May 4th, also known as Star Wars Day because “may the fourth be with you” and all that, fell over the weekend, and I totally blanked on it.
Star Wars as a narrative universe has so consistently failed to do anything interesting since its reemergence under Disney that I have kind of just given up on it, but that means I missed the trailer for The Acolyte, a new series coming to Disney+ in June, starring Amandla Stenberg and Jodie Turner-Smith. Now that the Met Gala fog has cleared, and with Lainey reminding me this trailer exists, let’s take a look at The Acolyte.
It looks good! Of course, all Star Wars things look good in the beginning. And the cast is amazing but show me a Star Wars cast that isn’t stacked. Like DC Films, casting and trailers are never the problem with Star Wars. Besides Stenberg and Turner-Smith, The Acolyte stars Lee Jung-jae (who learned English for the role), Manny Jacinto as the Han Solo type (GREAT casting), Dafne Keen, Charlie Barnett, and Carrie-Anne Moss as a Jedi master. Excellent cast, no notes. The series is created by Leslye Headland of Russian Doll and Bachelorette fame.
Stenberg stars as a disillusioned Padawan who may or may not be killing Jedi. Jodie Turner-Smith plays the leader of a coven of “Force witches”, so, Force users/not Jedi. THIS is actually interesting to me, to see how people other than Jedi use the Force, something Star Wars has, to date, stubbornly refused to show us. (They had a chance! Rey could have gone there!) The series is set during the “High Republic”, which is the era when the Jedi were at the peak of their powers, several centuries before the events depicted in the original trilogy.
I have always loved the mystique of the High Republic era. The world of Star Wars SHOULD be big, and the High Republic always felt like a boundaryless extension of the original movies, a time when the Jedi were powerful but not yet held separate from the people, when the Force was still widely accepted and used in a wide variety of ways. The films were always hamstrung by the basic fact that Luke only knew what little bits Yoda and Obi-Wan managed to teach him, his understanding as a Jedi was basically infantile. That’s why it was so exciting when he turned up in The Last Jedi with those ancient Jedi texts—all the lost knowledge! Right there! At Rey’s fingertips! And it went nowhere. BUT I DIGRESS.
Can The Acolyte fix Star Wars’ inbred narrative problem? I don’t know. It LOOKS good, the High Republic setting is promising, this is certainly an opportunity to tell a story in the world of Star Wars that doesn’t have to connect back to f-cking Skywalkers, but at this point, I just don’t trust the Star Wars creative team. They insist on shoving everything into the “Skywalker box”. If they can get through eight episodes of The Acolyte without mentioning “Skywalker” or making any character related to someone in the original trilogy, I will be washed clean in the fair light of a new day and have my faith in Star Wars as an expansive narrative universe restored. But going eight entire hours without saying “Skywalker” is a real challenge for the Star Wars brain trust.
Attached – Jodie Turner-Smith in her Met Gala after-party outfit.
