The Acolyte

There are a two positive traits here. The production value is (mostly) high, and as always with star wars the sound design and music score is great. Well, not $180 million good... but the show look at least $50 millon good...

Sadly the money spent on making this (mostly) look and sound good is also the only positives.

From the very start the dialogue is so cringe inducing I was almost throwing up. This feels like it has been written by a 9yo fangirl of Darth Kennedy. Some tiny little girl, filled with hatred of star wars and loathing of Star Wars fans, became the acolyte of Kathleen Kennedy and was then given hundreds of millions to put her incoherent thoughts down as a TV show. That is what this feels like.

The story, as far is there is one, is likewise confusing and make little to no sense. The acting is so poor I can only deduce they found these "actors" (I use the term very loosely) in a parking lot at KFC.

And on this show we get a fire in space. Yes, so that happened... And then we got a fire that burns from stone, burning down a mountain... what the.... I don't think the showrunners know how even fire works.

This is so bad, so badly done, so badly acted, so cringe, that when you see this surrounded by high production value your brain goes tilt. There is a disconnect and weird feeling coming over you. How did this become made? And who green-lit throwing this much money at someones hateful school play?

I give an extra point for the production value and sound design, plus I could not help myself laughing at the bad acting and cringe dialogue. Laughter is always nice. But 2/10 do feel like a too high score.

This is really bad TV, with the worst acting ever seen on this level. If you like star wars, stay away from this disaster. And if you do watch leave your cringe-o-meter at home because it will explode because this is super cringe. Your spine will crackle and your eyes will explode cringe.

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.

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.

I started watching this with the hope to be entertained. I was disappointed. When the Jedi said to a complete stranger "yes my child?" I knew the writing was going to be bad. The characters are forgettable and unlikable which causes me to have no interest in any of the actions of plots of the show. Only two episodes in and I decided to look at the reviews and saw 10s...these are obviously fake and it's just pathetic to see people doing this. This is horrible entertainment. The effects should definitely be better since it's easy to tell they put a lot of money into it. Instead they should've put more money into a neutral and invested writer to lead the writing department. Extreme HARD PASS. Watched the latest...wow how these horrible writers and set designers getting these jobs?

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.