Maybe It’s Time To Stop With The Jedi
Star Wars The Acolyte is sinking deeper on Rotten Tomatoes with an audience score of 13%. That’s less than the Willow remake, which has a whopping 65% score, a show that was so bad I fast-forwarded through most of the first episode and then turned it off with no regrets. The Acolyte is scoring far below Amazon’s Lord of the Rings.
I’ve seen The Acolyte episodes, all except for the latest, which as of now is episode 5. I won’t give any spoilers because I don’t plan on analyzing the show. Instead, what I wish to propose is an end to the Jedi.
It’s clear our culture can no longer write proper Jedi. Maybe not our culture, but the individuals who are creating these shows don’t have much in common with the fanbase. When I read Leslye Headland’s wikipedia page I don’t see anything other than The Acolyte that shows interest in science fiction. Most of her shows are about relationships or, as wikipedia says, “stories about people who have created prisons for themselves and are trying to get out.”
She was raised in a strict Christian household, which on its own could mean many different things, but it’s clear she rebelled against how she was raised and this comes out in her writing. She worked with Harvey Weinstein for SIX years and apparently didn’t catch on to anything he was doing. How’s that for a writer’s keen eye? She’s also a lesbian. I note that merely as a clue into her ideological and activist-based writing.
In short, this is someone who had a rebellion, or revolution, in their own life; or a strong reaction.
As such, how can this person be relied upon to write about an order of magical space warriors based on Eastern religions? According to the audience of The Acolyte, they can’t.
There was a brief stint of episodes called Star Wars: Visions, which were self-contained stories created by Japanese anime studios. I thought it was one of the best things Star Wars has ever done. Not only is anime a great medium for Star Wars, but the Japanese are probably the most culturally authentic group of people able to write Jedi.
The Jedi of The Acolyte are suspiciously not Jedi at all. For one thing, our culture has gotten out of touch with the ascetic. We are a sybaritic culture now. That is, fond of pleasure and self-indulgence. Today people will binge on TikTok all day long or can’t be without their smartphone for two minutes.
I think of 1977 when Star Wars was first released. The US back then was far less self-indulgent, even though the ME-generation was in full-swing. In the 70s only 14% of the population was medically obese. There were also no smartphones, no high-speed internet, only a handful of TV channels and generally a lot more of a religious attitude and awareness of Eastern religions.
I’m not arguing our culture was better back then, but it was more ascetic and closer to understanding what Jedi represented. Also, not anyone could write about Jedi, only the creator and whoever he appointed. Even in Star Wars Episode 1 the Jar-Jar Menace, the Jedi had presence and gravitas. That’s gone now
In The Acolyte one Jedi has super cool hair, another is morbidly obese, another shows signs of a lot of attachment and emotion and they argue amongst themselves all the time.
It should simply stop. All of the Jedi are given over to the dark side now because there is no dark or light side of the force. They don’t even mention the dark or light side of the force in the show. If it’s not mentioned it’s not understood by the writer who can’t personally handle a black and white view of the world of good against evil.
Writers are still good at portraying the darkside, though. Sith and all other dark force users are still cool and portrayed as they should be. But the light side has lost touch, much like much of our own culture has lost touch with the light side of life, given over to ragebait, clickbait, scams, grifts, AI nonsense and saccharine ‘How to stop sucking your thumb’ type articles.
Let’s just put the Jedi to rest, shall we? It’s not going to be good to whip the Jedi corpse until everyone starts crying. Let’s not see them live long enough to become the villain.
This is also, I daresay, a new cultural phenomenon? To see creative ideas become IP and a brand that then gets milked as a franchise. The Jedi were at their peak when the only ones we knew were Obi-wan and Yoda. Your imagination made the rest of them just as cool. Now that we see more of them, it’s over, the IP is spent. They’re fun to use in video games but on-screen they are a disgrace to the original idea.