“God is dead. God remains dead. And we have killed him. How shall we comfort ourselves, the murderers of all murderers?”
Frederich Nietzsche.
Those who know me well and those who have read any of my writing over the past 15 years will know how much I love George Lucas’ Star Wars.
The iconic mythology of good vs. evil, light vs. dark has been a fixture in my life for the whole of my life. It’s a love affair which began in November 1977 when my Dad took me to see the original film at the Yallourn picture cinema here in Australia. I was four years old.
Star Wars was a part of my childhood. Star Wars was a story that inspired me. Star Wars fired my imagination and it was in no small part, responsible for my becoming a writer. Star Wars grew with me and, for a time, I was able to share my love it with my children. It was a universal – generational – mythology.
The Star Wars that exists today, under the stewardship of Disney, is no longer the inspirational mythology I grew up with.
Since the acquisition of the Lucasfilm company in 2012, Star Wars has become as shell of its former self (Rogue One and Andor being rare and excellent exceptions).
I was one of the few who expressed concern about the sale of George Lucas’ intellectual property. I thought Disney would dilute the story and direct it towards a newer, younger generation of fans and that the original fans would be left behind. That it would become just another “product” in its ever growing catalogue of products and that it would lose a sense of itself.
The output from Lucasfilm since 2015’s The Force Awakens has proven my point. The sequel trilogy as a whole was an unmitigated, schizophrenic disaster plagued with disconnected storytelling, an offensive disrespect for the legacy characters and an appalling lack of awareness for what made Star Wars such a cultural touchstone for so many decades.
Lucasfilm’s move to streaming, episodic television has been an exercise in diminishing returns. Production started out promisingly (The Mandalorian) only to devolve into convoluted narratives (Book of Boba Fett), recurrent lore breaking (Obi Wan Kenobi), poor production values and increasingly shoddy acting (Ahsoka). Along the way Lucasfilm under the control of Kathleen Kennedy has waged a very nasty and very public campaign against the fanbase who have rejected the offerings coming from the Star Wars universe.
With the recently released streaming series The Acolyte, Star Wars has reached what I regard as the lowest point in its history – a point from which I don’t think it can be salvaged.
As much as I try to roll with the comedic aspects of the commentary around this shit show a streaming series The Acolyte, I cannot help but waver between immense sadness and red hot anger at what Lucasfilm has done to Star Wars.
And it’s less about the agenda driven storytelling that infects The Acolyte – although that is a significant factor – as it is the piss poor acting, the woeful production design and the degradation in the smaller things like music and nods to established lore that would normally help bind the overarching Star Wars universe together.
The Lesley Headland helmed show focusing on twin Force sensitive girls Mae & Osha (Amandla Stenberg) was invariably described in the lead up to its premiere as “Frozen meets Kill Bill” (whatever that means). Set in a time period 100 years before the events of George Lucas’ Star Wars Episode 1, The Acolyte sold itself as a fresh take on the lore of Star Wars, the role of the Jedi in the Galactic Republic and the nature of The Force itself.
The Acolyte’s worst offence is that it shrinks the galaxy. Whether this is a function of its budget or decisions of its creator, I can’t be sure, but in the 3 episodes that have screen at the time I’m writing this, The Acolyte feels insular, isolated; it has no breadth of scale that I associate with Star Wars.
In the portrayal of the two Force conceived sisters, The Acolyte blatantly stomps all over the legacy of what has come before it, rendering the most significant aspects of Star Wars lore irrelevant. It negates Anakin Skywalker’s story and wrecks much of the subsequent journey of Luke Skywalker.
The Acolyte attempts to revise the very nature of what The Force is. In its iteration, The Force is reduced to a tool (or thread) that can be manipulated at will by an individual rather than a galaxy spanning energy field that “surrounds us and penetrates us” binding the galaxy together. George’s Christian-inspired allegorical conception has been desecrated and reconfigured to serve the power hungry desires of both Jedi and Sith – or Sith-adjacent.
The Acolyte is nasty as well. In its pursuit of a fresh take on the Star Wars mythology, it is obsessed with individualilty in and of itself rather than how the individual interacts with universalities – the world or galaxy, its people and the myriad cultures that have made Star Wars so interesting.
It shuns the classical elements of storytelling/mythology that made the original films so compelling. It eschews notions of good and evil that is fundamental, not only to Star Wars, but all good storytelling.
It is, in a word, nihilistic distills its narrative arc into a crass product of the unresolved emotional issues of its show runner (Headland). Star Wars was George Lucas but it was never about George Lucas.
The Acolyte simply has no where to go. Good and Evil is foundational in human storytelling. The Biblical stories, The Greek Legends, Ancient Egypt. Jesus – even the Aboriginal people of my country were telling good and evil stories as far back as 30,000 years!!! By casting the Jedi as less than noble and the Sith-adjacent antagonists as misunderstood, the audience has no-one to root for. Its end point is that there is no good or evil. There is nothing.
What Lucasfilm fails to appreciate is that this post modernist deconstruction of methods of storytelling tens of thousands of years old does not work. It simply does not work and Lucasfilm’s refusal to acknowledge this will be their downfall. The Acolyte is the end point distillation of this.
I’m so angry about what has been done to Star Wars. It had the capacity to be evergreen, to evolve and speak to new generations by honouring the past and building a compelling future.
Star Wars was a modern mythology, built on stories of the past sure, but it stimulated a fresh exploration of those very mythologies George Lucas interpreted and infused into his story. Most importantly, Star Wars was accessible to everyone.
Lucasfilm, under the stewardship of Kathleen Kennedy and her posse of idelogically driven bootlickers have taken it away from all if us.
The Acolyte is heretically offensive. It is a crime.
Star Wars is dead & Lucasfilm has killed it.
DFA.
Dean Mayes - Australian Author & ICU Nurse 
Agree with every damned word of this..
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Thanks friend. As I say, it’s despairing to watch something you have loved your entire life be desecrated in this way. Sometimes all we can do is give voice to our despair.
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