We’ve been waiting for The Acolyte for some time. It holds a lot of promise to be the next “good” Star Wars show. While no one can say that for certain yet, the trailer released today gets our hopes up further.
The Acolyte is set 100 years before The Phantom Menace — the earliest big-scale Star Wars production to date. Yes, it’s a prequel, and we know how you feel. Prequels have the added baggage of the audience knowing the ending. Coming up with something interesting that happens BEFORE anything interesting happens, while trying not to break the events in motion that lead there, is a writing challenge more productions fail than nail. But this? This could be different.
The Mandalorian succeeded by channeling Westerns and the tense showdown situations people love to see in them. The Acolyte takes its inspiration from martial arts films, and (we hope) will be similarly cribbing the best elements from those: awe-inspiring acrobatics, brutal battles between two dueling parties, and possibly stealth scenes. The few fight scenes we get in this trailer don’t look like anything Star Wars has done before:
The Acolyte stars stars Amandla Stenberg (The Hunger Games), Lee Jung-jae (Squid Game), Manny Jacinto (Top Gun: Maverick), Dafne Keen (Logan) and Carrie-Ann Moss (The Matrix), and was brought into being by Leslye Headland (Russian Doll).
Here’s the REAL twist: the characters we’re looking at may not be Jedi, but Sith. Headland has spoken in past interviews about making this a Dark Side show. “I was coming at it as a fan who was much more into the RPG [role-playing games] that the Extended Universe feeds on,” IGN quotes her as saying in 2022. “I knew the timeline really well. And I was like, ‘I think if you want to explore Star Wars from the perspective of the bad guys, the best time to do it is when the bad guys are wildly outnumbered. When they actually are essentially the underdogs, for lack of a better term.’ So this would be that era.”
Star Wars: The Acolyte begins with the first two episodes June 4 on Disney+.
