After watching Rise of Skywalker, which I think is one of the biggest acts of creative cowardice ever put to film, I didn’t think Star Wars could put something out even more creatively bankrupt. Star Wars told us to hold our beers because I present to you The Acolyte.
The Acolyte completed my journey with Star Wars: joy turned to disappointment, disappointment fleetingly became anger around the time of Rise of Skywalker, which rapidly became a sense of apathy, momentarily uplifted by the brilliance of Andor, and then The Acolyte managed to twist the knife to abject ridicule.
I don’t usually write about things I don’t like. I’d instead write about things I do. The Acolyte delivers a show that represents the end stage of Star Wars so well that it’s hard to shrug your shoulders and move on without getting your thoughts down for prosperity.
It could have been great
As you read this, I want you to remember this section: this could have been great. I hoped for something intense, character-driven and tightly written into 30-minute episodes. Even the early warning of the episode length didn’t bother me, as I think there is a great Star Wars show still to be written that nails the 30-minute format.
This is what’s annoying about Star Wars. The pitches are great, but the implementation is dubious at best.
The concept was good
The pitch of The Acolye as Kill Bill mixed with Frozen got a lot of flack from people who weren’t thinking it through, but sadly, time proved them right. It did turn out to be a lame idea because the show produced was terrible. It was those influences in only the most loose and abstract sense, thrown in with an awful Young Adult romance targeted straight at ‘shipping culture’ storytelling.
If the premise had been truly delivered on with a well-produced show, with a script where the work had been done to break it down and deliver on the premise, it could have been excellent. A story of revenge, regret, and sisterhood based on regrettable events and misunderstandings between individuals would have been spot-on. I know some people think that’s what we got, but that only really exists in your head with self-generated explanations and by inserting stuff into the vacuum the script leaves open (and not in a good way).
The action occasionally impressed
The action wasn’t always on target, but some of the lightsaber action was the best we’ve seen since the prequels—it was fluid, engaging, and dynamic, even if it occasionally made strange shot choices. The deep cut using the Cortosis metal was among the few with an exciting application in the series.
It did have something in the core of the action that could have been interesting and genuinely phenomenal in a better TV series with a bit of a directorial uplift.
Some of the characters connected
A few characters delivered a performance that struggled from under the writing. I liked Master Sol (Lee Jung-jae) , until they narratively and physically killed him, Jecki Lon (Dafne Keen) until she died and ‘The Stranger’, some might call Sith guy (Manny Jacinto). I’m not saying they were used best, but those actors had a spark of a performance in their characters that I’d have liked to see more of under a better production.
Two of them are dead, so that can’t happen, whatever the politics or commercials.
It’s so bad
Plenty of videos on the internet can break down this show’s bottom-of-the-barrel quality in way more detail than I am inclined to do here, but I want to concentrate on a few things.
It’s not about canon
Star Wars canon has six tiers of canon validity, so it’s a clust-fuck that leads to debates of religious and philosophical proportions. This means I don’t overly concern myself with it, but problems are worth bringing up.
First, I understand why people are angry. The elements that cause the problems are so casually done, with a casual disregard, that they’re pointless, so why drop them in? Then you have the pattern established now of doing a prequel and inserting something as the canon-breaking first, and it just happens to be a diverse character that did it. These do start to feel like intentional social justice wrecking balls.
Second, canon breaks are often a concern in reverse proportion to the quality of the production. The quality of the production on this show is trash, so the canon breaks shoot into the upper atmosphere.
The canon breaks aren’t high on my list of reasons why this show is objectively terrible, but I get why some quarters are angry about them (and they do say something in the overall mosaic of how awful the show is).
It’s fan fiction
TV shows people don’t like, especially in Star Wars, are often derided as fan fiction. I hate it when people do that, as it’s usually just a euphemism for ‘something I do not like’. In this case, it’s a perfect description of the show. This section could be a forensic article with numerous specific examples, but I will have to resort to bullet points.
- Characters change motivation with no ‘work’ to get them there
- Characters change motivations multiple times per episode, and it’s rarely feel justified
- When you happen to know character motivations, they don’t remotely hold up
- Characters vanish from scenes impossibly and appear in others
- Characters accept blame for things when it’s not clear there is blame to take
- Characters almost aren’t characters but playing pieces on the chess board of the plot
- Characters get knocked out to move them to other scenes multiple times
- There is no moral framework for the show; the exact opposite
- It’s terribly constructed and paces, but most Star Wars suffer from that
- The message of the show seems to be you should be anything or do anything to get what you want
- The milieu the characters exist in lacks any authentic feel or verisimilitude
- When a decision is made in the script you can bet they’ve taken the laziest one available to them
I wouldn’t even call The Acolyte fan fiction, not because I think it’s lazy when people use the term, but because I’ve seen short fan films that are better than The Acolyte. I honestly find it hard to understand the series of decisions that got this show in front of audiences.
The writers have not done the work, and it feels like the show is, well, this needs to happen now, so what needs to happen to make that happen? Let’s pick the quickest and lamest options.
Even discounting the bullets above, at best, the show feels like the old days when writers would come in and write space opera but have no idea how to do it. The writing would lack weight, gravitas, and authenticity and instead feel like it’s floating across an unreal framework—that’s The Acolyte.
Where was the money
The Acolyte cost $180M, a staggering amount of money. The worst thing is that you can’t say you can see it on screen. As I stated at the beginning, there are lightsaber sequences in episodes five, seven, and eight, which are worthy of note, and the space sequences look good.
The problem is that the rest of it feels like everyone has turned up to do amateur dramatics on a stage. I’m not ranting about Star Wars having to look lived in, but the fact the money doesn’t translate into feeling like these are real characters in a real place. The weird thing is the show makes some great choices, like it doesn’t seem to use the volume a lot, or it uses it well, but the show still doesn’t give you that deep feel of authenticity you’d think $180M would translate into. I realise some of these things are writing and direction choices as much as production design, but the outcome is still the same.
Where did the money go?
It’s written for Tumblr
They literally had this man kill 8 people and by the end of that episode he became the Love Interest and stayed that way.
Leslye Headland, I salute you.
– A-Heart-Of-Kyber
It also seems written for Tumblr, whether by accident or intent. The show has two main traits designed to appeal to the Tumblr culture mindset: –
- It leaves vacuums for the hot air of Tumblr to fill
- It appeals to shippers
These two things ensure The Acolyte is like a drug to those who haunt Tumblr. It also means they love the show, but 90% of the reason they love the show is they’ve filled all the spaces where the script didn’t do the work with their bullshit. Discussing and theorising what was meant or intended is part of the appeal.
I think this was intentional, as whenever Headland appears in an interview, she’s like a Tumblr bot spouting any theory that might apply often in response to the interviewer’s leading questions. It’s like she doesn’t have an opinion and is a walking, talking, blank Tumblr canvas ready to regurgitate anything when questions arise.
Everyone likes a show that doesn’t pander to the audience by explaining everything, but this isn’t The Wire.
The moral compass
This Isn’t About Good Or Bad. This Is About Power, And Who Is Allowed To Use It.
– Mother Aniseyais
This is what angers me the most. Star Wars is a story construct that has to have a moral compass. You can tweak and stretch that moral compass, but it has to have one. Star Wars also puts people into good, bad and grey buckets, and you must be very careful how you place and move people between those buckets.
If you throw all that out and pursue one or both of the below agendas –
- There is no moral compass; only power decides
- There is no moral compass: do and be what you want to get what you want
I would argue that, at this point, you’re no longer telling a Star Wars story but just telling some story that happens to have Star Wars trappings in terms of costumes, sets, institutions, etc. This is what The Acolyte does, I was left confused as to who was in the good, bad or grey bucket, and I honestly didn’t give a shit, and it seemed to be both power decides and do what you need to do.
Those agendas are acceptable in stories, but the whole Star Wars construct breaks down when you apply them wholesale, as most of what exists doesn’t work without the moral compass.
You can flex the moral compass if you do it well. A show about Bobba Fett taking control of the criminal empire on Tatooine would be fantastic and make sense because (1) he would be in the grey bucket, and (2) he might be establishing something more criminally honourable. I’m not sure we got that show in The Book of Bobba Fett, but it would have worked. Andor works even though it flexes the moral compass of the resistance (notably before it became the Rebellion Alliance) because even though they push over the ethical line (only so much), the bigger picture is morally sound, and the enemy is horrendous. Andor flexes, but the strategic, moral compass is clear. Rogue One also established the endpoint of the more dubious resistance is when the Death Star arrived, and a rebellion based on hope was formed.
The true criminal act
There is one area where my fleeting anger hasn’t moved to apathy and ridicule: the treatment of the Jedi. They have become the poster child for hack agenda writing and political point scoring, often under the cover of the prequels, which showed that the Jedi were always bad. Wrong. The prequels did not show us that the Jedi were always bad; people are either dumb or just choosing to believe that to engineer their worldview.
The vast majority of the Jedi, like 99.999%, are heroes, and they are good. The prequels do not change this fact, and the Clone Wars series didn’t change that fact. The prequels told us that sometimes philosophies could lose their way, which wasn’t about individual members of the institution en masse or that even the institute was terrible since the dawn of its inception.
The Jedi lost their way in a philosophical and metaphysical sense that had zero to do with enacting specific and discreet modern-world social justice offences. They became distant from how the force binds the living things around them and became more insular, internal and esoteric, thus missing the darkness enveloping the galaxy around them. That is the be-all and end-all of how they failed – each Jedi was still a heroic figure striving for good ends and putting their life in danger.
Now, hacks take this concept and pervert it due to a lack of understanding, malicious intent, or to emboss their contemporary worldview on the franchise in a hamfisted way to make the Jedi bad. In The Acolyte, they make the Jedi a substitute for a corrupt cult or an analogy of US law enforcement committing social justice offences. They use the language of law enforcement, such as ‘being under arrest’ or ‘ reading people their rights’. A politician turns up for one scene to make a defund the police speech. Then, the Jedi construct conspiracies within conspiracies to cover up their ‘social justice offences’ and make a one-rogue cop argument.
This isn’t clever and it’s a specific application of what happens when the moral compass of Star Wars is stripped out to force an agenda on the story. A better-written show could have given us a truly authentic and great meeting of two force ideologies that resulted in an unfortunate sequence of events for which no one was to blame but a story of revenge spun from it – The Acolyte failed. It could also have told a story about 2-3 Jedi who did fail in their philosophy and faith. The position that The Jedi are an institution crushing and killing less powerful groups and then conspiring to hide it? No. It crosses a line.
I’m done
Since Rise of Skywalker, I’ve been casually trying each piece of Star Wars media out and taking it on its terms. I liked The Mandalorian, which was great but took a strange turn with series three. Obi-Wan Kenobi and The Book of Bobba Fett had moments but didn’t nail their premise. All these shows feel like honest attempts by professionals who seem mired in some production process and politics that result in mediocre outcomes.
The animations are often excellent, specifically in the latter seasons of The Bad Batch, and Andor is a meticulously produced, written and exemplary show.
The Acolyte feels different. I can’t say whether it was intentional; maybe it is an honest and fundamental difference in world views. However, it feels more than it being terribly written and constructed—it feels like it was intentionally destructive or destructive out of ignorance.
I’m just done. The Acolyte is so far from what I understand Star Wars to be. Never mind the low-quality writing and production; all I can think of when I think of Lucasfilm now is, please, stop.