The Acolyte's 'New Andor Promise' Fails to Impress: It's Even Worse Than The Book of Boba Fett

On June 4, the first two episodes of a new series set in a galaxy far, far away debuted on Disney+. The Acolyte adds a detective twist to the Star Wars formula, but it doesn't seem to be a big deal either for fans or casual viewers.

Beware: the following text contains spoilers.

Detective Line Development and Acting Leave Much to Be Desired

The first episodes of The Acolyte leave you with mixed feelings. First of all, the choice of genre plays a cruel joke with the story. The detective component seems unconvincing: first they try to convince us that Osha committed the murders, but already in the second episode we learn that her lost twin sister is to blame for everything, and that is too soap-opera-like a twist even for Star Wars.

Second, literally almost every role is not very convincingly played. Amandla Stenberg in the two main roles seems to be too straight: Osha turns out to be nice and smiling, while Mae walks around frowning. Lee Jung-jae sounds like he is just reading lines from a sheet of paper. And Charlie Barnett plays a caricatured, arrogant Jedi knight.

So far, the only character who seems alive is Jecki played by Dafne Keen; even under a layer of alien makeup, she's the only one who doesn't feel like a person made of cardboard.

The Acolyte Fails to Keep Its Promises

The biggest failure is that The Acolyte is far from what it promised to be. The Acolyte, the creator of the series Leslye Headland admits, takes its cues from Andor, a series that changes the optics of the franchise, turning the confrontation between the Empire and the Rebels into a tense political thriller with gray morality.

The Acolyte's "ambiguous" view of the confrontation between good and evil in the first two episodes is manifested only in the fact that the Jedi look like straight-forward cops. And what's new here, when George Lucas already exposed the Jedi Order as an outdated bureaucratic structure with obscure rules in the prequel trilogy?

Star Wars Fans Are Disappointed, and for Good Reason

Currently, The Acolyte has a 94% positive rating on Rotten Tomatoes from critics, who mostly praise its cast and fast pacing. However, even the positive reviews on Rotten Tomatoes note that the show does not live up to its promise of being something in the spirit of Andor.

The first audience reviews are rather negative — the user rating on Rotten Tomatoes is 39%.

Fans are not excited, not because it promises to be something as revolutionary as Andor, but because The Acolyte itself is just an extremely underwhelming project.

“I don’t like it so far, and I love all the Star Wars content save for Book of Boba. The dialogue feels written specifically for plot exposition alone at the expense of natural-sounding conversations. [...] This all just feels really, really clunky,” Reddit user jaynort wrote.

So far, The Acolyte feels like another run-of-the-mill installment — one that you want to put on the same shelf as The Book of Boba Fett and Obi-Wan Kenobi.

Sure, the lightsaber-less hand-to-hand combat is cool, but almost every other aspect of the show feels like a failure — a rather weak detective story with flat characters and a supposedly revolutionary attempt to reimagine the Sith and Jedi that doesn't really offer anything that Star Wars hasn't already done.