Jon Favreau directs a big-budget movie with a tidy small-screen consciousness. But that might be what "Star Wars" now is.
Plus IconOwen Gleiberman
Chief Film Critic
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Courtesy of Lucasfilm Back when it was known simply as “Star Wars,” the movie that changed the world — and launched George Lucas’s ever-expanding universe of mythical sci-fi — seemed as born for the big screen as any movie of its era. “Star Wars” said to its fans: Here’s a swashbuckling Zen space opera of irresistible vastness — a world large enough to colonize your imagination. To do that, “Star Wars” needed to be epic, and was.
But by the time “The Mandalorian” came along, in 2019 (42 years after the original movie), the world of “Star Wars” had expanded to the point that in its very omnipresence, as well as its hyperactive digital-age busy-ness (a quality launched with “The Phantom Menace” in 1999), it felt larger than ever…and also smaller. More had become less. That’s why “The Mandalorian,” created by Jon Favreau as the “Star Wars” universe’s first live-action television series, was the perfect solution to what had become The “Star Wars” Problem.
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