We know you’re just buying this for the porg, but bear with us.

Here’s another 5POA.  After checking out most of the Force Friday releases, I’ve accepted that there’s a shot that I might occasionally be surprised by the quality of one of these figures.  This is not one of those occasions. The figure does its 5POA thing.  It stands assuredly, it holds the weapon, and it has pretty good coloring. The biggest problem I see here is that his body hair gets blond-ish down towards his waist, but his legs are dark brown.  This puts an odd emphasis on his crotch, which frankly just isn’t what we should be going for here.  The bandolier is removable, but leaves behind strange indents on his chest and back hair.  My colleague Chris probably has some personal tips on how to combat this unfortunate symptom.

Chewie’s face looks off to me.  Can’t quite place it, but he isn’t right.  Maybe his eyes are too close, or his forehead is too large, but it doesn’t look like the Chewbacca I know.  The bowcaster looks great, but…the three pieces seem to rely on Van der Waals forces to stay together.  It’s a bit maddening.  A mouse somewhere in Estonia must have nibbled on a piece of cheese while I was photographing this, and the bowcaster exploded.  You can either glue it together (sacrilege) or toss the whole shebang in a bin.  I choose the latter option.  There are approximately 428 Chewbacca figures out there that are better than this one.  If you need to add a Chewbacca to your collection, go get one of those.

So we get to the star of the show, the tiny porg.  I don’t know what role these guys play in the film, but my guess is not a big one, save for a few quick shots of cuteness, and maybe a short comic relief bit.  Or, they could represent a force of formidable allies recruited to assist the Resistance and ultimately destroy the First Order and restore the Jedi.  I lean heavily towards the former.  The porg has no moving parts, so I’d have to classify it as an accessory rather than its own figure, like Salacious Crumb or Todo 360.  It looks close to the brief images we’ve seen, although I feel it should be looking upward more, and look less like a regular bird in our universe.  Again, not knowing what these little guys do in TLJ, it’s hard to critique, but I think it would have been neat if you could balance it on Chewie’s shoulder, or head.  As it is, resting it on Chewbacca’s hand as in the picture above was no easy feat.  Chris will understand when I liken this effort to his special smiling Luke shot he once took for a project.  It also would have been cool if they included a porg with other figures, like Luke, Rey, and the upcoming R2-D2.  I’m gonna hate having to buy 10 Chewbaccas just to appropriately army build these porgs.

So, it’s an average figure with a great looking, but highly volatile, bowcaster, and a cute, but singular, porg.  He’s lucky to squeak by with a 5.