The following Star Wars: The Acolyte review contains spoilers for episodes one and two.
In November of 2020, Disney announced over ten new series set in the Star Wars universe that would hit the streaming service in the coming years. Among these was The Acolyte, a mystery thriller set over a hundred years before the earliest set film in the series timeline The Phantom Menace. It would be helmed by Leslye Headland, the executive producer of the Netflix time-loop dramedy Russian Doll. The Acolyte was also unique among these announced shows in that it was pretty much the only offering that didn’t center on a previously existing character or serve as a spin-off to familiar shows like The Mandalorian. The Acolyte was an enigma, and that was an exciting change of pace for a franchise that has rightly been criticized in recent years for becoming increasingly self-interested and risk averse.
In the spring of 2023, Headland called her initial pitch for the series “Kill Bill meets Frozen” which is about as wild a logline as I can think of, but, oddly enough, it feels like a pretty accurate description. Although it does comfortably sit within a mystery-thriller framework, The Acolyte is just as much a martial arts revenge story about two sisters dragged into opposing sides of a mythic, centuries long conflict.
The series premiere “Lost / Found” opens up with a masked assailant, played by Amandla Stenberg of Bodies Bodies Bodies fame, attacking Jedi Master Carrie Ann Moss (she has an in-universe name but like, come on, it’s Carrie-Anne Moss) in an alien saloon. The fight that follows is sprawling, dynamic, and wonderfully choreographed. Rather than the familiar lightsaber duels or Old West style blaster shootouts, The Acolyte drops into a Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon-esque wire-fu set piece that sees Stenberg and Moss performing fantastical acrobatic flips, parries, dodges, and kicks. Given that Star Wars has pretty much always been about an order of magical space monks, it feels strange that it took almost 50 years for the series to try its hands at martial arts cinema, but it’s a natural fit and an absolute thrill to watch unfold.
The fallout of this attack unsettles a universe where the Sith are nothing but an uneasy whisper of the past, the Jedi are at the height of their institutional power, and an attempted assassination on a Master of the Order in such a public setting by a mysterious Force user raises uncomfortable questions. It’s this change-up in the traditional series power dynamics that seems to most interest Headland. While traditional Star Wars narratives have almost always been underdog stories about outgunned heroes fighting against villains wielding overwhelming power, The Acolyte flips the script. The typically heroic Jedi are willing enforcers of the status-quo, and the powers of the Dark Side are forced to work from the shadows to survive. While Headland clearly isn’t trying to paint the Sith and their sinister allies as heroes, The Acolyte does aim to muddy the script a little. Even if it faltered in its execution, George Lucas’s prequel trilogy of films showcased a Jedi Order that was too caught up in political maneuvering and detached from the lived realities of everyday people to protect themselves and others from their enemies. We see the beginnings of that institutional failure here. The Jedi still might be guardians of peace and justice, but they certainly act a whole lot like laser-sword wielding cops, who are quick to judgement and too comfortable falling back on dehumanizing regulation and procedure when faced with harder questions. It’s a far cry from the spiritually attuned and morally altruistic knights that Obi-Wan Kenobi opined to Luke about back in 1977.
It’s in this dynamic shift that Headland allows the central conflict of The Acolyte to really come into focus. The masked assassin is mistakenly identified as former Padawan Osha Aniseya, also played by Stenberg (you should probably be able to tell where this is going), who left the Order under mysterious circumstances several years prior. Osha’s former master Sol, portrayed by Squid Games’ Lee Jung-Jae, is tasked by his superiors on the Jedi Council with bringing her in for questioning, even if he doubts that she is the real assailant in question.
As opposed to his more dogmatic fellow Jedi, Sol comes across as an empathetic man who can express his emotions and affections for those close to him while balancing his spiritual and professional duties. Jung-jae sells Sol’s warmth and wisdom with ease and quickly earns the viewer’s trust as one of the emotional hearts of The Acolyte’s ensemble. Yet, he too is maybe hiding darker secrets. We learn midway through the premiere that Sol was present during Osha’s recruitment into the Order as a child and that during this incident her twin sister, Mae, perished alongside her parents in a violent fire. However, as the Jedi present alongside Sol at this incident begin to drop dead and the masked assailant at the center of the murders is revealed to be a very much still alive Mae, it becomes clear there is much more to this story than we are being told. The Jedi have been covering up something awful, and the consequences of this lie are finally coming to roost. And Mae isn’t working alone. She’s been trained for this quest for vengeance by a mysterious figure who wears a black, grinning mask and wields a red lightsaber.
Stenberg is the clear scene-stealer in The Acolyte. While she hasn’t had the opportunity to do much Parent Trap-style acting off her digital double as of this point in the series, Stenberg still succeeds in selling Osha and Mae as connected but undeniably unique people. Osha comes across as warm and sometimes playful but hides a tired world weariness within her. Mae, in contrast, is steely and deliberate in her actions, driven by a violent passion. In both roles, Stenberg excels. They feel as at home in Mae’s martial arts heavy assassinations as they do in Osha’s melancholic reunions with her former Master and fellow Jedi. While the larger implications for Jedi and Sith history are likely enough to keep most Star Wars die-hards hooked on The Acolyte, the story Headland and Stenberg are telling about these two lost and hurt sisters looks to be the emotional hook that will carry the series going forward.
It also, unfortunately, is where The Acolyte is stumbling the most at the moment. Seeing as the mystery at the series’ center isn’t so much a “whodunnit” as a “whydunnit,” it makes sense that a certain degree of our characters’ pasts will be hidden from the viewer until the pieces begin to fall into place. But at times, it does feel like Headland is asking a bit too much of the viewer given that almost every central character, particularly Osha and Mae, is motivated by secrets that are only beginning to be teased out. While The Acolyte is mostly able to skirt by given how well its cast sells the emotional context of each scene, the degree of narrative withholding Headland is attempting here threatens to undermine a lot of this otherwise strong character work. In turn, this confusion makes some of the rougher editing and pacing decisions made across the two-episode premiere feel a bit more apparent than they might be otherwise. This might all be smoothed over as The Acolyte pulls us deeper into its web of secrets and hidden agendas, but the success of this will come down to execution and in the moment storytelling. Maybe I’ve just been burned by watching too many shows fail to deliver on satisfying answers to their central mysteries, but I’m not quite ready to place my trust in The Acolyte to pull this all off.
It does help that The Acolyte looks great though. While previous Star Wars outings offered by Disney+ have often felt claustrophobic in their CG-heavy digital sets or perhaps a bit too grounded to be a part of such a traditionally colorful setting, The Acolyte feels tactile but also alien. Its sets are constructed with a clear attention to hand-crafted detail and are populated with all manner of wonderfully designed alien creatures and droids brought to life with a delightful mixture of creative costuming, puppetry, and digital effects. If you are a viewer that looks to Star Wars for spectacle, The Acolyte has you covered even as it aims for a more intimate take on this universe and not the grand scale visuals that define some of its cinematic counterparts.
But, this is Autostraddle, so you’re likely waiting for me to answer the most important question of all: “Is it gay?”
Well, it certainly has the potential to be. No Star Wars production ever has had this much prominent queer talent on screen and behind the scenes. Stenberg is joined by Charlie Barnett, who formerly worked with Headland on Russian Doll, and Rebecca Henderson, star of Single Drunk Female and Headland’s wife, who both play more straightlaced, by-the-books members of the Jedi Order. And although they aren’t present in the two-episode premiere, we do know The Acolyte will feature trans YouTuber and actress, Abigail Thorn, in a supporting role and that Jen Richards (Mrs. Fletcher, Her Story) will be co-writing at least one episode of the series.
It remains yet to be seen whether any of this will actually translate to queer stories on screen. Even though Headland more or less agreed the series could be “the gayest Star Wars yet,” the jury is still out. Granted, it wouldn’t take much for The Acolyte to claim this title given that its sharpest competition is Andor, which features two (admittedly badass) lesbians in its rather sprawling ensemble. The queerest aspect of The Acolyte so far is a very brief reference to the fact that Osha and Mae had two mothers (who are already long dead by the time the series has started), but we do still have six episodes to go this season, so this all could very well change.
Of course, this hasn’t stopped the ever-present and always obnoxious arm of the Star Wars fandom — who are convinced Lucasfilm president Kathleen Kennedy is on a personal crusade to eliminate all straight cis white men from the Galaxy Far, Far Away — from losing their collective shit about The Acolyte and review bombing the show on various sites and platforms like IMDB and Rotten Tomatoes. It’s all a part of the unfortunate paradox that the franchise seems unable to escape from. Somehow, despite the series’ fairly lackluster history of queer characters on screen and a slightly better, but still fraught portrayal of women and people of color, Star Wars has managed to become an inflection point for culture war grifters who claim that it’s become a radically queer Marxist text. I fucking wish. (Oddly enough, this description would more or less apply to Andor, but the grifter crowd seem to find that show too boring to actually have much to say about it.)
Given how vocally nasty the fandom has become over the last decade, I respect a publicly visible lesbian like Leslye Headland for agreeing to make The Acolyte in the first place and even more so for casting a nonbinary person of color as her lead. Sure, it may not be an act of extreme bravery to take a showrunner job for the biggest media conglomerate on the planet, but in no reality was Headland not aware of the sort of online abuse that would be thrown her way during her time making this show. The fact that she’s remained such a warm and positive public presence throughout her time working on this show is commendable.
And, thankfully, the show is pretty good! There are some rough patches and, like most mysteries, much of the success of The Acolyte as a whole may come down to just how dramatic the secrets hiding at its tangled web turn out being, but this is undeniably a Star Wars story with a vision, mythic ideas, and loads of visual spectacle. The fact that we have six more episodes to go of Jedi murders, creepy Sith, Force Kungfu, and, hopefully, space gays, is enough to keep me happy at the moment.