When most of the internets most mediocre people are all spouting the same opinion, I usually don’t pay it any mind. So I never took the criticism of The Acolyte I was peripherally aware of seriously. But I also haven’t been truly excited about any Star Wars in between KOTOR and Andor (and I was a little late to the Andor party) so I never watched the show. But recently I heard The Acolyte was going thru a bit of resurgence and decided to see what’s up. This is the frank unpolished review of someone who doesn’t hate women, minorities, harp about Woke all day, etc and really isn’t familiar with previous criticism of the show (apart from how vitriolic it is)
Spoilers ahead.
Star Wars Reloaded: starting the episode with Carrie-Ann Moss doing Matrix- style kung-fu didn’t feel like an easter egg or fan service (for better or worse), it just felt like an out of place distraction. And it wasn’t even very entertaining. Then they ended it by nerfing the Jedi Master to give her a wholly unsatisfying death. Deflect the throwing knife thrown at the bar tender and sense danger in time to defend yourself is what most Writers would have done in the moment, then find a better way to kill the Jedi.
I can’t tell if the Green Jedi Master is acting badly or just struggling with bad writing. Maybe some mix of both.
A Jedi Master is killed in battle and the order sends a Knight and a Padawan to bring the suspect in. Couldn’t someone capable of killing a master do the same with a knight and a padawan?
The Jedi have prisoners on a ship and seemingly take no precautions against their escape like disabling the cyborgs’ ability to hack droids and having walls rather than bars to isolate the prisoners from guards and each other. Also, an alien having a massive incredibly strong tentacle that can hide in it’s body before springing forth and growing many times in size has more of a Men In Black vibe than a Star Wars vibe. Anyway, the prisoners escape in pods with seemingly no plan for step two. Predictably they are all recaptured. But incredibly quickly and brought almost instantaneously to Coruscant. Which brings me to my last criticism: the pacing was way off. This may just be a byproduct of them trying to fit too much in the first episode but they could have benefited by adding another plot thread or stretching out the ones they had.
It wasn’t all bad though. Visually, it mostly looked good. And I liked Amandla Stenberg in the starring roles. I saw some potential moving forward. It felt like a foul ball rather than a swing and a miss.
If this is your opinion in the first episode oh boy be prepared for an adventure. The amount of times that things happens because someone wrote that happens just accept it is worse than episode 9. 90% of acolyte is like this or dumber with some characters and fights that are salvageable.
It was definitely a different point of view on the jedi. They are liars, whiny, impulsive, arrogant, self-absorbed and myopic. That makes for good drama, but it feels out of place for Star Wars.
If you think about it from the perspective of future tales about how corrupt the Jedi were to explain the purge, it makes sense. Like until now we’ve mostly seen Jedi from the perspective of training padawans and acting all wise and masterly. What if that was survivor bias and rose-colored glasses, and the Jedi were a bunch of aloof assholes?
Idk. Seems to be a show featuring nothing but calm and wise masters of the force would be boring as fuck, but that would be a more canonical take. Maybe the whole thing was ill-conceived in the first place.
Parts of it were worthy. I just found I hated all the Jedi except one. I suspect which one is obvious and needn’t be said to avoid spoilers. But anyway that’s a big problem when 80% of your characters are Jedi.
I don’t know. I think helps drive home the ideas suggested in the prequels that the Jedi are seriously compromised. The whole High Republic series is about how the Jedi becoming an official part of the Republic weakens them. It kind of mirrors what happened with things like Christianity, where its more radical edges were sanded off once it became “imperial.” Unfortunately, we don’t get to see the Jedi at their true “height” on film anywhere.
I don’t think the problem was the concept and a good show with these elements would be well received. The execution and the main plot that is weak.
Agreed. I’d go back and watch a supercut of all the fight scenes, but other than that there wasn’t really anything worth remembering / revisiting. Didn’t stand on it’s own as a good story or add anything good to Star Wars canon overall.