The Book of Boba Fett review: Star Wars spin-off does more than enough to keep both fans and agnostic viewers happy

With Jon Favreau’s The Mandalorian and now The Book of Boba Fett, the Star Wars franchise has leaned into the ‘Western’ part of its ‘space Western’ billing. Boba Fett made that plenty clear when the show’s home base was revealed to be Tattooine, the desert planet where Luke Skywalker was raised. In the show’s straightforward setup, we see the titular antihero (Temuera Morrison) assuming the role of the planet’s new crime boss or ‘Daimyo’ (a term used for a medieval Japanese feudal lord), five years after the deaths of Jabba the Hutt (in Return of the Jedi) and his majordomo Bib Fortuna.

Favreau used the Western genre trappings to great effect in The Mandalorian. He created a lean, no-frills, crowd-pleasing action fest with old-fashioned, taciturn protagonists and plenty of ass-kicking throughout its runtime. Along the way there were some great design elements for Star Wars fans to pore over, there was the universal appeal of Grogu/Baby Yoda to bring it all home.

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For the most part, Favreau sticks to the same formula for Boba Fett, and he has a suitably gruff-but-humane leading man in Temuera Morrison (who previously voiced the character in several Star Wars media, and played Boba’s father Jango Fett in the prequel trilogy). It’s the kind of endearing gruffness that lends itself well to dark comedy, and you see some of that in Morrison’s early scenes with his assassin-in-chief Fennec Shand (Ming-Na Wen). When a local Mayor’s majordomo demands a tribute in Boba’s ‘court’ itself, a perplexed Boba turns to Shand and says, “I’m supposed to be the crime boss here, he pays me!”

The big ‘hook’ of Boba Fett is that it takes a brutal, widely-feared bounty hunter character and writes him as a boy scarred literally and figuratively by the loss of his father.

It’s not always successful in this goal, but when it does—episodes two and three are particularly strong in this area—it makes for some classic Star Wars fun (themes of paternity, predestination and ‘astray’ children redeeming themselves; this has always been central to the franchise). I was particularly impressed with episode two, ‘The Tribes of Tattooine’. Like every episode, this one too juggles two timelines—present-day Boba consolidating his newfound position as Daimyo of Tattooine, and his memories of the five-year gap after his near-death in Return of the Jedi. During this episode, we see Boba Fett earning the trust of a Tusken tribe—an incredible proposition in itself, because Star Wars fan will remember the Tusken Raiders as a highly xenophobic species.

The episode has been written quite cleverly. In the present-day, we see Fennec Shand advising Boba to give into some of Tattooine’s more old-fashioned customs—like the Daimyo not walking by himself, but being carried on a ‘litter’ by underlings. Boba refuses, but he acknowledges the need to integrate. Soon, as we see the whole story with him and the Tusken tribe, the resonances between the two storylines (insider/outsider politics, colonizer/colonized relationships) grow increasingly important. The episode ends on a lovely note of silence, a welcome tonal anomaly for Star Wars.

Now, to the elephant in the room: what of the CGI Luke Skywalker? As the sixth episode revealed last week, Boba Fett features a cameo by Luke Skywalker that was put together digitally, using an on-set performer and an AI-generated voice whipped up courtesy plenty of archival footage. Mark Hamill did not shoot any new material for this at all. As somebody joked on Twitter, in Year Three of the pandemic CGI Luke was probably more doable for Disney than getting everybody’s dates to tally with Hamill’s.

Obviously, this leads to a spiral of fandom questions—will this be the future of IP-films, where nobody is ever really dead, everybody’s a hologram and nothing is irredeemable? I’m not sure if we’re at that (admittedly) logical endpoint yet, but let’s just say I’m not overly keen on Tony Stark’s ghost haunting any of the Marvel universes.

CGI quibbles notwithstanding, The Book of Boba Fett does more than enough to keep both fans and agnostic viewers happy. And the spate of cameos in the last few episodes—Luke Skywalker, Ahsoka Tano, Din Djarin/The Mandalorian and yes, Grogu aka Baby Yoda himself—elevate the emotional stakes like finales should. I’d love to see more of this morose warlord pottering about Tattooine with his healing ‘Bacta tank’ and his cyborg squad.

The Book of Boba Fett is streaming on Disney+Hotstar.

Aditya Mani Jha is a Delhi-based independent writer and journalist, currently working on a book of essays on Indian comics and graphic novels.