Forbes were one of the few among the Critics on Rotten Tomatoes to resist towing the pro-Disney line and write what they really thought about
The Acolyte.
Erik KainForbes
Rotten score.
'The Acolyte' is a deeply bland, relentlessly mediocre 'Star Wars' show that pairs some cool fight scenes with wooden dialogue and a predictable mystery.
Jun 7, 2024
Their full review:
The Critics Must Be Crazy — ‘The Acolyte’ Is Just Another Mediocre ‘Star Wars’ Show
Erik Kain
Senior Contributor
I write about TV shows, movies, video games, entertainment & culture.
Updated Jun 7, 2024, 01:06pm EDT
The critics must be crazy. I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again. This time, it’s
Star Wars: The Acolyte that has aroused the profoundly odd sensibilities of the professional media class. That and the broken aggregation system that is Rotten Tomatoes.
The latest show from the House Of Mouse is fine (at best) but you wouldn’t know it perusing the internet. Behold:
That’s a wide divide. There are many reasons for it. We’ll get there momentarily. First:
A Long Time Ago In A Galaxy Far, Far Away . . .
Seriously, it was a
long time ago. 100 years before the rise of the Empire.
The Acolyte takes place in the High Republic’s final days, just before the long era of peace and prosperity came crashing down into turmoil and strife—at least partly thanks to the arrogance of the Jedi Order itself. Partly, too, thanks to a mysterious new villain who (we can only hope) turns out to be Darth Plagueis.
It’s a cool idea for a new
Star Wars setting that before now we’ve only seen in games, comics and books. We’ve been stuck in the Skywalker era for so long. Even a show like
Andor which has no Jedi and never mentions the Force or Luke Skywalker, still takes place within the years of the Imperial rise and fall. It’s a breath of fresh air to see a
Star Wars show actually branch out.
Unfortunately,
The Acolyte retains many of the franchise’s worst habits and does next to nothing with the new setting that makes it actually feel new. This could be set two years before the prequel trilogy and nobody would be the wiser.
I wrote a review covering the first two episodes of the show before I’d watched the next two.
You can read that right here. It’ll catch you up on the story without too many spoilers. I was tentatively optimistic after two episodes. I’ve become decidedly less so after four. Quite frankly, even if the final four episodes of the season turn out to be fantastic, the first four will hold it back from greatness. And how often does a series get that much better in its second half?
Disney and the show’s creators have billed this series as a “darker” delve into
Star Wars. Critics have echoed this sentiment, calling it
a show that makes “bold choices.”
Inverse says that
The Acolyte is “An experimental, galvanizing standalone story that establishes a new caliber of what Star Wars TV can do.” Galvanizing! New caliber!
Gosh, we must be watching different shows.
Elsewhere we get such quotes as:
- “'The Acolyte' presents in its first few episodes, a dashing adventure of mystery, action, impressive fight sequences and a cat and mouse game that keeps you intrigued from one episode to the next.”
- “Showrunner Leslye Headland, best known as the co-creator of the Netflix series Russian Doll, breathes new life into the Star Wars universe with The Acolyte.”
- “[Leslye] Headland has created one of the best Star Wars series to date making it a character driven revenge story over one relying on copious action scenes, light sabers battles or legacy characters to drive the series.”
Again, I feel like I’m living in an alternative universe reading these, one in which being a critic no longer requires you to be critical, but rather rewards you for simply liking the Right Things and disliking the Wrong Things. One of these quotes gushes over the “impressive fight sequences” while another says it doesn’t rely on “copious action scenes.” But really, the number of reviews calling this some version of a “compelling mystery” or a “riveting thriller” or “STAR WARS HAS NEVER DONE THIS THING BEFORE’ simply boggles my mind. None of this is even remotely true. I say this as someone who has been mildly entertained by this series so far and will gladly watch the next four episodes. But really, you have to be realistic about these things. The only ground being broken here is in the cemetery where they bury our hopes and dreams.
Nothing here, beyond the era, is actually all that new. And very little about it is particularly compelling or well-written. It is, however, very, very diverse and I suspect that this focus on diversity drives a great deal of both the positive critical reception and negative audience reviews. When you commit so utterly to making a social cause the thing that defines your show, you effectively guarantee that it becomes just another shouting match in the never-ending culture wars. As I’ve noted elsewhere, there are better ways to approach this (
Andor!)
Many positive critic reviews are . . . less crazy, however. They’re marked Fresh on Rotten Tomatoes, but they include phrases such as:
There are tons of these, and because Rotten Tomatoes is a binary—Rotten or Fresh—there’s no middle-ground upon which they can fall. Another juicy tomato: Many critics don’t even pick whether their review should be regarded as “Fresh” or “Rotten.” They have that option, but Rotten Tomatoes can also just pick that for you instead. I discuss other issues with the review aggregator
in the video below:
The Acolyte Is Bombing With Audiences
Audience scores reflect another extreme. At 39% (as of this writing) the show is decidedly rotten. Is that an accurate representation of actual audience opinions? Are people just mad because
The Acolyte is so diverse? The Star Wars reddit
doesn’t seem too upset or too thrilled. I get an overall sense of ‘meh’. Maybe not 39% but far, far from 93%.
Whatever you might think on this front, most of the complaints I’ve seen so far don’t focus on the diversity issue, but rather on the stilted dialogue, predictable plotting and so forth. Mostly, longtime Star Wars fans just continue to feel generally deflated by the overall mediocrity and lack of ambition that Disney is bringing to the table. A sampling:
- “The show was watchable, which was an improvement over Obi-Wan and the listless Ahsoka but there is no sign of genuine creative ambition in this show and it suffers from the same sense of weightlessness and lack of dramatic sense as Ahsoka. The characters don't grab my interest and I haven't spent two seconds thinking about the plot during or after watching.”
- “Ugh. This is as bad as you've heard. Visually, it looks...OK, I guess? The fights are fine but being massively overrated by Disney-friendly media. The rest is a garbage fire. Terrible acting, weird pacing, bargain basement writing, and pointless changes to Star Wars mythology. It just "feels" wrong throughout, even compared to other Disney Star Wars”
- “Having thus far watched the first 2 episodes the show is just very....eh. Like a lot of folks are saying the score is fantastic & it's probably the highlight. But good sound can't carry a show. Thus far the characters are all a bit bland - I'm hopeful of further character development in the next episode.”
I’ll have more to say about the core, fundamental problems with
The Acolyte in a separate post now that I’ve watched the first four episodes, but I have to largely agree with these commenters. It’s just incredibly underwhelming. The critics gushing praise for this series sound out of touch with
Star Wars and its fandom (and what makes it tick!) and really out of touch with good writing in general.
The Acolyte is just okay. It might get better; it might get worse. Maybe the back half of the season will blow our minds. But right now?
The Acolyte is just a deeply bland Star Wars series with some cool fight scenes and a handful of cool characters who I’m afraid will ultimately be wasted, just like the cast of the sequel trilogy.
I’ve written about this before, and I’ll say it again:
Relentless mediocrity is what’s killing Star Wars and Marvel and DC and so much of pop culture. The majority of Disney’s Star Wars shows and movies have been watered-down and disappointing affairs that seem to want to capitalize on the property without bothering to understand what makes us love it to begin with. They have just enough redeeming qualities to prevent them from being truly terrible. Mostly, they’re just bland and forgettable and lacking the great charm and heroics that made the original trilogy such an iconic entry in the history of cinema.
What a shame. It could have been so much better, so much more. The unlikely existence of
Andor proves my point. A diamond in the rough. Or as the Mandalorian would put it: This is the way.
Forbes' review of Episode 3:
‘The Acolyte’ Episode 3 Review: One Of The Most Disappointing ‘Star Wars’ Episodes Ever Made
Erik Kain
Senior Contributor
I write about TV shows, movies, video games, entertainment & culture.
Jun 11, 2024,10:06pm EDT
Updated Jun 12, 2024, 02:58am EDT
The third episode of Disney’s
The Acolyte is an embarrassment to the entire franchise, though the same could be said for so much
Star Wars these days outside of
Andor and the first two seasons of
The Mandalorian.
Here’s one exchange between two characters in this latest episode:
Mae: “The Jedi are bad!”
Osha: “The Jedi are good!”
Later, the same two characters—the twin protagonist/antagonists of the story, as children in this flashback episode—say to one another: “What have you done?” “What have
you done?” “What have
YOU DONE?”
I want to ask Disney the same question:
What have you done?
This entire episode is a bad joke. We learn that Mae and Osha lived with their mothers in a society of witches, all of whom are female. It appears they were conceived using the Force. Or something. Force-using witches are also apparently frowned upon in this galaxy. They call the Force, the Thread. I’m getting Dark Side vibes here, though I’m also getting the sense that this show will try to be all edgy and make the Jedi out to be the bad guys. Which we’ve seen play out about half a dozen times at this point.
Osha and Mae fight with one another constantly and are very, very irritating throughout the episode. Osha wants to leave her people and Mae wants to stay. When the Jedi show up and ask to test the girls for their Force powers, they agree to fake not having any, but Jedi Master Sol convinces Osha not to lie, and she says she wants to be a Jedi and leave with them, against her mothers’ wishes.
Mae is upset and threatens to kill her sister, locking her in their chambers and burning the entire witch village to the ground, apparently killing everyone. It seems clear that there’s more to the story, that somehow the four Jedi—Indara, King Tommen, Wookie Jedi and Sol—are somehow complicit.
Sol saves Osha and they escape. Mae appears to fall to her death, but we know better since this is the third episode.
What a disaster.
Scattered thoughts:
- IGN says this episode offers up “a lot of tantalizing new layers to how we perceive both the Jedi and the Force” and I would like to know if we use different versions of the word “tantalizing.”
- I’m confused about the entire motivation of Mae, who wants revenge on the Jedi but is actually the one responsible for killing everybody—if, that is, anyone is actually dead (after all, both twins thought the other one was dead—it seems likely none of the witches died at all). Even if she didn’t burn everyone to death, she certainly started a fire that she certainly must believe killed Osha at the very least.
- The Jedi in episode 2 killed himself over this, it seems. If there’s not more to the story this will make absolutely no sense whatsoever.
- The witch chant was one of the lamest chants in the history of all chants. I wanted to giggle maniacally listening to it. I also wanted to cry.
- The Nightsisters are better witches. Merrin, from Star Wars Jedi Fallen Order and Survivor, is a better female witch character than anyone on this show.
- This show had something like $180 million for its budget and I cannot for the life of me tell where any of it has gone. Every world feels small. Every set feels claustrophobic. There is no sense of scale or variety. It’s all so relentlessly generic. But hey, lightsabers!
- Rewatching the escape with Sol and Osha, this room with the pile of bodies is clearly not from a fire, so yeah there’s more to this. But that doesn’t change how ludicrous the whole “I’ll kill you!” bit is, and how Mae very much tried to burn her sister to death. (Of course, it could also be bad production design, in which case maybe they did die from a fire. Or smoke?)
Regardless, what a weird way to end the episode. The girls fight. The fire spreads throughout what appears to be a stone cave (stone!) and then suddenly they’re passing all these bodies. We didn’t hear any commotion or screaming or battle. It’s more confusing than intriguing.
Also, what’s up with the tree?
Someone has captured the chant footage. This was put in an actual TV show we’re supposed to take seriously (second tweet):
jacob.
·
Jun 12, 2024
@jtimsuggs
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Tonight’s episode of
#TheAcolyte is honestly GREAT. Such a unique Star Wars story.Feels so unique, yet also reminiscent of The Phantom Menace in so many ways. Really amazing foreshadowing as to what’s to come not just in this story, but years later as well. Loved it!
I have no words.
I do have a theory, however. Imposters have taken over
Star Wars (and lots of other popular genre properties, from
The Witcher to
True Detective). Maybe they’re fans, maybe they’re not but they’re certainly masquerading as good storytellers. And they think they know best, making whatever changes they see fit to “make it their own”.
As Game Of Thrones author George R.R. Martin wrote recently:
Amen, brother.
I’d say that
Star Wars deserves better stewards, but George Lucas didn’t do a very good job of that himself in the later years. In fact,
The Acolyte keeps reminding me of the prequel trilogy in all the worst ways.
Ah well. What a shame. I’ll keep watching (obviously) and I really do hope it gets better. In fact, next week’s episode—which is too short and has an annoying cliffhanger ending—is leaps and bounds better than this one. So that’s something to look forward to! Silver linings and all that jazz.
https://www.forbes.com/sites/erikka...review-the-worst-star-wars-episode-ever-made/
that wasn't lame cringe. The real world is full of, yah know, books ripping off Tolkien, video games, other movies, that can at least some up with reasonable sing-song chants. That was gawd-awful.
Yep. Since I guess this is supposed to be some sort of embarrassing story/message to this sister of hers who wisely is laying low.
