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To fully appreciate The Mandalorian & Grogu, it is probably necessary to begin by acknowledging a difficult truth: Star Wars has always been the product of a historical misunderstanding. A three-way misunderstanding between George Lucas, the fans, and the marketing departments. All three helped shape what the franchise has become, but none of them were ever really pursuing the same thing.

Lucas first. His place in film history is secure enough that we can now look at his work with a little less reverence. Because if one actually takes stock of his talents, the picture is less flattering than the mythology surrounding him would suggest. He is not a great dialogue writer. He is not a great director of actors. He is not a great screenwriter. He is not a particularly sophisticated political thinker. He is rarely subtle when dealing with emotions, characters, or dramatic conflict. In many ways, a significant portion of his career consists of demonstrating his own limitations whenever he finds himself free from meaningful opposition. The prequels remain a fascinating monument to this phenomenon: the work of a filmmaker powerful enough that nobody could tell him no, transforming that freedom into an almost uninterrupted succession of embarrassing dialogue, visionary ideas, and baffling creative decisions.

The truth is probably simpler. George Lucas was, above all, extraordinarily well surrounded. Editors, producers, designers, technicians, and collaborators played an essential role in transforming his instincts into cinema. Yet he possessed one genuinely rare quality: he was among the first people to understand something that nobody had fully grasped before. Not because he was smarter than everyone else, but because he arrived at the right moment with the right obsessions. His genius, when it appeared, looked less like intellectual superiority than a strange ability to stumble onto solutions that nobody else had thought to try.

The most important of these insights concerned the representation of science fiction itself. Lucas understood early on that if you wanted an imaginary world to feel believable, you had to stop emphasizing how extraordinary it was. The original Star Wars is built around this principle. The droids are not technological marvels; they are tired workers arguing with one another. Aliens spend their evenings in shabby bars. Spaceships break down. Weapons malfunction. Nobody seems particularly impressed by the future surrounding them.

The best example remains the Millennium Falcon’s first appearance. A contemporary blockbuster would devote several minutes to unveiling one of the most iconic vehicles in cinematic history. Lucas shows it quickly, almost carelessly, in a shot that refuses grandeur. Then Luke sees what will become one of the most famous spaceships ever put on screen and essentially reacts as if he has just discovered a rusted wreck in a parking lot: “What a piece of junk.” It is an extraordinarily intelligent directorial decision. The Falcon becomes believable precisely because nobody within the film treats it as exceptional. The fantastic works because it has been made ordinary.

But this intuition gradually disappeared into the hands of the other two forces that came to dominate Star Wars. The fans developed an increasingly pathological relationship with the franchise. As the universe transformed into a total commodity, they learned to inhabit it as expert consumers. Every detail had to be catalogued, authenticated, and ranked. Every element had to be preserved in a supposedly pure state. Passion slowly became indistinguishable from fetishism. Characters, props, lines of dialogue, and even mistakes became relics whose value depended on their conformity to an ever-expanding canon. Beneath the rhetoric of consistency and lore often lies a deeper anxiety: the fear that an object of consumer identity might lose its stability. Parts of contemporary fandom increasingly resemble less a community of enthusiasts than a police force for imaginary heritage, one whose instincts can become openly reactionary in their obsession with order, purity, and repetition.

The marketing departments, meanwhile, never needed to believe in anything at all. Their logic is much simpler. Star Wars represents one of the most fully realized examples of the contemporary intellectual property model. Films, television series, games, novels, and merchandise all form a single system whose purpose is to maintain the circulation of a brand. The more characters, symbols, variations, and references an intellectual property can generate, the more valuable it becomes. Consistency is not an artistic value but a management tool. Nostalgia is not an emotion but a renewable resource. The system therefore has little incentive to create anything genuinely new when it can endlessly monetize what already exists.

This is precisely why The Mandalorian & Grogu occasionally feels surprisingly refreshing. Not because it escapes this logic—it is obviously a direct product of it—but because it allows certain strange impulses from old Lucasian cinema to re-emerge. The film speaks relatively little. It constantly hides its performers behind helmets, makeup, costumes, and puppets. It devotes considerable screen time to creatures that do not merely exist to advance the plot. Above all, it often seems more interested in the texture of its world than in the efficiency of its storytelling.

This tendency reaches its fullest expression in the film’s treatment of the Hutts, who may well be the strangest creation ever produced by Lucas’s imagination. It is worth pausing to appreciate how absurd the idea actually is. Faced with an infinite number of possible life forms to represent galactic organized crime, Lucas chose giant slugs. The idea is ridiculous. It is also brilliant.

Since Jabba, the Hutts have introduced something into Star Wars that contemporary science fiction often struggles to produce: genuine otherness. They do not resemble humans in elaborate makeup. Their relationship to power seems to emerge directly from their bodies. Jabba does not rule despite his obesity; he rules through it. His enormous size, his inertia, and his ability to absorb space around him are themselves expressions of domination. Hutt power is a power of consumption, accumulation, and presence. These creatures do not move through the frame. They overwhelm it.

The Mandalorian & Grogu understands this perfectly and occasionally pushes it to almost excessive extremes. Everything about its depiction of the Hutts is grounded in materiality. Their bodies have weight. They sag. They spill outward. They occupy space with a heaviness contemporary cinema often seeks to avoid. One constantly feels their mass, volume, and density. Folds of skin deform. Flesh ripples. Viscosity becomes almost a staging principle. During the fight sequences, bodies do not collide like action heroes but like geological events. Impacts produce wet slaps of skin against skin. Movements seem slowed by the sheer weight of living matter itself.

What makes Rotta particularly fascinating is that he introduces a rupture within this logic. Unlike traditional Hutts, Rotta possesses a muscular, mobile, almost athletic body. Where Jabba and the Twins appear as living institutions—organic masses transformed into political structures—Rotta appears as an individual. His appearance already tells a story of transformation. Yet this evolution extends far beyond his physical form.

The film grants him something Hutts have rarely possessed before: interiority. Rotta doubts, hesitates, evolves. He possesses contradictions, emotions, and a complex relationship with his inheritance. His way of speaking, behaving, and imagining his place in the world often feels distinctly contemporary, almost Gen Z in its relationship to authority and identity. On paper, the idea is completely absurd. The Mandalorian & Grogu literally sets out to individuate a giant slug.

And yet that absurdity produces something unexpectedly rich.

The film simultaneously asks the audience to take Rotta seriously as a psychologically complex character while refusing to transform him into a disguised human being. His fundamental strangeness remains intact. At every moment, his interior life coexists with his profoundly non-human nature. His emotional struggles still belong to a gigantic viscous creature whose movements are accompanied by the sound of flesh striking flesh.

The final confrontation with the Twins therefore becomes far more interesting than a conventional blockbuster climax. What is at stake is not merely a succession dispute but a conflict between two possible visions of Hutt society. On one side stands the old order: accumulation, mass, inheritance, and organic domination. On the other emerges a new form of individualization embodied by Rotta. Political conflict literally takes the form of bodies colliding. Ideas become physical. Worldviews become masses of flesh crashing into one another.

The sequence ultimately encapsulates everything that makes the film interesting. It is simultaneously serious and ridiculous. Profound and grotesque. It asks the audience to contemplate the cultural evolution of an entire civilization while watching several giant gangster slugs fight one another in a symphony of folds, viscosity, and slapping flesh.

No rational market analysis should have produced something this strange. No fan obsessed with continuity would likely have imagined that the future of Star Wars might involve an implicit meditation on the modernization of Hutt identity. Yet it is precisely in moments like these that the franchise rediscovers something of its original vitality.

Because Star Wars was never at its best when it pursued coherence. It was never at its best when it sought to satisfy fans. It was never at its best when it tried to sell toys. It was always at its best when some slightly naive, occasionally clumsy creator—provided he was surrounded by the right people—managed to smuggle ideas into a blockbuster that no rational process should ever have approved.

The Mandalorian & Grogu is filled with such ideas. And when Hollywood’s vast nostalgia machine begins to crack under its own weight, when the grip of brand managers loosens for a moment, those strange impulses sometimes reappear. Contradictory, imperfect, occasionally accidental impulses, yet infinitely more stimulating than the endless repetition of familiar motifs.

At a time when franchises increasingly resemble databases, there is something almost anomalous about a blockbuster devoting so much energy to the political, cultural, and bodily evolution of an aristocracy of giant slugs. And since 1977, anomalies have probably been the best thing Star Wars has ever produced.

At last i have them all !

Am I the only one who thinks that prequel fans are mostly right-wingers?

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The Hutt in the room : My thoughts on The Mandalorian and Grogu