I sat in my local cinema a few months ago having re-watching Star Wars Episode 1 – The Phantom Menace, eagerly awaiting the bonus trailer for the latest offering in the Disney Star Wars lexicon of films and featurettes, The Acolyte. I will say that the centre point of that trailer, a fight scene between Carrie-Ann Moss and Amandla Stenberg, left me feeling a little worried as it all seemed a little too close to the fight scenes of The Matrix for me, obviously not helped by having Moss a central part of it, the costuming and general look and feel was a bit “PlayStation cutscene” for me too. But this is just a trailer; it will all be alright in the end. The Acolyte could be another Andor, Ashoka or Mandalorian, so I left the theatre feeling upbeat and excited.
After the release of The Acolyte, I eagerly gathered snacks and began binge-watching the whole series. Afterwards, I realised that all my early fears about this series were totally unfounded. Instead, Disney had replaced them all with a brand-new set of absolutely horrifying night terrors that I wasn’t even aware I had. I’m not kidding; this series has left me genuinely terrified for the future of the franchise within the Haus of Mouse.
I do want to say that I think Science Fiction doesn’t have enough strong female leads, so I usually get quite excited when it happens. Whether it is Katherine Janeway, Seven-of-Nine, Dr Sam Carter from SG1, Delenn from Babylon 5 or Jyn Erso from Star Wars, I genuinely enjoy watching a female lead outsmart her enemies, emotionally connect with her allies and generally kick butt and take names; I find myself urging them on, rooting for them to overcome the darkness way more than a similarly written male lead. I have no idea why; I just do. So, I was genuinely excited to see that this series would introduce new names to this illustrious pantheon – Osha and Mae. The trouble is that neither will make my list of successful characters for several serious reasons, which I will outline below. However, to avoid too many spoilers, I am not going to review the episodes themselves. You can all watch the spectacle of The Acolyte for yourself, but for this opinion piece, I will focus on four areas why this series didn’t work for me. You should watch it and make up your own mind; these are just my thoughts. Spoilers ahead
The plot doesn’t make any sense
This is the number one issue for me; the whole plot of The Acolyte feels disjointed and rather ugly. There are no nice, easy plotlines through which the story flows. This is because the production/writing team wants everything to be brand new and, therefore, everything requires an explanation. Even the settled lore of the Star Wars universe, which should be the foundation of every series, seems to have been mutated somehow. For example, the Jedi aren’t the Jedi we know and love; they’re instead a rather pathetic, child-stealing bunch of plotters and schemers. Similarly, the Force – a character that appears as a constant in every Star Wars reincarnation- has changed its rules and relationships, so much so that it is even given a new name. There seems to be a determined and planned attempt to ensure that anything considered settled and stable in lore must be replaced with this new Acolyte lore. This makes The Acolyte hard to watch and enjoy, not only because you must invest time and effort learning about the new characters, planets and backstories but also because you must relearn and accept things you thought you already knew. A longer-running, well-established, and fan-respected series might be able to get away with this kind of core change – but a newcomer off the block trying to rewrite 40 years of history – not so much.
The other issue the series has is that it struggles to identify itself. What exactly is this series all about? I’ve watched all the episodes, but I still do not know. At first, I thought it would be some Jedi detective agency where Jedi reunite to fight crime. The trouble is they tell you straight away who the criminals are – meaning there’s not a lot of detective work for the viewer to do. Maybe this series was going to be some great coming-of-age, teenage angst-inspired story about family and one girl’s struggle coming to terms with the death of her twin. The trouble is the Twin isn’t dead, and the other twin knows that from episode 2. Or maybe this will be the story of a persecuted community’s struggle to live in peace away from the ideology of the Sith and Jedi – the dominance of religion over belief. Sadly, the cult is wiped out in episode 3, so it isn’t that either. This series has no identity, and it has no planned direction. The story meanders from one set of random events to the next – which is fine for real life, but a fictional story based on Sci-fi or Fantasy needs better structure and a set of very clear unchanging rules. Awful writing and poor script craft
A character or a story is only as good as the writing behind it, and The Acolyte has some of the worst scriptwriting I have ever seen, sadly. It doesn’t just appear basic; it is laden heavily with exposition. It forces characters to describe, in mind-numbing detail, everything that is happening around them. Or telling us (rather than letting the action show us) how they are feeling or their reaction to scenarios around them. If you rewrite the rules to something as core as The Force, I understand you must explain those changes, but it is far better to show that in action. The worst example of the bad writing in The Acolyte is in Episode 4 – huge chunks of dialogue talking about themselves, loitering in corridors or wandering across mountains, all whilst talking about things that we, the audience, already know about. It adds nothing new to the story and wastes 27 minutes of our time – this is halfway through the series, too. And rather than add any interesting direction (or misdirection), we have some cringy humour about the proper use of pronouns (in which they ironically missed out “she” as an option!). When they did decide to write something with a bit of weight and story impact, they did something utterly bizarre – they made a main character suddenly change their alignment – without a single understandable reason. At that moment, any feelings, one way or another, we had about Mae are thrown out of the window and reset. I have absolutely no idea why they did this. There is no attempt to build tension or create an epiphany moment of realisation for Mae and the audience – just “I’m going to hand myself in” – huh? The writing is awful, and this, combined with all the other issues, makes The Acolyte harder to watch than needed.
Failing to bring characters to life
I am not an actor, so I am not qualified to speak on how difficult it is to make a character come to life, but I am a member of the audience, so I can comment on what I felt watching the performances. I can surmise that having almost no cohesive story and some very poor scriptwriting makes this process much more difficult. I am unsure why this cast was chosen. They do not seem to gel at all; their reactions to one another seem wooden, with no spark of life. Any inter-character tension is thinly built and then lost almost immediately. For me, this whole show felt like a bunch of NPCs from Elder Scrolls were made player characters for a day. I also do not feel that any of the actors understood either the richness of the Star Wars universe or their character's place within it. This wasn’t an epic Space Opera, the much-vaunted vision of George Lucas for Star Wars it was more like Brendok’s Got Talent with plenty of big red crosses.
A huge chunk of the blame for this subpar acting comes down to the very limited acting range of the star – Amandla Stenberg. Her facial expression remained almost unchanged for the entire series. Her expression for joy is almost the same as her expression for relief and her expression for anger. Actors need something to bounce off and energy between you that feeds your delivery and lets you do more with what you have; in my opinion, there was none of that in the Acolyte, and if it doesn’t come from your star, you have no chance of getting much more from your supporting cast.
At times, the cast and characters seemed just as lost in the episodes as I felt watching them.
Not so special effects.
The Acolyte looked cheap; seriously, if you cannot get the special effects right in a Sci-Fi space opera like Star Wars, you will have problems from the start. The outfits looked like they were fan costumes ordered on Amazon, and the sets and CGI landscapes were not much better; case in point: Coruscant. Even 100 years before the Phantom Menace, when this series is set, Coruscant is the centre of the known galaxy, and its entire surface is a city, all the way into the skies. You wouldn’t get that feel from the shots of Coruscant used in this series. Compared to the early CGI of Phantom Menace, this new version of the Capital World looked like a cut scene from Jedi Academy or Knights of the Old Republic. Then there was the makeup, considering that one of the Jedi Masters ended up looking like the fourth member of the Bee Gees, with quite possibly the worst beard application in cinema history; I’m afraid even that seemed slightly off throughout. The thing I don’t get is that this is Disney's bread and butter; it isn’t their first rodeo when it comes to creating worlds, cultures, and creatures—but somehow, in this series, it just ended up looking cheap.
My final thoughts.
I am sure plenty of people out there loved The Acolyte, and that’s brilliant. I hope they got everything they wanted from this series and more. Art is supposed to be subjective; there isn’t a right or wrong answer to the question, “Did you enjoy it?” And I am not saying that everything in The Acolyte was bad; some of the fight scenes were pretty good, and Kelnacca, the Wookie Jedi Master, was a good (albeit brief) addition. But if you have to throw away almost everything fans consider canon to make your series work, you had better come up with a pretty kick-ass series, and this wasn’t it.
I know there is a tonne of hate and bile out there in the online fan community about this series, and I don’t think a lot of that is very helpful. It mostly feels like desperate people are hunting for clicks on their YouTube channel, but there are things that I can even see about this series which are poor choices, poor quality, or just plain bonkers. I have no idea what this means for Disney’s relationship with Star Wars moving forward. Certainly, I think any chance of a sequel for The Acolyte is small to zero. I cannot see anyone wanting to prolong the agony that has been the audience rating for this series. What scares me the most is the Disney believes it has the power to meddle with 40 years of established canon. It feels it knows Star Wars (and its fans) well enough to take something many consider sacred - like the force for example, and just change it. That worries me a lot, because if you have to throw out things people love to make way for other ideas, what happens if people hate those new ideas. Imagine the new owners of paramount saying "Klingons never existed and there is no warp speed". You cannot close Pandora's box once you have opened it. Disney may well have bought the right to change things, but they do not own the love and fondness Star Wars has created over the decades, that can be lost in the blink of an eye and without that, there is no-one to make Star Wars for. We shall have to see what damage this series does to future sequels and new ideas in the Galaxy far far away.
What did you think of The Acolyte – what did you love about the series? Tell us in the comments below.
WRITTEN BY WoorLord
EDITED BY WoorLord
IMAGES SOURCED FROM LucasFilm.com
