Ahsoka (Disney +): TV Review - The Force is Female...and Boring as Fuck

****THIS IS A SPOILER FREE REVIEW!!THIS REVIEW CONTAINS ZERO SPOILERS!!****

My Rating: 1.75 out of 5 Stars

My Recommendation: SKIP IT. Just a poorly written, poorly acted (with the lone exception being Ray Stevenson) series that further diminishes the Star Wars brand.

This past week Ahsoka, the most recent of Disney’s Star Wars series, concluded its eight-episode first season on Disney +. The series, which is a spin-off from The Mandalorian and stars Rosario Dawson in the title character, follows Jedi Warrior Ahsoka Tano as she investigates a potential threat to the New Republic in the wake of the fall of the Empire.

If I’m being kind, I would declare that Ahsoka is completely and entirely forgettable. If I’m being honest, I would say it is an embarrassment. This series, like so much of Disney’s Star Wars material, is at best a missed opportunity, and at worst an absolute atrocity.

Ahsoka’s failings are numerous and include, but are not limited to, completely ignoring any sort of previously set rules for the Star Wars universe. For example, the “rules of the force” are abandoned entirely, as is the deadly nature of the light saber, a once fearsome weapon which is turned into a mere flesh wound maker on Ahsoka.

Besides destroying the most fundamental of things from Star Wars canon, one of the other major issues with Ahsoka is the abysmal acting and inferior cast.

I remember seeing Rosario Dawson when she made her big screen debut in the unnerving Larry Clark film Kids (1995). Dawson was a natural screen presence and absolutely magnetic in Kids, but a lot has changed in the last 28 years. Over the ensuing decades Dawson has become not just a bad actress, but a terrible one. She was so atrocious in the recent Hulu series Dopesick as to be shocking. Here in Ahsoka she is so uncomfortable on screen that it left me actually perplexed. If I saw one more scene where a wooden Dawson as Ahsoka just folded her arms and stared blankly at her scene partner, I was going to light myself on fire. Dawson folds her arms so often on Ahsoka that if you did a drinking game where you did a shot every time she crosses her arms in an episode…you’d die.

Then there’s Dawson’s awkward, anti-athleticism in the fight scenes. To be fair, the fight scenes on Ahsoka are poorly staged, poorly shot and poorly executed. They all seem slow, dull and like they’re being performed underwater, but Dawson in particular moves like an arthritic, elderly woman in a nursing home….as opposed to the mere unathletic middle-aged woman she is.  

The younger actresses in the cast fare no better in terms of fighting or acting either.

Natasha Liu Bordizzo plays Sabine Wren, a Mandolorian and former Jedi apprentice to Ahsoka. Wren is an egregiously poorly written character, but Bordizzo doesn’t help matters by being so vacant in the role. Sabine is supposed to be the energizing force in the series but she’s so vacuous as to invisible. Making matters worse is that Bordizzo is just as bad as Dawson in the action sequences despite being half her age.

Diana Lee Inosanto, daughter of famed martial artist Dan Inosanto (under whom I trained many moons ago), plays Morgan Elsbeth, and unfortunately, is not a good actress. Inosanto is terribly stilted and uncomfortable to watch as she’s devoid of even the slightest bit of presence. Even her fight scenes are yawn-inducing, which is shocking considering her impressive lineage.

Then there’s Eman Esfandi who plays Ezra Bridgers. Esfandi looks like a guy who would be cast to play Jesus in a National Geographic documentary re-enactment, and has that same level of talent too. Esfandi has all the charisma of a tumbleweed and seems like a background actor who mistakenly stumbled in front of the camera.

The big bad in the series is Grand Admiral Thrawn, underwhelmingly played by Lars Mikkelsen. Thrawn is an epic character in the Star Wars universe and here he is reduced to loitering through each scene which he so barely inhabits.

The most striking thing about Ahsoka is Ray Stevenson, who plays Baylon Skoll, a Dark Jedi who stands in the way of Ahsoka as she pursues the truth. Stevenson is literally the only actor in the entire series who brings any inner life to his character. He’s also the only actor with presence and gravitas. When Stevenson is on-screen he effortlessly demands your attention. Stevenson is one of those British actors who is just highly skilled and a master craftsman. His skill and craftsmanship are subtle but extremely effective and the rest of the cast would have done well to learn from him.

Baylon Skoll is also the only interesting character in the whole series, but unfortunately, he is sidelined for the majority of it. Even worse, Stevenson tragically died after filming the series, which is a terrible loss for all of us…made all the worse in that Baylon Skoll will never get his own series.

That Stevenson, who had a bit of a knock around career despite being a fine actor, is the best actor in this series by a mile says a great deal. In contrast, Andor, another Star Wars series, was littered with top notch performances by people with similar careers and backgrounds to Stevenson. Why the hell can’t Disney just cast decent actors like Stevenson in EVERY Star Wars series and movie and in every role?

The writing on Ahsoka is as bad as there’s ever been in a Star Wars series, which is quite an accomplishment. The plot is incomprehensible to the point of being just plain silly (lightsabers can’t kill, there are stormtrooper zombies, witches, and space whales…yes…fucking space whales), and the dialogue is Junior High School drama club level of bad.

Of course, there’s the usual Star Wars nostalgia injection to placate old timers hungry for their lost youth, this time in the form of Anakin Skywalker, the always dreadful Hayden Christensen, and C3PO. One would need to be lobotomized to care the slightest about either cameo.

Since Disney bought Star Wars back in 2012, the franchise has undergone a transformation that has left it bereft of the things that made it noteworthy in the first place. To be fair, Lucas hadn’t exactly crushed it with his lackluster prequel trilogy, but Disney’s post-Lucas Star Wars output makes the prequel trilogy look like The Godfather trilogy.

Since the Disney takeover of the galaxy far, far away, the studio and Executive Producer Kathleen Kennedy have, for some reason, decided to declare that “The Force is Female”. The problem is that the female force, whether in films or series, has proven to be boring as fuck.

Why Disney has leaned so far into gender politics in Star Wars that they’ve stumbled over their own sagging tits is beyond me. Star Wars has, for the most part, been something boys have nerded out over since it hit big screens back in the 70s. The animating myth and archetype of Star Wars is, as Joseph Campbell told us, a masculine one. Disney’s intention to turn the franchise mythos into a girl power vehicle is so obviously self-defeating as to be demented as it neuters the Star Wars myth and renders its archetypes psychologically powerless, diminishes the Star Wars brand and alienates the core audience.

That Disney is also castrating their Marvel myth and brand with the same diminishing creative, artistic and commercial results, only makes the decision to feminize Star Wars all the more perplexing.

The bottom line is that the Star Wars franchise in general, and Ahsoka in particular, are symptoms…and Disney is the disease. Disney’s steadfast determination to inject cultural politics into all of their franchise material and ignore artistic and dramatic quality has aggressively corroded the value of Star Wars (and Marvel) to an astonishing degree.

Star Wars tv series like Ahsoka should be slam dunks for Disney as the franchise is chock full of fascinating stories and characters, and yet the studio consistently churns out underwhelming, if not abysmal, series that act as little more than cultural political vehicles that ultimately actively destroy what people used to love about Star Wars.

In conclusion, Ahsoka is simply not worth your time or energy. Even hardcore, rabid Star Wars fans should skip Ahsoka as it really is a blight on the brand.

 Follow me on Twitter: @MPMActingCo

©2023

The Mandalorian - Season Three Review: This is NOT the Way

****THIS IS A SPOILER FREE REVIEW!! THIS REVIEW CONTAINS ZERO SPOILERS!****

My Rating: 1.5 out of 5 stars

My Recommendation: SKIP IT. A major disappointing season from this once terrific series.

Season one (2019) and two (2020) of The Mandalorian were as good as it gets in terms of Star Wars storytelling. So much so that a dear friend of mine, the biggest Star Wars fan I know, once waxed poetically to me about how the series’ creator Jon Favreau was the savior of the Star Wars franchise.

Whether you believe that about Favreau or not, the truth is that The Mandalorian undoubtedly set the bar very high for the bevy of Star Wars series that came in its wake. Unfortunately, the majority of them have failed to live up to the standard.

For example, the alarmingly awful The Book of Boba Fett and Obi Wan Kenobi fell shamefully short of The Mandalorian’s high standards. Things were so bleak at Mickey Mouse’s money-making machine after the back-to-back egregious embarrassments of Boba Fett and Obi Wan, Disney’s Star Wars television ventures seemed on the precipice of annihilation like Alderaan on the wrong end of a Death Star blast.

Then the top-notch Andor arrived on the scene. Andor was able to equal, and in some ways exceed, season one and two of The Mandalorian’s high storytelling standards and Disney once again felt like the had righted the good ship Star Wars.

But now the roller coaster continues with season three of The Mandalorian, whose eight episodes concluded on Wednesday, which scuttled all the creative and artistic momentum of its previous two stellar seasons and of the superb Andor.  

Unfortunately, season three of The Mandalorian feels more like an extension of the sub-par work of The Book of Boba Fett and Obi Wan Kenobi than a continuation of the excellence of seasons one and two of The Mandalorian.

Season three is an exceedingly frustrating, irritating, incoherent, dull, lore-desecrating exercise that besmirches the once mighty legacy of The Mandalorian brand, reducing it to just another Star Wars piece of junk in a galaxy quickly filling up with Star Wars junk.

The storyline of season three lacks immediacy and consistency, and instead feels like writers/producers trying to sell Star Wars toys while they kill time waiting for other series, most likely the forthcoming Ahsoka, to carry the Star Wars narrative load.

The (spoiler-free) loose premise of the season is that Din Djarin (Pedro Pascal) and his de facto adopted son Grogu – aka Baby Yoda, join with Bo-Katan Kryze (Katee Sakchoff) to try and return to Mandalore.

The premise never compels, and the villain (I won’t say who it is to avoid spoilers), once revealed, feels like a creative cul-de-sac that is repetitive and redundant and redundantly repetitive.

The series featured the worst episode (episode six – which contains cameos by Lizzo and Jack Black – God help us!!) in the history of Star Wars tv which is an astonishing accomplishment considering the staggering level of incompetence of The Book of Boba Fett and Obi Wan Kenobi.

The season finale, while not a great finale, was an action-packed episode and was, to a point, entertaining, but it didn’t elevate the series or make it make sense.

As much as I enjoyed some of the action at times in the finale it was also ridiculous to the point of shameful, and it stretched Star Wars lore and the established rules of the series and the Star Wars universe beyond recognition.

For example, earlier in the season Mandalorians chasing a giant monster had to stop because their jet packs ran out of fuel after roughly a half mile. But in the finale, Mandalorians were flying thousands of miles and breaking through the atmosphere of a planet and into space with ease using their jetpacks.

Another example is that in the finale the villain/villains have great powers (I’m doing my best to avoid spoilers) and yet they end up being like every other dopey background actor stormtrooper who gets felled with ease by the good guys.

The biggest problem with season three though is that it felt like it was no longer about The Mandalorian but rather about the WOmandalorian. Female warrior queen Bo-Katan Kryze became the focus of the drama and the hero who continuously kept saving the damsel-in-distress Din Djarin from peril.

Making things worse was that Katee Sakchoff, an actress I loved on Battlestar Galactica, was dreadful as Bo-Katan. In season two Din Djarin worked with a bad-ass woman warrior Cara Dune, played by Gina Carano. Dune was really cool and Carano was great in the role, but then she said something on social media about Nazis that made the Nazis at Disney upset so they fired her. The reason I bring this up is because, and I never thought I’d say this in my entire life, but Katee Sackhoff is no Gina Carano, and The Mandalorian season three suffers under her relentlessly weak performance.

Which brings up another issue that is becoming glaring, and that is Disney’s princess problem. What I mean by that is that Disney made its bazillions by telling female-centric stories for girls about princesses. Snow White and the Seven Dwarves, Sleeping Beauty, Cinderella and on and on. The problem is that they’ve purchased Marvel and Star Wars, two brands that tell archetypal stories about boys and men for boys and men.

Instead of embracing what made Marvel and Star Wars successful, Disney has reverted to form and gone about dismantling the male archetypes and replacing them with “princesses” - inadequate and inappropriate female characters.

So, in Marvel we get Thor replaced by Lady Thor, Black Panther replaced by Lady Black Panther, Hawkeye replaced by Lady Hawkeye, Iron Man replaced by Iron Heart aka Lady Iron Man…not to mention the cavalcade of female led-projects like Black Widow, Captain Marvel (who originally was a man in the comics) and now The Marvels. In Star Wars the most obvious example was that the center of the latest trilogy was a female, Rey, while the two previous trilogies focused on Luke and Anakin.

I understand Disney’s insipid impulse to feminize everything and even understand its insidious desire to socially engineer through its products, but what shocks me about this is Disney’s incredible misunderstanding of the basics of myth and archetype.

As Joseph Campbell and Carl Jung teach us, the woman’s hero journey (or heroine journey if you will) is very different from the male hero journey. Different narratives and archetypes are needed and necessary in order to tell the heroine’s journey, but what Disney (and most other modern storytelling) is doing is simply replacing men in the hero’s journey with women.

The reason why these stories, on the whole, fail is because they do not resonate in the collective unconscious due to their mythic and archetypal misunderstandings.

This does not mean that women can’t be leads in action stories…quite the contrary, but they must go on a heroine’s journey not a hero’s journey. Ripley (Sigourney Weaver) in Alien is a perfect example of the heroine’s journey in an action role. Ripley is at her core a feminine mother character (in the first film this – among other reasons - is why the cat is so important – as Ripley must nurture and save it), just like the mother creature she fights.

Another example is Kate Macer (Emily Blunt) from the fantastic 2015 film Sicario. Macer is an FBI agent but she must navigate the brutal world of men all the while knowing that she, as a woman, is more vulnerable than the men she is surrounded by. As much as she wants to be “one of the boys”, she never will be and that is part of her journey…coming to understand the nature of things and the perilous, nearly indecipherable world of men.

While audiences, for social or political reasons, may support these Disney designed female-led hero’s journeys, on a very deep psychological level, they are agitated by them and often repulsed by them and that’s because they are the anti-thesis of our inherent psychological and mythological conditioning.

No doubt there are some who, again for social or political reasons, want to decondition audiences from what they would describe as an archaic view of men and women, but the human psyche and collective conscious and unconscious, don’t work that way as they have been built over thousands of years and don’t bend to whatever is fashionable in the decadent society du jour.

Back in 2015 right after the female-led The Force Awakens hit theatres, I was at a dinner party with a bunch of Angelinos and the movie came up as a topic of conversation. I chimed in and said I didn’t think it was very good and a woman sitting next to me, who was there with her maybe ten-year-old daughter, leaned over and whispered into my ear, “yes, but the message it sends to girls, and to boys about girls, is really important.”

I nearly bled to death biting my tongue in an attempt to avoid a social mis-step. What I wanted to tell this woman was that the privileged life she led, the big L.A. house she lived in with the “I’m With Her” sign in front, and the security of her existence, was built by…men. Many of them ugly, brutish men, who she would despise simply because they were ugly and brutish men. These are the same men who throughout history have eliminated any and all threats to her plush, decadent, million-dollar, echo-chamber existence.

This is the type of woman, a pampered princess, who demands “equality” for women and girls, but when push comes to shove, she only wants the kind of “equality” where she is awarded unquestioned deference and privileges due to her “victim status” as a woman which elevates her above by those deplorable men who intervene to protect her from the vicious darkness of the world.

If this woman lived in Ukraine she would, as did most of the Ukrainian women, leave to go live in other parts of Europe while all the men of fighting age (and well beyond and beneath fighting age) were forced, through force or conscience, to fight, and ended up being slaughtered by the vastly superior Russian military.

This is why Sicario is so impactful, as it shows in the bleakest, bluntest terms, that play-acting as a tough chick won’t cut it in the world of men. Men inherently understand this as we’ve navigated the perils of the brutal world of men our entire lives and know what the real deal is.

Yes, women have been on the receiving end of toxic masculinity…but they’ve also benefitted from men’s sacrifice and masculinity’s ability to protect them in a dangerous world to such a degree that they now feel safe and secure enough to incessantly bitch and moan about how all masculinity is toxic.

That’s a long way of saying that when Bo-Katan saves Din Djarin for like the fifth time in season three on The Mandalorian, it made me laugh at how ridiculous and shameful it was even for a silly, sci-fi series on a corporate streaming service hellbent on promoting a social-political agenda.

It is fitting that Disney now turns its Star Wars hopes to Ahsoka, which hits Disney plus in August and tells the story of the female Jedi who was once the Padawan of Anakin Skywalker. The girl power galaxy strikes again.

As far as The Mandalorian season three goes, it was a major letdown compared to season one and two. The series lost not only its cohesiveness and its competence, but more importantly its purpose and meaning, and there’s no telling if it’ll ever get it back.

Season three of The Mandalorian was so deflating, it left me wondering not only what the future holds for Star Wars, but if it has a future at all.

The cold, hard reality is that The Mandalorian, Star Wars, Marvel, and our entire culture in general, is an utter mess, and it needs to get its balls back and quick if it wants to survive.

As the Mandalorians would say, “This is the way.”

©2023