The Book Of Boba Fett (2021) Dir: [Various]
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I have to preface this review by saying that nearly every 'new' Star Wars project has a potent mixture of genuinely good ideas, gratuitous fan pleasing and some frustrating and quite frankly bizarre narrative choices.
This Jon Favreau created limited series is a perfect microcosm of all this. There are some genuinely brilliant moments and scenes, but the whole series is undermined by some severe pacing issues and some strange narrative choices in the last few episodes.
As mentioned, the series is very slow paced for the majority of it, the narrative of almost grinds to a halt at points. It almost felt as though this series relied on moments to carry it, which is disappointing.
What's more, some of the episodes were not as strong as I would have hoped. However, the final two episodes were stronger, though not without fault themselves.
On a more positive note, there were some really nice references, call backs and characters from prior Star Wars stories. You could argue some of these inclusions were unnecessary, but I didn't mind them.
Furthermore, the credit artwork is one of the highlights of these Disney Plus Star Wars series. It's fascinating to see what was storyboarded for each episode. The music, composed by Ludwig Göransson, is phenomenal, as you would expect. As far as the acting goes,
Temuera Morrison remains iconic as Boba Fett, even now, years after he originally played his father Jango Fett.
Ming-Na Wen is good intermittently, though seems to fall into the background of the narrative far too often.
Timothy Olyphant makes a return to Star Wars, after previously appearing in The Mandalorian, and he plays his part in this narrative pretty well.
Mark Hamill lends his voice to the de-aged cgi version of himself, which looks much better than I had expected or hoped.
We also see Pedro Pascal back in the Star Wars universe, his introduction kind of derails the Boba Fett storyline and turns the series into The Mandalorian season 2.5, but it was still really cool to see him again.
Corey Burton's character was a really cool surprise, though in my opinion he very quickly became a wasted commodity here - another disappointment.
I'll also mention Danny Trejo, who I was very happy to see make an appearance, even in a more minor role.
Overall, this series was a little hard to get behind at points. Like I said before there are some genuinely very cool and enjoyable moments and scenes throughout this one, but I can't help but feel like this was made to give fans more Boba Fett, rather than tell a story of any real importance or note.
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