When it comes to Star Wars, many would describe me as a Fanboy. It’s true, this person who considers critical thinking a personal strength is overcome by a primal positive bias when asked for opinions about any and all things Star Wars, and anyone that knows me knows this. With this in mind, when I find myself not being able to give a whole-hearted recommendation to the latest Star Wars TV streaming adventure “The Acolyte”, I guess we have “a moment”.
To be clear, there are many aspects of The Acolyte I did appreciate. For the most part I found the characters to be well conceived and also (and a bit to my surprise) well developed across the story’s 8 chapters, and despite the flaws I’m about to describe, I started to care about them. But while the Light Saber fights were consistently among the best we’ve scene in Star Wars, they also point to one of the major issues I have with The Acolyte overall.
In Episode IV: A New Hope, when giving Luke his late father’s Light Saber, Obi Wan says they are “an elegant weapon for a more civilized age”. But does The Acolyte present this time period, some 100 years before the events of Episode I: The Phantom Menace as more civilized? Looking at the context, we have Jedi who lie, witches who create life, and Sith appearing more controlled, calculated, and fight-ready than the High Republic at its peak. I am not feeling elegance and civility.
Another issue related to this is that the Light Saber fights were the very best part of the entire series, and probably the only thing that did not have me feeling confused. To be blunt, I found the storytelling very weak, as did my razor-sharp 17-year old Star Wars-loving son. Not only did we NEED the recap which prefaced each episode, but we also depended on the pause button so we could stop mid story and debate what was happening on screen. And this was not the kind of deep and profound debate that many fans normally enjoy, but simple questions about the basic story and its sequencing, as everything felt fragmented, disconnected, and forced (pun intended). I guess the real tell for me was that after every episode, Acolyte creator Amandla Stenberg took to social media to “explain” important aspects of each episode. Really?
Now this conclusion may suprise you, but largely driven by the care I started to feel for many of the characters, I do want to see a second season of The Acolyte. However, I implore Disney to consider putting the story into the hands of either Tony Gilroy (Andor) or Dave Filoni (you know), assigning either Deborah Chow (Kenobi) or Bryce Dallas Howard (The Mandalorian) to the director’s chair, and perhaps giving the score to Gordy Haab (Jedi:Survivor, Jedi:Fallen Order, Battlefront II), who may be the perfect composer to define the musical backdrop for the High Republic era. In case you are asking, Mrs. Kennedy…
Thoughts from the surface... 