There are three main types of Star Wars stories. There's the kind where you write whatever you want and call it Star Wars, common in the many novels published in the 1990s. There's the kind where you recycle existing Star Wars stories and make them familiar; this has been the primary way of doing things at Disney. But finally, there are the stories that enthusiastically use Star Wars as a setting to create something new. There have been several novels that fit that profile, as did the first season of Andor, and now, four episodes in, it looks like the new Star Wars series The Acolyte, set a century before the movies, also fits the bill. in that category. .
The Acolyte centers on a pair of twins, Osha and Mae (both played by Amandla Stenberg). The girls were raised by an unaffiliated coven of Force users, but despite living outside the Republic, the Jedi, including Carrie-Ann Moss's Indara, stuck their noses into these women's affairs, leading to the disaster. As a result, the sisters are separated for decades, each thinking the other is dead: Osha ends up training to be a Jedi before disappearing after a few years, and Mae, while everyone thinks she is dead, trains with a secret Sith master. When Mae emerges to hunt down and kill the Jedi who raided her coven, Osha takes the blame and gets back into Jedi affairs as they pursue her sister.
Creator: Leslye Headland
Stars: Amandla Stenberg, Dafne Keen, Jodie Turner-Smith
One thing that sets The Acolyte apart is the way it doesn't linger on the revelation that Osha and Mae are separate people: the show begins by inferring that Osha has a normal life and works as an assassin, but we learn the truth about Mae before the end of the first episode. A lesser Star Wars story would have tried to exploit that mystery for at least several episodes.
But that's one of the many common franchise mistakes that this series from showrunner Leslye Headland avoids several times during the episodes that were screened for critics. For example, every time it looks like we're about to be embroiled in some nasty, Tropoic artifact, like when the Jedi approach and find Osha standing over a dead body she'd discovered 15 seconds earlier, some character will quickly set the scene. . Let's make it clear so we don't have to waste several scenes with nonsense. It's a beautiful thing, considering how much of the modern Star Wars franchise relies on those kinds of spinning wheels.
Also, they have achieved something interesting with the aesthetics here. The Acolyte has all the same visual trappings of Star Wars and Marvel using heavy doses of CGI, but avoids seeming too reliant on that aesthetic by filming in a lot of practical settings, increasing the grain of the film and opting for a very dark look. The result isn't strikingly beautiful or anything, but it looks good and the dark grain hides the CGI quite effectively.
However, I'm much more struck by how neutral the tone of this series is, something that was probably possible due to how far removed it is from the main franchise. This is a show that has a lot of family iconography but isn't reverent about it. The Jedi are simply magical police and are not treated as inherently good; You can bring that presupposition with you when you watch The Acolyte, but the series itself doesn't reinforce that idea.
In fact, she can't because she doesn't want to treat Mae as the villain. She won't have the Darth Vader/Kylo Ren redemption arc here, because she's a victim of circumstance just like her sister, who were 8 years old when they got caught between multiple groups of Force users who wanted to control their lives. lives. future. The Acolyte is not about Osha versus Mae; he feels much more like Osha and Mae against everyone else.
The "everyone else" also includes some interesting figures, like Dafne Keen's Jedi apprentice Jecki, with whom Osha seems to develop a bond, and Manny Jacinto's Qimir, who helps Mae in her hunts. But the most memorable of these others is Jedi Master Sol, played by Squid Game's Lee Jung-jae, Osha's former master, who has a sincere desire to make up for the mistake he and the other Jedi made with the coven. He knows that he and his co-workers were the original cause of this situation and feels responsible for handling the mess that has resulted in the present. Although Lee apparently didn't know English before taking on the role, he gives what is probably the best performance on this show.
While I'm really digging the direction the show is taking through the first four episodes, there's reason to fear how this will eventually tie into the franchise's main plot.
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