The Mandalorian

This is a visually stunning, consistently entertaining space-spaghetti-Western serial.

The sets for the show, on which no expense was reportedly spared, have a wonderfully textured, dusty, lived-in quality to them. ... While The Mandalorian’s debut is pretty thin, it’s also got a lot of wide open spaces to expand into.

Left with mostly just his voice to act with, Pascal gives Mando some hints of snarkiness, if not humor; by and large, he comes off as a business-first ballbuster. (And truth be told, no one wants a quippy Mandalorian.) Weathers and Herzog fit comfortably into this world, in their brief intros, and it’d be great to see more of Nolte’s Kuiil.

Where most of the films tie themselves in knots keeping up with the family travails of Skywalkers and Palpatines, The Mandalorian operates in relative solitude. ... Favreau keeps things just the right side of schmaltzy, while also creating a more textured universe than we are used to.

Amid the fan service, there is plot too. .. A series that has started in relatively low key fashion but seems certain to leave everyone, and not just Star Wars ultra-diehards, wanting more.

The Mandalorian offers gorgeous production design, vivid world-building, an adorable baby creature and a hilariously broad performance by far-out filmmaker Werner Herzog in a small but memorable villain role. Though the first three episodes move slowly, the combination of glacial plot development and ample combat gives them a sort of comic-book feel.

Mainly, the charm of “The Mandalorian” is in its relative removal from Resistance-centered adventures bound to frequent reminders of Jedi and light saber battles. Placing the action in the outer reaches of civilization lends more of a spaghetti-Western-meets-ronin-samurai vibe to the narrative, and this feels like a more intriguing and sustainable fuel for the longterm. ... “The Mandalorian” fulfills its overall mission. Our curiosity has been ignited, granting us hope that this expansion of the mythology may be worth our faith. It gave us that tingle, in other words. Let’s see if we’re still feeling it eight weeks from now.

There’s not a lot to say yet except to report the good news that it is very much in keeping with a Star War — visually intriguing, amusingly adventurous and light on its feet, a space-western comfortable with the tropes of cinema culture and common reference points.

While the Mandalorian's lore is doled out just enough to keep things interesting and mysterious, the supporting cast is a little more frustratingly obscured early on in the series. ... What The Mandalorian does exceptionally well is give us a well-tempered bounty hunter with a heart, an antihero who will happily dispatch dozens of armed alien guards and is quick to execute an ally when the situation demands it, but won't mindlessly kill a baby alien just because the bounty demands it.

Every screen shot locks you comfortably into the familiar "Star Wars" canon, but somehow it all feels fresh and new. ... "The Mandalorian" feels like a trip worth taking with them.

Its first hour intrigues with quiet promise.

Happily, the show's brisk, handsomely produced 39-minute premiere is a great deal of fun, giving fans reason to have a good feeling about this.

At this point “The Mandalorian” is, like more than a few franchise films, pretty good. A prototypical space western with a laconic hero in the Clint Eastwood-John Wayne mold (John Ford’s Wayne-and-a-baby film “3 Godfathers” comes to mind), it’s well paced and reasonably clever, with enough style and visual panache to keep your eyes engaged.

A TV show needs relationships; a cast of ciphers and loners too isolated to trust anyone or even give us their names might wear thin fast. The episode’s tone also unfolds rather herky-jerkily, wheeling from light to grim, tragic to weird, in a way that often feels more stilted than natural. But there is already so much to enjoy. The show looks and sounds great, with eerie flutes and electronic strings bestowing both retro and futuristic vibes.

“Fun” is also probably the best word I can apply to the compact (under 40 minutes, which I thought was illegal for often-bloated streaming dramas) Mandalorian premiere. Favreau and Filoni do an effective job introducing us to this corner of the franchise, and to the rough, desperate circumstances of the title character, played by Pedro Pascal. ... At this early stage, it’s Star Wars‘ Greatest Hits mashed up with the most popular clichés of film Westerns.

The show has to justify its existence in a different way than most new series do, at which the first episode does a decent job. Someone who doesn’t care for “Star Wars” likely won’t care for “The Mandalorian,” but the setup is rooted in enough tropes that its story remains accessible enough to anyone who might be interested.

The premiere is still fun and packed with technical marvels that devoted Star Wars fans never could have even fathomed appearing on TV a decade ago. It's just small.

Good enough to keep me watching, forgettable enough that I doubt I’ll want to watch this specific episode again. ... There’s a bit too much whiz-bang editing and overdone production value (they should pull back on the overheated score a bit) but it’s clearly designed to keep young people watching.

It’s long on impressive special effects and alien shootouts, and short on a fresh story line beyond the usual unwitting hero with a mysterious family tree and a destiny that involves saving the universe (or part of it). ... It’s “Star Wars"/Disney right down to its weird sand creatures and blighted outposts, and a safe-but-entertaining start for the media giant’s exploratory mission into a largely untamed universe.

The Mandalorian, which moves along nice and briskly as the Mandalorian is given yet another asset of even greater import to hunt down and capture. It’s so brisk, however, that we don’t get much of a sense of our main character. ... The episode’s ending — which, again, unlike Twitter, I will not spoil here — also leaves you very curious to see what happens next.

Yes, “The Mandalorian’s” pilot episode is a formally sound 39 minutes of television; even with an extra nine minutes, the half-hour series moves with assurance, and looks by most attributes to be a well-polished new piece of the franchise. But for anyone who’s seen enough Marvel movies to grow tired of their formula, or who was irked by how often “The Force Awakens” relies on nostalgia over originality, “The Mandalorian” may evoke different feelings. It’s not sound, it’s predictable. It’s not surprising, it’s calculated.

Crafted around a protagonist designed to be obscure (he never removes his helmet, and even his voice is modulated into bland evenness), there's little in the way of an emotional connection in the first episode. ... A slight twist ending sets up a story that could involve bigger ideas from the film series. And there are a few bright moments, even behind a steel mask, where Pascal makes his equivocal bounty hunter feel more grounded.

If you love watching a bunch of armored space soldiers shooting at each other with blasters, you’ll have nothing to complain about. But—sans history, motivation, or facial expressions—it rings a bit hollow, lacking the achingly human element of the Star Wars universe.

The clash of tones in this first episode felt cheap in both directions, striving for moral justifications of thrilling amorality. The Mandalorian really is Disney’s Boba Fett, a mercenary safe enough for kids.

The Mandalorian is perfectly fine entertainment. But it’s also fundamentally empty entertainment and not a great harbinger for many Disney+ original programs to come.

The impressive production values, however, can’t cover up a relatively skimpy plot. “Chapter 1” of The Mandalorian is a thin piece of set-up stretched over 38 minutes, barely introducing its hero and then dangling a tantalizing twist at the end. ... For a Star Wars nerd looking to fill in some arcane details, it’s a cozy watch; but one episode in, The Mandalorian has yet to prove it can stand on its own.

Its issues hew toward the fundamentals of direction, performance, and dialogue, more problems of basic filmmaking skill than miscalculated vision. Favreau started from a more specific, vivid place than in his jobs for Marvel or on Disney’s wretched Lion King remake. Unlike his nomadic antihero, however, he doesn’t take it much of anywhere.