired much of Star Wars' western feel (particularly adapting the scumminess of it into Star Wars' "used future" aesthetic,) the Mandalorian is far more concerned with showing than telling. Indeed, the main characters, at least early in the season, don't have names. There's the eponymous Mandalorian (Mando for short) and The Child. One of the core members of the cast is a Henson-made puppet who never speaks. And Mando is fairly terse himself.
What that allows is for storytelling that is primarily visual, or at least non-verbal. And I don't know what it is, but for some reason that style of cinematic storytelling is always very impressive.
Indeed, it makes me think of a number of critically-acclaimed action movies that have come out within the last ten years. Mad Max Fury Road, as an example. That's a story in which you could watch it without knowing english and still probably get it.
Now, where I'm at, the show is starting to hint at deeper and more complex plots, but for the time being, it's rather simple - bounty hunter has a moral crisis and finds himself on the run from his colleagues. But the show is just a pleasure to look at, with a fantastic score aping Ennio Morricone by Ludwig Gorranson. I almost worry about the show getting bogged down in complicated and convoluted character dynamics as it goes on, because right now it's so pure.
And that, to me, is what makes Star Wars so resonant. I've sometimes thought that Americans are always looking for the most iconic, mythic, and quintessential expression of something in our art, and Star Wars hits something very close to that core. It's as if we're trying to best represent the actual shadow puppet in Plato's cave.
Even though its premise and plot are quite different from other Star Wars stories we've seen, the Mandalorian (so far) seems to be resonating with that purity that the original movie so effectively achieved.
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