There is a great disturbance in the Force.
When it comes to fandoms, few are as divided as Star Wars, where it seems every new release or announcement is met with its very own little culture war. It’s only getting worse and it’s not hard to see why.
The vision of what a galaxy far, far away should look like differs wildly from one person to the next. That’s a top-down problem in many respects. Disney’s sequel trilogy was a jumbled mess. Even its various creators couldn’t agree on where the story was going, let alone what this new, revived version of Star Wars ought to become. I’m still baffled that Kathleen Kennedy and J.J. Abrams and the rest of the sequel trilogy shot-callers didn’t come up with a coherent three-movie story from the get-go. It’s one of the great unforced errors of modern cinema. So much potential squandered. As a Star Wars fan since as far back as I can remember, it’s just another heartbreaker. But hey, somehow Palpatine returned.
Disney launched its streaming service, Disney Plus, and with it an exciting new series. The Mandalorian was the first live-action Star Wars TV show and it was an instant success thanks to Pedro Pascal’s strong-but-silent Mando and the incredible introduction of Baby Yoda. The show and the service launched just before The Rise Of Skywalker. There was promise in the air.
The Force Divided
Since then, it’s been a pretty mixed bag, and that’s putting it mildly. Rise of Skywalker was a mess; a hodge-podge of competing visions that left the fandom deflated. On the streaming side, however, things were a little bit brighter. It didn’t last.
The Mandalorian had two pretty strong seasons, but fell apart in Season 3. The Book Of Boba Fett was a weirdly feckless affair, that did little to encourage fans that Disney had a coherent vision for the space opera. The show was only partially saved by the arrival of Mando, but even then it undid much of what The Mandalorian’s second season set up with Luke Skywalker effectively just handing Grogu back rather than training him in the ways of the Jedi. It was clear that Disney wasn’t interested in taking narrative risks, playing it safe at almost every turn.
The much-hyped Obi-Wan Kenobi with Ewan McGregor reprising his role as the popular Jedi Master in hiding fell flat. Many observed that there was about enough story in the series to fill one decent movie. The rest was filler. And young princess Leia was a massive misfire. More’s the pity. At least we know she grew up to be one of the most awesome characters in all of Star Wars.
Ahsoka had its moments, but Dave Filoni’s attempt to make the leap from Rebels and Clone Wars to live-action never quite worked. Something was lost in translation.
Only Andor really stuck the landing thanks to its incredible writing and production values, but it was headier stuff than many Star Wars fans were accustomed to, and many passed. Cassian Andor (Diego Luna) is a minor figure in the big scheme of things, and there were no Jedi and no lightsabers and no Sith. It was a masterpiece, a diamond in the rough, but not necessarily a crowd pleaser.
During all this time, no new movies hit theaters. Solo made sure of that. The powers that be at Disney and Lucasfilm put all their efforts into streaming, and by and large those efforts had disappointing results. The movies that have been announced have either been canned or met with dubious reactions from fans.
So it’s little wonder than The Acolyte has been so divisive. I’ve made my own feelings about the show well-known. I am one of the few critics out there who finds it incredibly bland and poorly written. Fans, on the other hand, have taken to Rotten Tomatoes and social media, and many are unhappy. The way the culture wars have taken root in pop culture, the debate around The Acolyte has become, shall we say, fraught.
The Fandom Menace?
Even on IMDB, the audience score reflects a growing disenchantment with Star Wars, where The Acolyte has a meager 3.3/10 rating. Does it deserve this low of a score? Or a 13% user score on Rotten Tomatoes (in stark contrast to its 85% critic rating)? Probably not. I rate it somewhere around the same quality as Boba Fett or Obi-Wan: Quite poorly, in other words, but not necessarily any worse (though that witch chant takes the cake for cringiest Star Wars moment since Disney took over).
This is not necessarily a reflection of The Acolyte’s quality in a vacuum, however. This is the result of years of growing apathy and dismay.
These super low scores following a flood of reviews (over 25,000 on Rotten Tomatoes, far more than most Star Wars shows) is referred to as “review-bombing” and that’s a fair description. But I think review-bombing has a place in modern online culture. I don’t believe it’s entirely trolls giving the show bad reviews. I don’t think it’s just a bunch of racists and sexists, either. Sure, they are out there and they certainly make their unpleasant views known.
Nor do I think we should simply write off these reviews as dishonest or politically motivated. For many of us, there is simply a sense that the Star Wars we know and love—and have loved for decades, since we were but young padawans—has been utterly changed for the worse by people who don’t understand or appreciate what made this franchise great to begin with.
Frankly, this sense of crushing disappointment has been with me since long before the House of Mouse got its greedy mitts on Star Wars. The prequels were a huge letdown. Perhaps the greatest letdown I ever felt at the movies was The Phantom Menace. Worse, George Lucas’s edits to the original trilogy remain, in my humblest of opinions, a uniquely terrible tragedy of meddling and arrogance. The fact that I can’t watch the original original trilogy on a 4K Blu-ray disc makes me horribly, unreasonably sad.
I discuss more of this, and why I think fans would welcome diversity and strong female protagonists in Star Wars if only Disney took a radically different—and, dare I say, radically more lucrative—approach in my latest newsletter. For now, we can only hope that Lucasfilm will pay attention not just to the loudest, most noxious voices out there, and not just to the culture warriors on both sides of the flame wars, but to fans who badly want Star Wars not just to survive, but to thrive. We want great stories and great characters we can root for; nothing more, nothing less.
This is the way.
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