The Acolyte

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.

Quite literally the worst Star Wars project since the Holiday Special. It actively changes the Star Wars universe, the nature of the Force, and all of the canon that has come before. It's straight garbage, written by people with no respect for the franchise, and directed by people with no capability of creating a TV show. It's profoundly senseless.

Poorly written, poorly acted, poorly edited, and poorly paced. The entire show appears to be little more than a vanity project full of self-inserts rather than real characters. The decisions made by the characters don't make sense and break immersion constantly. The concepts introduced seem to be little more than whims, with no reasoning behind them and no explanation as to why they don't line up with franchise canon.

The idea behind the story may be decent, but the writer/showrunner is far too vain and inept to give it a proper attempt.

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 love Star Wars. I grew up on the original trilogy. I can remember being so excited when Return of the Jedi previews were aired on TV and even more excited when my family and I were in the theater and the scrawl started. I like the prequel trilogy well enough. And while I did like the Force Awakens, I admit the following movies had their faults. Some pretty big ones, actually. But the acting was always pretty top notch (Anakin Skywalker being the exception).

All that being said, the acting in this series is a failure. I want to acknowledge that Lee Jung-jae was fantastic. He put this show on his shoulders and carried it all the way through this season. The exact opposite can be said for the "star" of the series, Amandla Stenberg. She is quite possibly the worst actress I have ever seen on any screen, big or small. She is not believable in any scene she appears in, regardless of the mood or tone of that scene. She has single-handedly ruined this series for me. And the fact that she has to pull double duty makes it even worse. While the characters she portrays are twins they clearly have different personalities, their lives having taken very different courses. But unfortunately for the viewer, you must interpret that separately from what you see, as Amandla plays both characters the exact same way... poorly. She is near constantly wide eyed for no discernible reason and it looks as though you can see her mind telling her that she is supposed to be expressive, but the expression looks more like constipation rather than anything going within the script.

I was excited and looking forward to a Star Wars series with an African American female leading character to drive the show. I could not have been more disappointed in the result. I'm sure they don't want to recast for a potential second season, but they should strongly consider it.

While the story itself seemed interesting enough and if you're willing to overlook some pretty glaring moments of "why would they do that?" then it's not a horrible entry into the Star Wars canon. But you really have to dig deep to look beyond the atrocious acting out in by Stenberg and a couple other cast members.

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.