The Book of Boba Fett – Season 1 Review

On the sands of Tatoonie, bounty hunter Boba Fett (Temuera Morrison) and mercenary Fennec Shand (Ming-Na Wen) navigate the Galaxy’s underworld and fight for Jabba the Hutt’s old territory.

Anybody that knows me knows that I love Star Wars more than most things in the whole entire world. To this day, I still can’t decide which media property I like more – the Marvel Cinematic Universe (MCU), or the Star Wars franchise. Each and every time a brand new Star Wars project gets announced, the hype train inside my nerd brain gets to chugging.

When season two of The Mandalorian came to a close at the end of 2020 (wow, two years ago already? Time, please slow down!), the show’s end-credits sequence promised an upcoming show called The Book of Boba Fett, focusing on the titular bounty hunter and his various misadventures.

Ever since that announcement, I’ve been unbelievably excited to get whisked away yet again to a galaxy far, far away and see what Fett and Shand would get up to. Now that the show is here – created by Jon Favreau – I can safely say that the end results are… disappointing to say the least.

I’ve been a huge fan of the Disney era of Star Wars and I know that one sentence alone is enough to cause many people to click off of this review. But it’s the truth. There hasn’t been a single Star Wars property since Disney took over that I haven’t liked. At the end of the day, I still liked The Book of Boba Fett, but it is overwhelmingly average which isn’t good considering just how amazing this show could’ve been.

This is a show that’s supposed to be focusing on Boba Fett, one of the most feared bounty hunters in the entire galaxy. In the original trilogy, Fett was a massively intimidating guy. You felt his presence whenever he was in the room. Heck, even in The Mandalorian season two, he felt like a force to be reckoned with.

So why is it that in his own show, he feels like an afterthought? Not only that, but he doesn’t really feel all that intimidating here, either. That’s not to say that Temuera Morrison isn’t great in the role because he most certainly is. It’s just the scripts and direction he was given that caused his character to feel lesser than this time around.

The first four episodes of this show were just… fine. They weren’t bad. They weren’t good. They were just fine. Not a whole lot of stuff happeend. These felt like build-up episodes. Did these build-ups eventually pay off? Yes, they did. But it’s still not too much fun to sit around for four full-length episodes watching Boba Fett and company do next to nothing.

It’s not until episode five where the show picks up steam considerably. From that point onward, The Book of Boba Fett becomes a significantly better show and it’s kind of hilarious because two of these episodes don’t even feature Fett at all. And guess what? The two episodes that Fett doesn’t appear in are the best of the whole season.

All of the performances here are stellar. The visuals, action, cinematography, editing, and music are absolutely sublime which shouldn’t really come as a surprise. The thing that bogs the first half of this season down is bad scriptwriting. Thankfully, the show irons out these kinks in the second half. The Book of Boba Fett isn’t the incredibly brutal space-epic that we all wanted, but it’s still worth checking out in the long run.