I love television. I've spent my entire adult life writing about it. I just launched a podcast whose title is literally TV Is Good. I think the medium at its best has no need to be treated as inferior to movies, books, opera, or any other artform.
I feel the need to say this upfront, so you understand that when I say that The Mandalorian and Grogu plays like a really long episode of television, it's not meant as a snide put-down of the film, but as an acknowledgment that the needs of movies and TV are different from one another. I've been raging forever at the plague of the "10-hour movie," where a screenwriter with no training or interest in television expands an unsold feature film script into something bloated and shapeless. This movie, though it has its charms, is the inverse of that, playing like a two-part episode of The Mandalorian that got a big budget and a long running time.
Alan Sepinwall
I've spent the past few weeks writing about TV shows adapted from movies, and movies adapted from TV shows. Next week, I'll write about movies like this one, which are continuations of TV shows, with the same actors reprising their roles. When the latter group works, it's usually because real thought is given to what you can do with a group of characters on the big screen that you can't do on the smaller one.