The Acolyte

Episode 1 was hard to watch. Writing on this series so far is at the CW level, and toward the low end of that. The casting, or miscasting perhaps, is baffling. The lead looks too young for the character she portrays, and lacks seriously in presence. The character isn't interesting to boot. What was the thinking behind assigning her this acting task? Other characters suffer from the same mismatch problems. It's as if the characters and their actors were drawn out of a hat.

Onto other issues. Dialog is clunky. As an example during a fight, one character asks another why they are there. Answer: to kill you. If killing with excess cringe were STAR WARS canon, this would be a dangerous weapon for THE ACOLYTE.

Kung-fu action is another main theme for this series. Why? It doesn't look like STAR WARS. Could we get some explanation why the fighting style is suddenly front and center?

In sum, THE ACOLYTE is a poorly written mess out the gate, and it suffers from an apparent general lack of understanding in regard to the STAR WARS universe. Overall showrunning on this one is poor.

The acolyte isn't the worst thing thats happened to Star Wars by any means. However, it resembles something that was fan made and written over a weekend. The acting and production is college level at most. You'd think with a budget that was almost double of Ahsoka's they would have been able to come up with something better. I have no clue where the money went to be frank, because it didn't go towards hiring any talent as far as acting goes. Maybe they went with lower level actors/actresses to go all out on the production, but if that was the case they failed. The money 100% didn't go to the writers, they had to of bought this story off Fiver.

Then I've seen episode one and two of The Acolyte.

Eight episodes at $180 million or $22.5 million per episode. In terms of production, I get the impression of a cheap 80s science fiction, there was nothing here that would indicate $22.5 million per episode.

Roger Corman could have made both of these episodes in the 80s for less than $100,000 each. When I have seen the first two episodes of The Acolyte, I get a cheap feeling of a bad and cheap CW production which in recent years has often had a bad script, bad actors and a low budget.

Among the actors, Lee Jung-jae was in a class of his own, otherwise there was a lot of stiff and poor acting from some of the actors, which can often be caused by bad directing.

Plot, script and dialogue were often unforgivably bad and stupid and are totally illogical. I don't understand how it is possible to write such bad scripts as we see in some TV series and movies nowadays. Has anyone at Disney approved the script before it goes into production?

I wasn't a big fan of Ahsoka, all the senators and generals were stupid and inept to such an extent that I sided with the Empire.

However, Ahsoka was much better with better actors and it was more grandiose and magnificent with many more and better effects and seemed like a much more expensive production.

I'm just baffled who this series is aimed at? I get that reinvention is a good thing, but the conflicting and contradictory nature of so much of this show seems almost designed to annoy people that like Star Wars. Is the play here that they are trying to alienate the current fan base and instead find a large new audience? I really don't think this can possibly work. It's really starting to feel like just making something people that like Star Wars would actually watch is something they are actively trying to avoid.

It's kind of depressing on so many levels. It's now starting to feel like the brand that Star Wars was is just not what they want Star Wars to be. When I think about the endless stories they could make instead, that would not exclude new audiences and still excite old audiences, it's just bizarre how we end up here. With such a middling show that seems to be made for an imaginary audience.

I guess the good thing about trying to alienate an audience is that eventually all of us feeling disappointment and then writing about, it will just stop caring anymore so there will be less people complaining. Maybe that's what Disney want?

Take one of the most exciting and expansive fictional universes with iconic characters and storylines... then just tear it up without respect to its original mythos, lore, etc. That's the path of destruction that Disney has been on, save Andor, Rogue One, and to an extent, the Mandalorian.

It's sad because I'm sure lots of talented professionals worked on this. Tragically, the writing and acting is truly terrible. Special effects are great, but that's not enough to compensate for all its other flaws.

As a fan, I want to give it zero stars. Out of respect for the special effects artists, I'm giving 3.