The Acolyte, the latest Star Wars series on Disney+, is unfortunately a swing and a miss from the decades-spanning franchise. Created by Leslye Headland, the series has been heavily criticised online, becoming the target of review-bombing campaigns on IMDb, Metacritic, and Rotten Tomatoes from irate Star Wars fans who feel that it’s too woke for their tastes. While there are pandering elements in this series, these critiques are difficult to separate from outright bigotry when so much of it is levelled at the race, gender identity, and sexual orientation of the series’ characters (as well as the team behind The Acolyte).
As well as that, the storm of controversy over this series’ inclusivity overshadows much more valid critiques of The Acolyte, a show that is flat and uninspired, with awkward dialogue, weak acting, and a boring, slow-paced story. The series opens with a battle that we have no way of contextualising since we do not know any of these characters. There’s nothing dynamic about this scene that would make us want to know them, either, with serviceable action and clunky dialogue.
There’s something oddly weightless about the drama in this series, like when freelance mechanic Osha (Amandla Stenberg) is arrested by Jedi Knight Yord (Charlie Barnett) and his Padawan Tasi (Thara Schöön) a few minutes later. It doesn’t seem like Osha’s life as she knew it is over, or that she has much of a reaction to the announcement that she has been accused of killing a Jedi Master. So little is known of Osha or this world that it’s clear she will not be imprisoned for long. But the series never even tries to hide that fact by pretending something urgent or exciting is happening.
It’s revealed that Osha isn’t guilty of this crime, with her identical twin sister Mae, also played by Stenberg, having committed the murder. Mae is seeking revenge on the Jedi, including Osha’s former teacher Sol (Squid Game’s Lee Jung-jae), as she blames them for the deaths of her family long ago. Although the plot creeps forward into the present day during these eight episodes, it’s entirely predicated on this tragic incident in Mae and Osha’s childhood, an event that the story depicts from multiple characters’ perspectives.
As the series continues, each episode feels more and more inessential, especially given the slow pacing and how very little insight is given into its most important characters. The acting is also quite weak, with Amandla Stenberg failing to give enough authenticity to her dual roles to make these sisters stand out from one another. There’s no nuance in either performance that could separate them, though the writing is also to blame for this. Mae and Osha are written so blandly that they may as well be interchangeable (which, regardless of certain plot developments later this season, doesn’t excuse such lacklustre storytelling).
Stale and uninspired lines of dialogue are a dime a dozen in The Acolyte, where there isn’t a single sharply-written character that’s exciting to watch. While it’s great to see Lee Jung-jae trying out such a different project, this isn’t the appropriate role to showcase his abilities. The expressive actor was perfect in comedic, tragic, and tense moments in Squid Game, but here he’s misused as a noble but flawed teacher of young Jedi, where his demeanour is passive to the point of being bland.
It’s also clear that the actor isn’t yet comfortable performing lines in the English language. It works well in a universe with as many planets as Star Wars to include characters with quite pronounced accents, but there’s a difference between having a strong accent and only just becoming accustomed to a language. Lee Jung-jae, unfortunately, was fast-tracked into an English-language role. This leads to an awkward delivery of his lines that makes it impossible to see the character he’s portraying while he grapples with expressing himself in a foreign language.
The show’s comedy is reminiscent of a bad live-action adaptation of an anime, where it seems tailor-made for very young children who won’t cringe at these lines and facial expressions. One can imagine a lot of this humour working far better in an animated format, where the characters would succeed at being goofy and expressive instead of just plain awkward.
The show’s fights are fun to watch and expertly paced, creating a fluid and exhilarating experience that the rest of the series fails to match. Though the choreography is well thought-out, action scenes interspersed with dialogue are more difficult to enjoy, since the action is broken up awkwardly as characters look like they’re always waiting for their turn to speak, turn around, or do something of consequence. Also, while it ties into the plot and keeps the action from becoming repetitive, there comes a point where it seems like the Jedi’s lightsabers are malfunctioning more often than not!
Anyone who’s watched any Star Wars-related media can easily guess the kind of music employed in The Acolyte, and in such a disappointing story, it’s difficult not to notice how played-out its score seems. One can predict almost exactly what the music will sound like in each moment, where, just like this series’ actors, it often feels like it is waiting for its predictable cues. The score is endlessly repetitive and grating to experience by the end of the season.
Though this series is a letdown, it’s not without merit. One consistently impressive aspect of The Acolyte was the visual world-building, with interesting creatures and environments that made this fictional universe feel lived-in and authentic. Stenberg and Lee are also given enough effective dramatic beats to work with by the close of The Acolyte’s first season to allow their talented acting to shine through. Finally, there is an emotional core to these roles, which was missing throughout almost the entirety of this season. But these positive aspects of the series are unable to redeem a lacklustre story, which is effectively the Star Wars equivalent of an act of police brutality and its repercussions.
The series keeps returning to the incident that tore Mae and Osha’s family apart to determine who is at fault for these deaths, showing the events preceding the incident from different perspectives to explore this moral grey area.
It’s surprising material to see covered in a franchise of this kind, and while I admire such lofty goals, it never comes together in an illuminating way. If the series had been able to tell more of a complete story in the present day, it wouldn’t constantly seem like there is nothing of value here besides an event that happened years before the vast majority of this story. Moral complexity just doesn’t have much of a place amidst the escapist entertainment that Star Wars thrives in. What’s more, this series engages in that same escapism whenever it’s not contending with these ethical issues, compromising what it wants to be and making it feel as if it has no idea whether or not it wants to belong in this franchise.
While any seasoned viewer of TV shows or movies knows to temper their expectations regarding child acting and portrayals of children, The Acolyte reaches new lows in that regard. Lauren and Leah Brady, the child actors who portray young Osha and Mae, are very difficult to watch when they are the drivers of this story’s third episode. For this reason, this episode is easily The Acolyte at its worst, since they feature in virtually every scene and have none of the acting intuition required to sell anything they say.
However, it is difficult to cast too much blame on their performances when they are not even given workable lines. Children can often be quite blunt and simplistic in the language they employ, but having to listen to Osha cry out “The Jedi are good” before her sister responds “The Jedi are bad” is excruciating to listen to. No wonder these young actors sound lifeless: adults who’ve been portraying diverse roles throughout their careers would struggle to give life to such limp dialogue.
Since it’s caused such a firestorm online, it’s worth addressing how this show tackles diversity in greater depth. Although the criticisms are almost entirely overblown, often exposing the hateful ignorance behind many who express them, there’s some validity to this general frustration. The Acolyte’s all-female coven (headed by Osha’s lesbian parents) could be intriguing but instead feels like fan fiction trying too hard to appear progressive. Given the fact that the fantastical creatures in Star Wars are quite varied, the inclusion of witches isn’t unprecedented, but it also doesn’t mesh well with the world of Star Wars. There’s just something cheap and lazy about creating powerful new entities with their unique lore in a universe that has existed for decades now.
Some works of art tackle diversity by casting members of minority groups in stories and not addressing it directly. Other creators will infuse the difficulties some minority groups face—with these characters serving as conduits for this—into their stories. The Acolyte takes the worst aspects of both options, where it feels as if it’s straining to tick off items on its diversity checklist, without effectively articulating the unique experiences of these characters and the disadvantages they face. None of it is treated with the slightest degree of nuance or well-crafted storytelling.
When a work of art is straining to be more inclusive, one unintended consequence is how it makes it seem as though it’s a monumentally difficult task to craft a story around characters from underrepresented groups. When you pair this with a series containing stilted dialogue that inhibits powerful acting, and a story that crawls forward without many interesting ideas, it’s not too surprising that people misattribute The Acolyte’s failings as a result of it being too ‘woke’.
In many ways, it feels as if this show is handicapping itself by being part of the Star Wars universe. If it were set in an entirely different fictional world, without an abundance of other works from the franchise to compare it to, it’s possible that it could establish its own interesting and layered lore that fleshes out its examination of the grey areas of morality.
On the other hand, almost all of the best elements in the series, from the action showdowns to the visual world-building, are connected to this franchise. Caught between wanting to subvert what the Star Wars universe is centred upon and being unable to exist without it, The Acolyte sadly limps to the finish line of its first season, having failed to uncover a clear target audience or reason to care about this story.
USA | 2024 | 8 EPISODES | 2.39:1 | COLOUR | ENGLISH
Cast & Crew
writers: Leslye Headland, Jason Micallef, Charmaine DeGraté, Jasmyne Flournoy, Eileen Shim, Claire Kiechel, Kor Adana, Cameron Squires, Jocelyn Bioh & Jen Richards
directors: Leslye Headland, Kogonada, Alex Garcia Lopez & Hanelle Culpepper.
starring: Amandla Stenberg, Lee Jung-jae, Charlie Barnett, Dafne Keen, Rebecca Henderson, Jodie Turner-Smith, Manny Jacinto, Dean-Charles Chapman, Joonas Suotamo, Margarita Levieva, Lauren Brady, Leah Brady, Harry Trevaldwyn & David Harewood.
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