Seven years after The Rise of Skywalker, the saga finally got off the couch, and what it brought back was a tin-canned dad, a green gremlin, and a teenage Hutt with a glandular disorder. The Film Board lands split right down the middle, mostly in the affectionate way. Everyone agrees the adventures of Grogu are the heart of the thing. Everyone also agrees the plot is thin enough to read a newspaper through, and that this plays less like a movie than like the best three episodes of a Mandalorian season nobody got to make.Pete, JJ, and Ocean are joined by Matthew Fox, host of the Star Wars Generations podcast, and the table works through all of it: whether a jacked, English-speaking Rotta the Hutt is the dumbest swing or the most heroic one (Ocean is buying, Pete is not), why Sigourney Weaver got cast in a role that forgot to be a character, the Martin Scorsese cameo that weirdly lands, and the swamp sequence where Grogu plays caretaker to a poisoned Mando and the whole room finally forgets it is watching a puppet. Ocean makes the case for television as the franchise’s natural home, Pete keeps glancing over his shoulder at Andor, and somebody floats the idea of just letting Matthew run Lucasfilm.The scores are in, and the panel landed in a tight cluster. Ludwig Göransson’s score gets the home-run vote. The swole Hutt gets the side-eye.Connect with the ShowThe Film Board is part of the Next Reel Family of Film Podcasts. Find everything at thenextreel.com. Follow the show and rate every movie with us at letterboxd.com/thenextreel. Get member-only extended episodes at trustory.fm/join.Watch & Discover

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