The Book of Boba Fett

Review of the series "The Book of Boba Fett" - a clumsy spin-off of "The Mandalorian" about the famous bounty hunter.

A new Star Wars series that tries too hard to replicate the success of its predecessor and offers absolutely nothing new.

After the events of The Mandalorian, Boba Fett (Temuera Morrison), along with henchman Fennec Shand (Ming-Na Wen), seizes power in the criminal circles of Tatooine. He has to put together a crumbling crime syndicate and establish a new order: Fett wants to rule not with fear, as past bosses did, but with respect, and even refuses to move around the city in a palanquin. Of course, the new daimyo (that's what the head of the mafia is called, like elite samurai) immediately has many enemies, and Fett will have to go to a special capsule more than once to recover from another mess. There he constantly dreams about the past: rescue from the jaws of the sarlacc, friendship with nomadic Tuskens, and the role of a kind of Lawrence of Arabia.

Disney once again seizes the opportunity to squeeze all the juice out of a once good idea. The Mandalorian was unexpectedly loved by Star Wars fans more than the studio's other attempts to revive the George Lucas series, although (or rather precisely because) it was a peripheral story, taking place in the outskirts of the galaxy far from the main conflicts. As a result, the show, which was never intended to be a flagship, became the main Disney asset within the franchise, and, of course, the producers were quick to ruin everything good about it. The second season of The Mandalorian, albeit not without success, turned into a fan-service skit by the end. Now, around the story, whose charm was precisely in its insignificance, it was decided to build its serial universe. And if earlier there was an unknown hero in the center, then the new shows flaunt the names of well-known characters: Ahsoka from the Clone Wars and, behold, Boba Fett, a bright episodic from the original trilogy.

The Book tells how exactly the bounty hunter got out of the sarlacc's belly, where he landed in Return of the Jedi, and what happened after the finale of the second season of The Mandalorian, when Fett sat on the throne of Jabba the Hutt and became the criminal lord of Tatooine. These two lines constantly intersect, and from the outside, everything sounds perfect: fans will finally learn more about the fate of the character who has become a favorite of the public, despite the fact that he hardly spoke in the original trilogy.

The problem is that the salvation story is absolutely… redundant. As soon as Fett appeared among the sand dunes of Tatooine in The Mandalorian, it was already clear what had been going on all these years. Apparently, he somehow got out of the jaws of the monster, lost his armor and adapted to life on an inhospitable desert planet. The Boba Fett Book tells absolutely nothing new - it just shows exactly how it happened. As if not realizing that the charm of the character is in his mystery and white spots in his biography. By trying to expose Fett, the show only makes things worse. Turns him, in fact, into another Mandalorian, a tough hero who does not always follow the law, but lives by his own moral code.

And flashbacks are still the most interesting part of the series. In the conditional present, criminal squabbles unfold only slowly, and more often in words than in deeds. Boba Fett walks around the establishments that his mafia “roofs”, resolves conflicts with the mayor and neighboring syndicates, and once in a series stumbles upon some infiltrated killers. There is absolutely no storyline to it. Which is strange, given Robert Rodriguez's name among directors and executive producers: who hasn't had a problem with perky crime thrillers before.

The aesthetic secondary nature of the series does not help either. The point is not that this is The Mandalorian 2.5, as the creators themselves call it, but that even against the background of the already not very expressive predecessor, The Book of Boba Fett looks incredibly gray. More precisely, yellow, because the only landscapes (at least in the first series) are the monotonous sands of Tatooine. The iconic space for the franchise is easy to recognize and even easier to shoot, but it’s not for nothing that Lucas has always had this planet as a starting point, a place from which the heroes tried to get out as quickly as possible. Even in The Mandalorian, she became an island of calm, a start for departure to much more interesting places. Tatooine, as well known as it is to Star Wars fans, is just not a very interesting setting. And no references to "Lawrence of Arabia" will save here.

Of course, it is wrong to judge the entire series by three episodes: who knows what surprises Favreau and Filoni keep for us (so far it seems that there are none at all). And in itself, apart from its predecessors, "The Book of Boba Fett" is not bad at all: it's just exactly the same as "The Mandalorian" in its not the best, but far from the worst episodes. And yet, the trend is upsetting: having just begun to develop in breadth, Star Wars is again bogged down in hopeless epigonism. The main court here will be decided not by critics, but by the viewer: who, judging by the statistics of views and discussions on the Web, more or less does not care about The Book of Boba Fett.

This article was sponsored by Douglas Owen