The Acolyte: Another Day, Another Star Wars Show
When Lucasfilm president Kathleen Kennedy announced a new slate of Star Wars titles in 2020, streaming was the name of the game. Theatrical films were far, far away, after commendable box office but divisive critical and audience reception to their 5 recent films meant that an indefinite hiatus was fair. The Mandalorian signalled a major shift in Star Wars storytelling, the first live-action TV show from Star Wars after 20 years of almosts and maybes, and the train kept on rolling. More seasons of The Mandalorian were guaranteed, spin-off solo adventures for characters like Boba Fett, Rogue One’s Cassian Andor, and Clone Wars and Rebels fan-favourite Ahsoka Tano were revealed, and a return of Ewan McGregor as Obi-Wan Kenobi in his series (after numerous failed attempts to get a solo film made). One in particular that had this writer the most interested was a mystery thriller about emerging Dark Side powers set about 100 years before Episode I – The Phantom Menace called The Acolyte.
While The Mandalorian was a fun adventure series, it started to become bogged down by cameos from other shows and it, and The Book of Boba Fett, dragged in Luke Skywalker simply for fans to point and cheer. Star Wars itself, if it needs to exist longer than this decade, must find new ways to expand beyond the Skywalker family, so thus The Acolyte stuck out as the one with the most potential to be that something new.
The Acolyte, is about twins Mae and Osha (Amandla Stenberg) who were created by a coven of Force-wielding witches for an unknown purpose. Osha was taken away by Jedi Master Sol (Lee Jung-jae) to be trained, but Mae was left behind and assumed dead in a fire that the Jedi may have been responsible for. 15 years later, and Mae, now an acolyte of the Dark Side, kills a Jedi Master, which Sol and a team of Jedi Knights investigate with the assistance of Osha, who left the Jedi some years beforehand. The mystery deepens until the full emergence of the Stranger, Mae’s Sith master, leads to a decimation of Jedi, the capture of Osha, questions of Mae’s allegiances, and for Master Sol to come to terms with the arrogance and hubris of the Jedi.
All 8 episodes have now aired on Disney+, and…honestly…it left me feeling rather disappointed.
Let’s thoroughly ignore the hateful, racist, and misogynistic screams of a pathetic loud minority who disgrace the term “Star Wars fan”, and focus on some positives and negatives of this series, one that seeks to be different from any piece of Star Wars media but also falls into the same traps as most of the Disney+ live-action shows.
On the positive side, the leads of the show in Amandla Stenberg and Lee Jung-jae do a commendable job to carrying this story through its roughest pacing problems and some confusing motivations. Stenberg (who uses both she/her and they/them pronouns) successfully gives Mae and Osha different personalities that we can distinguish beyond one wearing dark clothes and the other wearing light. Once the sisters reunite and switch places after episode 5 “Night”, Stenberg is then able to start to merge the two together and develop changing allegiances for both believably, her emotional commitment to this universe matching her remarkable dedication to the wuxia-inspired fight scenes. Lee Jung-jae is perhaps my personal favourite performance as Sol, a Jedi Master who embraces emotion far more than he’s supposed to, gives a heart to cold proceedings, and is a master duellist akin to some of the best Jedi we’ve seen before. Sol’s hubris and total belief that what he did was the right course of action is his downfall, but Jung-jae allows this truth of his character to feel natural, believable, and painful all at once, in perhaps the best performance of the show.
Many of the technical elements of the show are on point, as should be expected with Star Wars. Real-world filming locations of England, Wales, and Portugal give each visited planet a tangible and distinctive look and feel more in line with Andor’s production than the Stagecraft-heavy filming of The Mandalorian, Obi-Wan Kenobi, and Ahsoka. The computer-generated visual effects and the practical creature and alien effects are produced fairly well, seamless in most respects, but the action choreography above all else gets top marks. Episode 5 “Night” and Episode 8 “The Acolyte” deliver lightsaber fights that are tense, well-executed, and present fresh concepts for typical Star Wars action, like mixing in hand-to-hand combat with more offensive Force powers, turning a lightsaber off and on again for surprise attacks, and even headbutting a lightsaber with a unique metal to disarm Jedi.
On the negative side, it’s basically everything else. There is an interesting story concept at play, that being this mystery around the birth of twins via the Force which leads into the story of Darth Plageuis the Wise introduced via Palpatine in Revenge of the Sith, and dealing as well with the many flaws of the Jedi Order that caused its ultimate downfall and near-extinction from the galaxy. The execution, however, is severely lacking, with the individual episodes suffering from a lack of emotional tension via insufficient editing, generic and indistinguishable soap opera dialogue, and confusing motivations for most characters. Even the best episodes of the series (ep. 5 & 8) suffer from pointless optical wipes cutting from scene-to-scene, and have too many scenes of characters disappearing mid-confrontation like Batman in The Dark Knight.
The cinematography, credited to Chris Teague (Russian Doll) and James Friend (All Quiet on the Western Front), is perfunctory at best, shooting these real-world locations with a lack of distinctive composition, something that Star Wars is famous for. The general quality of the costumes, interior set design, and the lightsaber effects all have some money put behind them, but clearly not enough as they all together resemble a high-budget fan film, something that most of the Star Wars shows have felt like after Mandalorian Season 2. Very few constructed set pieces standout, the well-choreographed action takes place in environments that look like expansions of Disneyland’s Galaxy’s Edge, and the lightsabers themselves, that most iconic of all film weapons, look cheap and unwieldy with their dull white blade cores and chunky hilts. Even the music from Michael Abels, a great composer in his own right, is serviceable background music, carrying no distinctive leitmotifs and refusing to use any iconic John Williams themes for the Force, the Jedi, or the Sith.
Many of these are flaws found in most other Disney+ shows from Star Wars. Their stories sound interesting at first, but even with 6 or 8 episodes, there’s a rushing and dragging effect, the plot and character development being too much for a feature film but not nearly enough for the season’s length. In the case of The Acolyte, two episodes are spent in flashback giving the audience only a minuscule amount of context as to Mae’s vengeance and Sol’s guilt, and thus we feel cheated. Even if there was an attempt to condense these two flashbacks into a single episode, we’re still left with 6 other episodes that drag their feet at every turn, with repetitive conversations, confusing changes in Mae and Osha’s character developments (the story says they need to swap places so they do so without much in the way of sense), empty focus on characters that die mercilessly halfway through, and a significant lack of mystery for a show dubbed as a “mystery thriller” when it was first introduced.
The final episode The Acolyte tries its best to deliver compelling character development, emotional resonance, and exciting action, but it all feels too late. By the time the series has ended, the cast and crew are hopeful there’ll be a Season 2 to deepen the mysteries and mythology, it just rings hollow as the journey here could have been far better or at least not taken so long. The Acolyte feels more immersive visually than those series shot using the ILM Stagecraft, delivers some hardcore Expanded Universe elements sure to please those who’ve spent way too much time on Wookieepedia, and certainly had its moments. But moments do not equate to a satisfying narrative. Live-action Star Wars on Disney+, beyond Andor, has resigned itself to bare minimum fan service, weak visual executions, melodramatic dialogue that even George Lucas might roll his eyes at, and a sense that this is Star Wars only for its own sake. The Acolyte could continue and broaden its horizons, promising a brighter future ahead. Or not. Right now, that horizon seems far, far away.
You can stream all eight episodes of The Acolyte on Disney + now.
