In a four-hour video that has been viewed nearly 7 million times, YouTuber Jenny Nicholson dissects the failure of the Star Wars hotel (officially Star Wars: Galactic Starcruiser), a two-day “immersive experience” that, after years of hype and extravagant shareholder promises, opened in March 2022 and closed 18 months later, at a loss of $250 million. Nicholson, who paid over $1,600 a night for her stay, chalks the hotel’s failure up to numerous factors—the 246-minute runtime leaves room to point a lot of fingers—but sums up by tying her pricey but lackluster stay to a larger Disney trend: charging more for luxury-branded products while providing less and less. It’s actually in the company’s interest, she argues, to allow the baseline experience of visiting their theme parks to become a little worse, because it coaxes those who can afford it into paying more to skip the lines, with added surcharges for the most popular rides.
By toggling between early promotional materials and her own experience, Nicholson pinpoints several places where the grand visions of the hotel’s conceptual stage were whittled down to an underwhelming nub, and others where nifty aspects that were originally pitched as part of the related Galaxy’s Edge theme park were relocated inside the much pricier confines of the Galactic Starcruiser. In essence, she argues, the hotel functioned as a “paywall” for experiences—such as a nightclub act with an alien singer—that were placed beyond the reach of ordinary parkgoers, while at the same time shunting participants into interactive storylines so hemmed in by the larger chronology of the Star Wars universe that their outcome was doomed to be inconsequential. In essence, the Star Wars hotel overpromised and underdelivered.
The Acolyte, which premieres on Disney+ today, suffers from a similar fate. The eight-episode series, created by Russian Doll showrunner Leslye Headland, starts off playing with some invigoratingly big ideas, but by the midway point (four episodes were given to critics in advance), they’re apparently all but abandoned, because pursuing them would mean unsettling the branded cosmos we’re already familiar with. Set 100 years before the rise of the Empire, the series follows Osha (Amandla Stenberg), a former apprentice Jedi who dropped out of her training and now works as a meknek, essentially an interstellar grease monkey, doing tasks so low that they’re only supposed to be performed by droids. It’s disorienting to come across Osha at first, swapping banter with her co-mechanic and taking pleasure in her unglamorous tasks, because we’ve already seen her, in The Acolyte’s opening scene, fight a Jedi master to the death.
The guilelessness with which Osha greets the Jedi who show up to question her, including Russian Doll’s Charlie Barnett as the strait-laced if occasionally shirtless Yord, seems to rule her out as a suspect, but that leads to more questions. Was the Osha we saw wielding the Force with deadly accuracy cloaked in some sort of holographic disguise? Perhaps so adept she can hypnotize a bar full of hardened lowlifes, and even viewers at home, into seeing her as someone else? The fact that the actual solution to this conundrum is the simplest and most obvious one is encouraging in its own way, a sign that Headland is not afraid of Star Wars’ inglorious roots in low-budget serial adventures. (If Flash Gordon doesn’t help you figure it out, General Hospital will.) But The Acolyte isn’t a larkish adventure series in the vein of The Mandalorian. It’s heavy with mythic resonances, or at least the hope of them, the sense that it wants to be telling a grand story about destiny and choice, vengeance and forgiveness.
We know from the beginning that Osha’s doppelgänger is out to kill Jedi—four of them in particular, including one played by Matrix star Carrie-Anne Moss, although she doesn’t seem unduly concerned about how many other bodies she drops along the way. And for a while, The Acolyte indulges the idea that her quest might be a just and even righteous one. A century before the rise of the Empire, as the series’ opening crawl tells us, the Jedi are scouring the universe looking for potential padawans, children to take in and teach their ancient ways. But the lack of a clear and commensurate enemy seems to have allowed a bit of mission creep. If the Jedi aren’t fighting a force of equal and opposite strength, they’re just the space police, and that leaves open the possibility that they might occasionally be on the wrong side. When the story takes us back to Osha’s childhood, in a flashback episode helmed by After Yang and Columbus director Kogonada, we’re teased with a truly radical idea, maybe the most potentially world-shifting since The Last Jedi: What if the Jedi aren’t the only ones capable of harnessing the Force, and what if there are other, equally valid, ways of drawing the line between light and dark? Could the Jedi be … the bad guys?
Unfortunately, the answer, at least thus far, seems to be no. The show pulls back from its most audacious possibilities in a way that suggests the heavy hand of brand management, chipping away at anything that might rock the boat. There’s a pattern here, a desire to shake things up followed by a fear of the consequences. It’s how you get the audacity of The Last Jedi followed by the reversion to mean of The Rise of Skywalker, how you go from Phil Lord and Chris Miller’s Solo to Ron Howard’s Solo. It’s how The Mandalorian starts off as an adventure-of-the-week show blissfully unencumbered by lore, only to accrue more and more of it; how it wound up surrounded by prequels and spinoffs instead of self-contained stories. Overpromise, underdeliver. (May the Force be with Andor Season 2.)
The Acolyte tries to carve out its own territory. There are some cool fight scenes, including one centered on the Jedi master Sol, played by Squid Game’s Lee Jung-jae, but despite the reported $180 million budget, it’s a show that shrinks the world rather than expanding it, blowing its money on lavish set pieces rather than building out environments for us to inhabit. The Acolyte acts like it’s swinging for the fences, but when the time comes, the best it can manage is a bunt.