Lost/Found

I wanted to like this, the first 5 mins were the highlight and it went downhill from there. No interest in the characters and stories. Overall just pretty boring. The quality of the new Star Wars shows has been uneven. While some series like "The Mandalorian" have been enjoyable for their storytelling, characters, and production values, the acolyte falls into a second camp of not being able to meet these standards. Inconsistent writing, pacing issues, and underdeveloped characters lead you to think this show was more what Disney think Star Wars fans should like rather than what Star Wars fans actually want to see.

Wont go into spoilers. I'll get straight into this by saying that the writing and dialogue is so flat and at times really really bad here. There's so much clunky exposition to get the audience caught up and there's lots of failed attempts at humor. The acting is fine. The only ones who were somewhat good were the girl from Logan and the guy from Squid Game (Sorry, I don't know their names.) The cgi and sets range from not very good to pretty good. It looks better than kenobi and boba fett but nowhere near Andor and some of mando.

The characters are completely hollow so far, and honestly so is the plot. There's just nothing keeping me interested in watching this show. At least we still have Andor season 2 to look forward to.

The beautiful thing about The Mandalorian and Andor was the discovery. "Here's a character, watch what they do, and you'll figure out the rest as you go along." They left us almost constantly in suspense, wondering what was going to happen next. What's this person's goal? Why are they doing this? What's their next move? The first episode of The Acolyte has decided to do away with all of that.

Right off the bat there's text on the screen explaining exactly when in the Star Wars timeline we are, and the plot is immediately laid out. What follows are 40mins of unsurprising, wildly cliché events with dull, obvious characters that are trying so heavy-handedly to make you feel something they alienate the audience completely. Sorry writers, but giving me less than 5mins to wonder why someone dislikes fire before flat-out telling me is super boring.

The episode's dull writing can't be saved by the mediocre acting, and it leaves me feeling disappointed that a project that could have been so promising and so interesting is off to such a soulless start.

Very much enjoyed the first episode, the action is well choreographed, sort of reminds me of the matrix and it does well to create intrigue with mystery and many different points of view. It does leave me unsure at this point in time what the necessity of this show will be, what it wants to tell us that we haven't discovered through previous projects, but I imagine in time we will find that out.

Lee Jung-jae fits so perfectly into this universe and his line delivery has you hanging to his every word. You can feel Master Sol's regret and sympathy for Osha and whatever the situation was and it will be interesting to see exactly what those details are. Yord comes across as a bit of a people pleaser, desperate for approval at the moment, I'll be curious to see more to better understand him and also his connection to Osha which so far we only know they had from their first on screen interaction.

It's hard for me to take a lot of the review-bombing and actual negative reception for Star Wars content seriously anymore. Why should I be avoiding a series because it has queer characters, POC characters or actors who are queer and POC?

I do think a lot of people just lost interest in Star Wars content somewhere around Book of Boba Fett and Obi-Wan Kenobi, though. And I have finally got around to reading actual criticism for this series and so far, I can sort of understand some of it.

This pilot was a bit rough. I'm not sold on all of the acting, some of the logic doesn't make sense, and admittedly, some of the dialogue is very on-the-nose or just... not great.

In contrast, some of the acting is actually pretty good, and I am legitimately invested in this story. A Star Wars mystery? Hey, why not?

Star Wars space logic really is kind of silly. I still remember in Clone Wars when Anakin was jumping around in space as if gravity doesn't exist😂Makes you wonder why they don't bother with stuff like that.

But all-in-all, I don't hate it so far. The production isn't as bad as people led me to believe, nor is the plot. I will continue watching.