I have a bad feeling about this.
There’s a new Star Wars series coming to Disney+ that I’d briefly considered maybe-possibly giving a chance when it starts streaming in June. For starters, “The Acolyte” features Carrie-Anne Moss, who I’d happily watch read the warning labels of various prescription medications I’ll (hopefully) never have to take. But most intriguing was setting the show a century before the events of the first prequel, “The Phantom Menace.”
Star Was has picked up an awful lot of baggage — some of it Woke, most of it just lazy — since Disney bought Lucasfilm ten years ago. Setting the show a hundred years before anything we’ve seen before would let “The Acolyte” clear the decks and start fresh.
Yeah, that’s not what showrunner Leslye Headland did.
Today I learned that in order to best “enjoy” the show, there’s homework you have to do.
To really understand what’s going on in “The Acolyte,” you should first watch all seven seasons of “The Clone Wars,” four seasons of “Rebels,” and three seasons of “The Bad Batch.” You should probably go back and watch that Ewoks cartoon from the ’80s, just to be safe.
a quick breakdown of the high republic’s structure. this multimedia initiative has started releasing content in 2021 broken down into these phases pic.twitter.com/7OuLf7tid1
— jaina zeveron ACOLYTE JUNE 4TH 💚💛💙💜🪶🖤🧡 (@rogueoneism) March 20, 2024
Or you can use this guy’s crib sheets. Take notes because there will be a quiz before the first episode.
This is the same mistake Disney has made with the Marvel Cinematic Universe these last four years. Various TV shows and movies are all so intertwined that it’s impossible to simply sit down in a darkened theater and enjoy the new movie. You need all the context that comes from a $13.99 a month ad-free subscription to Disney+.
It’s worse than a cash-grab; it’s a turn-off for the casual fans who make up most of the moviegoing audience.
From there, things get worse because they get Woke.
Headland never learned one of the most powerful tools in science fiction: allegory. Star Trek used 23rd-century allegories to comment on current events in the 1960s. One of the best examples was “Let That Be Your Last Battlefield,” which was a thinly veiled critique of racism. The inhabitants of planet Ariannus are all half-black (shoe polish black) and half-white (chalk white). The dominant race was black on the right side and white on the left. The oppressed were the other way around. One critique of the episode is that it was a little too on point and would have been better had the visual point been more subtle.
Flash forward to “The Acolyte,” which has a black female human character explain that the show is “not about good or bad, this is about power and who’s allowed to use it.” In this new and improved Star Wars, the most popular weapon isn’t a blaster or a lightsaber. It’s a sledgehammer, wielded against the audience.
If that weren’t enough to turn me off, here’s Headland making the now-inevitable publicity appearance to explain the importance of 21st-century Earth LGBTQ+ issues — and implied incest?!? — to the Star Wars galaxy.
LGBTQ+ activist Leslye Headland is a new director in the Star Wars franchise:
Her goal for the films? To make it LGBTQ-inclusive and similar to Disney fairy tales. pic.twitter.com/Anfkn9RciK
— End Wokeness (@EndWokeness) March 19, 2024
Activist first, storyteller second.
I’ll pass.
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