So we’re back in a galaxy far far away (again) with the sixth spin-off show of the Disney+ Star Wars era.
The Acolyte, comes with a great cast – from His Dark Materials star Dafne Keen to The Hunger Games’ Amandla Stenberg, and Lee Jung-jae, who stole the show as the lead in Squid Game. Plus, there’s the iconic Carrie-Anne Moss, who has graduated from the Matrix to using the Force as Jedi Master Indara.
But the record for Star Wars spin off shows has been mixed: for each Mandalorian and Andor, there is a Book of Boba Fett and Ahsoka. So where does this one sit? The answer, frustratingly, is probably somewhere in the middle.
The Acolyte plunges viewers back in time when the Galactic Empire was but a twinkle in Emperor Palpatine’s eye: 100 years before its beginnings. The Jedi reign supreme, but because it would be boring to live in a utopia, the Sith are still there, just training in the shadows, waiting for their moment to strike.
Into this powder keg steps Osha (Stenberg), a former Jedi who has turned from the path and now makes a living as a ship’s mechanic. You can tell she’s a goodie because she has the requisite cute droid, in this case named Pip.
Osha just wants a quiet life but trouble comes knocking when she’s arrested for the murder of a prominent Jedi.
Of course, it’s not her, but is in fact her evil twin Mae (also played by Stenberg), from whom she was separated as a child and who has turned to the Dark Side to seek revenge for some mysterious events that happened in their past. And so Osha escapes and sets off to reconnect with Mae and figure out why she’s so dead-set on offing some of the Galaxy’s best and brightest.
This is all with the help of a gang of Jedi misfits and rogues headed up by her previous mentor Sol (Lee) and Jecki (Keen, drowning slightly under all her makeup), his Padawan.
Fortunately, this ramshackle team work well together. The acting is solid – Stenberg is especially good as both the conflicted Osha and malicious Mae – but the same cannot always be said for the plot, which pings around the galaxy for the first few episodes, with little more reason but to cram as much of the Galaxy into viewers’ eyeballs as possible.
And there is a lot of it. In The Acolyte we see the insides of sandy temples, frozen wastelands and the Jedi home planet of Coruscant, all of which looks gorgeous (worldbuilding has always been one of Star Wars’ strongest points) featuring aliens that could have been ripped straight from the 1970s.
But there are plenty of Force-related contrivances which will leave many rolling their eyes, chief among them the visions Mae and Osha have of each other, which conveniently lead them into compromising locations.
It feels very Star Wars, but also a little old... as does the dialogue, which veers towards the grandiose and convoluted. “Attack me with all your strength!” one person cries repeatedly at the start of every battle. Sure.
It does deliver some rollicking adventure, and all the tropes you’d expect in a Star Wars show – from lightsabres to beeping droids – but doesn’t really offer anything new to the universe in the way that Andor did, and ultimately feels a bit forced.
Stenberg, though, is eminently watchable: a twin threat who manages to elevate the series above all the hamminess. If only the lines were better.
