The Acolyte: TV Review (Three Episodes) - In a Galaxy Far, Far Away...the Same Old Culture Wars

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

My Rating: 1 out of 5 stars

My Recommendation: SKIP IT.

The Acolyte, the new Star Wars series streaming on Disney +, tells the story of a murder mystery and intrigue involving the Jedi during the High Republic era a hundred years before the Skywalker saga begins.

The series’ first two episodes premiered on June 4th and a third episode was released this week, with a new episode releasing once a week for the next five weeks.

The Acolyte has generated a great deal of conversation online because, according to its detractors, it shatters the lore upon which the Star Wars franchise is built and is copiously filled with an over-abundance of token diversity. In contrast, the show’s adherents cheer the show exactly because of its diversity and covert socio-political agenda.

While I have enjoyed, to varying degrees, the Star Wars franchise over the years, I’ve never been a super fan and so I really don’t have a dog in the fight between the old traditionalist Star Wars fans and the new progressive Star Wars fans. All I want is for Disney to produce good Star Wars series and films.

Disney’s track record on Star Wars, particularly the shows, is not great. On the bright side, The Mandalorian seasons one and two, and Andor, were phenomenal.

On the down side, The Book of Boba Fett, Obi Wan Kenobi, season three of The Mandalorian and Ahsoka were absolute trash.

After having watched the first three episodes of the 8-episode season of The Acolyte, I can objectively report that the show is a dull disappointment that dwells among the latter rather than the former.

The Acolyte is a perfect embodiment of everything that is wrong with Disney’s Star Wars output. The writing is egregiously bad, the staging, cinematography, fight choreography, production design, directing and acting are so sub-par as to be astonishing and outright embarrassing.

The show is created by Leslye Headland, whose previous claim to fame is the series Russian Doll and having been Harvey Weinstein’s assistant (yikes!).

Headland’s visual style is one of claustrophobia, as nearly every shot and every set is cramped and confined. The resulting affect isn’t one of dramatic intensity but of artistic bankruptcy.

Headland’s story, at least what is seen through three episodes, is completely ignorant of the power of myth and archetype, dramatically inert and narratively adolescent. The dialogue, in particular, is so puerile as to be painful.

Adding to the issues of Headland’s extremely limited artistry and stunted creativity is the fact that this show, which boasts an enormous $180 million budget, looks unconscionably cheap. The sets look like something borrowed from a drama school stage play and the costumes and makeup fare no better, as everything feels thrown together and lacks definition and detail.

One of the biggest issues with The Acolyte is the poor casting and consistently abysmal acting.

Amandla Stenberg stars as two characters, twins Osha and Mae, and she is truly terrible in both roles. She is awkward, unskilled and unathletic, and is so devoid of charisma and screen presence she’s as compelling as a dog turd baking in the hot sun.

Stenberg fails to make any distinction between her portrayals of Osha and Mae and thus you’re never sure who you’re watching in any given scene…which doesn’t add to the drama but only confuses it.

Stenberg isn’t helped by the childish script – which has her waking up breathless no fewer than three times in the span of about fifteen minutes or so, but Stenberg certainly isn’t ready to carry a series on her diminutive shoulders with her exceedingly minimal talent.

Lee Jung-Jae, who recently starred in The Squid Game, fares no better with the script. Lee, who learned to speak English specifically for this role, struggles to speak with any cadence or rhythm, and thus brings every scene he inhabits to a grinding halt.

The rest of the cast are equally incompetent, most notably the two actresses playing Osha and Mae as children. I know it’s difficult to find child actors but good lord these two kids are a train-wreck.

The one bright spot in the cast is Jodie Turner-Smith who plays a witch who is the “mother” to the young Osha and Mae. Turner-Smith is the only actor on the series who fills her character with an inner life and whose eyes project a dramatic meaning and purpose. While everyone else is play-acting, Jodie Turner-Smith actually IS acting.

Disney’s marketing plan for its Star Wars (and Marvel) franchise projects is to be aggressive in turning these traditionally male myths into female led stories chock full of diversity with minimal white male presence. Or as South Park so expertly said in its evisceration of Star Wars production chief Kathleen Kennedy and Disney, “put a chick in it and make it lame and gay”. Mission accomplished, Ms. Kennedy.

The reason for this “chick/lame/gay” approach is that Disney wants to politicize their franchise projects by turning them into referendums on culture war issues. This is meant to aggravate and alienate traditionalist fans (mostly straight white men), and arouse progressive non-fans (women, LGBTQ etc.) in the hopes of turning them into loyal fans. The idea being that the original fans will never leave, even if it means they hate watch, and new progressive fans will watch out of political loyalty turned into brand loyalty, rather than due to unabashed fandom.

When the traditionalists cry foul over a show or movie with a female lead or color-filled cast, the progressives, most notably in the media, will reflexively and instinctively rush to defend the show because if the “bad people” (white men) are against it…then it must be good. And even if it isn’t good, it must be defended because the fight really isn’t over the quality of the show but rather over the importance of the diversity on display.

The Acolyte, which has a gay non-binary woman of color as its lead, and which features – and this is no joke – a coven of lesbian witches who create human life without males (and this coven is involved in one of the worst scenes in any Star Wars venture – it’s during a ritual and it is like something you’d see at a junior high school drama club production at an all-girls school), and which is created by a lesbian (Headland) who has openly stated the series is the gayest Star Wars show ever, is the perfect example of Disney’s divide and conquer culture war approach.

The results are as you’d expect…critics from the establishment media adore the show, giving it a robust 85% rating. Meanwhile, audiences despise it having given it a 20% rating. Of course, the critics counter that the series is being “review bombed” by disingenuous audience members who they claim are “racist, sexist and homophobic”.

What the Diversity, Equity and Inclusion Uber Alles brigade fail to recognize is that while the audience score may be a result of “review bombing” by a handful of troglodyte ne’er do wells, the critical score is also likely a result of “review bombing” by shameless shills and socio-political sycophants among the media establishment.

What is always amusing to me is that months after having rabidly defended the latest Star Wars or Marvel atrocity and having praised it for its daring diversity and inclusion these same critics will usually, and sheepishly, admit that the show or film actually really does suck but that it was still “important” because of its diversity and inclusion.

I have long said I don’t give a flying funnel cake about diversity and inclusion, my only priority is quality. Make a good show and it makes no difference to me who wrote it, directed it or starred in it.

For example, you never heard anybody bitching about Andor being led by a Mexican (Diego Luna) and being filled with a plethora of female characters. You know why? Because it was fantastic. That show was so expertly written and exquisitely executed that troglodyte trads didn’t bitch about diversity and critics didn’t have to lie about its quality. The female characters in Andor weren’t girl power tokens, they were complex creations with specific intentions and purpose, and are among the very best ever created in the history of the Star Wars franchise.

In comparison, The Acolyte, which by the way is a great name for a show – too bad it’s ruined on this piece of poop, is so atrociously made as to be criminal. The characters are paper-thin, the acting abysmal, the plot inane and the production astonishingly sub-par. And it’s because it’s so bad that’s why Disney and its media minions have turned it into ground zero for the culture war.

I, for one, am so tired of the endless and fruitless culture war, and by extension Star Wars and Marvel and the rest of our lazy and disingenuous pop culture, that I want to gouge my eyes out and light my brain on fire. And yet…here I am, once again, bitching about the same old culture war issues in a galaxy far, far away, that makes our own galaxy such a very unpleasant one.

The bottom line regarding The Acolyte, at least through the first three episodes, is that this show isn’t worth fighting over as it is simply bad television. I have no idea if it violates and upends the foundations of Star Wars lore and mythology, I just know it fails to reach even the most rudimentary level in regards to entertainment and storytelling.

If you’re a huge Star Wars fan you’ll probably watch the show because you watch everything Star Wars, and you’ll probably dislike it but not enough to break your addiction to all things Star Wars. If, like me, you’re a fair-weather fan, then you can definitely skip The Acolyte...because, to paraphrase Obi Wan Kenobi, “this is not the Star Wars you’re looking for.”

 Follow me on Twitter: @MPMActingCo

©2024

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

Andor: TV Review - Andor shines as darkness descends on Darth Mouse and the Disney Empire

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

My Rating: 4 out of 5 stars

My Recommendation: SEE IT. It’s a real spy drama that happens to be set in the Star Wars universe. Well crafted, and very well acted.

Andor, the most recent Star Wars live action series, finished its twelve-episode first season on Disney + this past Wednesday November 23rd.

The series, which tells the story of Cassian Andor and his introduction into the early-stages of the rebellion against the Empire, is a prequel to the film Rogue One and is set prior to the events of Star Wars: A New Hope.

To say I was reticent going into watching Andor would be a massive understatement. You can’t really blame me. The previous two Star Wars series, The Book of Boba Fett and Obi Wan Kenobi, were both utterly atrocious. These series, most specifically Obi Wan Kenobi, were so bad as to be embarrassing, so one can understand why any fan would expect the worst when it came to Andor.

But then I tentatively waded into the series and was at first relieved, and then surprised and finally excited. Andor may very well be the best Star Wars series thus far – at the very least it’s equal to The Mandalorian, and the reason for that is because an actual professional, Tony Gilroy, whose career includes writing the Bourne trilogy and writing/directing Michael Clayton, created the series…and it shows.

Andor is certainly the most sophisticated Star Wars series to date. It’s a real show about a growing, underground rebellion that just happens to be set in the Star Wars universe. You could set the story in modern-day Iran, China, US or Israel and you wouldn’t have to change all that much.

The acting in Andor is the best there’s ever been in any Star Wars story, be it movie or tv series. The cast across the board are truly phenomenal.

I’m not much of a Diego Luna fan, but he’s fantastic in Andor as the lead. His performance is contained yet kinetic. Luna reveals just enough, but never too much, of Andor, and it makes for compelling viewing.

Genevieve O’Reilly is spectacular as Mon Mothma, an Imperial Senator from Chandrila trying to thread the needle of her public image, personal politics and family life. O’Reilly is so good in the role, and Mon Mothma is such a fascinating character, that I was yearning for a series about her alone.

Stellan Skarsgard is also brilliant as Luthen Rael, a key figure in the rebellion who no one can seem to pin down. Skarsgard shines in the role because Rael, like the actor playing him, must constantly change the masks he wears and along with them his behavior. Skarsgard is a great actor, and having him bring his considerable talent and skill to a Star Wars series indicates how seriously the creators of the series took the story.

The rest of the cast, in big roles and small, are uniformly terrific, and it elevates Andor beyond the usual Star Wars fare and turns it into a legitimate spy drama.

For example, Rupert Vansittart plays Chief Hyne, a small supporting character, and in one small scene he is so good as to be astonishing. This is what happens when you cast skilled actors…everything gets elevated.

The overall aesthetic, most notably the set design, is also top notch. Each set feels real and not like some set on a studio backlot. Visually, everything has a visceral, tangible feel to it, and creates an atmosphere reminiscent of major science fiction like Blade Runner.

To be clear, not everything works perfectly. A few storylines felt forced and fell a bit flat, such as the odd relationship between Dedra Meero (Denise Gough), an ambitious supervisor of the Empire’s Security Bureau, and Syril Karn (Kyle Soller), a-down-on-his-luck security inspector for a corporate entity working with the Empire.

Gough and Soller are both very good in their roles, but the arc of their characters and their relationship rang hollow and felt superfluous, and their climax is easily the weakest part of the otherwise well executed series, and it isn’t even close.

From what I understand, Andor is not generating big numbers for Disney +.  The situation is so dire that Disney is running the series on ABC in order to generate some interest in it. This is unfortunate but not surprising.

When you roll out second and third-rate garbage like The Book of Boba Fett and Obi Wan Kenobi, you’re not going to generate trust from fans, and so they don’t give a series like Andor the chance it deserves.

A great friend of mine, let’s call him Doug, is the biggest Star Wars fan I know. He’s truly a fanatic. But as Andor’s first season wore on I kept asking him if he’d watched it and he said “no”. He said he hadn’t given it a chance because he “didn’t want to be crushed with disappointment again.”

That Doug, who literally gets dressed up in costume and attends opening night of Star Wars movies, is reticent to watch a Star Wars show because he can’t take anymore soul crushing disappointment, is a sign of major problems for Disney.

I think Disney knows it too, which is why CEO Bob Chapek is out and guru Bob Iger is back in. Iger retired in 2020 and left Disney, the company he built up into a staggering entertainment powerhouse with acquisitions of Pixar, Marvel, Lucasfilm and 20th Century Fox, in the hands of his one-time protégé. But now he has some serious decisions to make if he wants to pull Disney out of its current tailspin - which includes a 40% drop in stock price over the last year.

There’s been a lot of talk about how Big Dick Bob Iger will wheel and deal his way out of trouble, maybe by buying Netflix, or maybe even by selling Disney to Apple.

Buying Netflix seems improbable to me because Netflix carries massive amounts of debt and brings nothing of note to Disney, which already has a robust streaming service.

Selling to Apple makes more sense, at least financially, as it would mean a boon for Iger personally as it would attach his vast Disney holdings to Apple, a Teflon tech company that isn’t going anywhere.

But these choices would simply be a distraction for Iger from the bigger decision he must make which is, he can either double down on the creative direction Disney is going now with its numerous properties like Star Wars and Marvel, or he can dramatically change course.

Doubling down means continuing with the cultural political stuff in Pixar, Star Wars and Marvel, which is a big part of the reason Disney is in such trouble at the moment. It would basically mean Disney deciding to stay the course and do the same thing over and over again and expecting a different result. In other words, it would be insane.

As insane as it would be, I could totally understand why it would happen. The Disney employees, like mindless cult members, truly believe in this woke stuff, and in their own righteousness. And the ruling class in the Disney executive suite live in the most isolated of bubbles that aggressively reinforces the importance of wokeness, and their own self-righteousness.

That said, Bob Iger is no moron. He has to know that his bottom line, and all of his personal stakes in Disney, are getting seriously damaged by the company’s embrace of wokeness, including denigrating and attacking fans as racist, sexist and homophobic who critique their product.

The other option is for Iger to reverse course and to go back to the middle of the road in terms of staying away from cultural politics. That’s no easy task, especially when his workforce and the social circles the executives run in, will put up serious resistance.

At this point the problem can’t be solved just by returning to making quality movies and tv shows, as evidenced by Andor being such a great series but no one tuning in. The disease of wokeness has taken deep hold and Disney is suffering from a stage four version of it, and it is killing the company by alienating customers.

Everything is trending down for Disney. The recent spate of dismal Star Wars series pre-Andor are seriously eroding fan interest. The same is true of Marvel, where the recent batch of movies aren’t just bad but underperforming at the box office…all while their budgets bloat beyond belief. Marvel tv shows are just as bad if not worse than the Star Wars shows, and they don’t pay any dividends anymore.

The reality is that the good ship Mickey Mouse was on its way to the utopia that is the Fantasy Island of Wokeness but it hit the Iceberg of Reality and is now quickly taking on water. It seems to me that bringing back Bob Iger to rearrange the deck chairs won’t solve any of the bigger problems.

Maybe I’m wrong and Iger will right the ship and Disney will be back to its robust self in no time. Or maybe Disney is doomed because it didn’t listen to Cassandras like me who were warning them early on that “get woke, go broke” was inevitable if they kept on the self-righteous path.

Regardless of all that, the truth is that building back trust from fans is a difficult thing to do and it takes years. There is no quick fix. But Andor, which is as good The Mandalorian, is a terrific first step.

Disney needs to put together a string of quality Star Wars series, and eventually Star Wars movies, in order to bring the bevy of Star Wars fans back safely into the fold. The same is also true of Marvel.

I hope they do it. I also hope you check out Andor, because it’s very well-made, and well-worth your time.

©2022

Obi-Wan Kenobi (Disney +): The Final Verdict

****THIS ARTICLE CONTAINS SPOILERS!!! THIS IS NOT A SPOILER FREE ARTICLE!!!!****

Obi-Wan Kenobi, the Disney + money-grab of a mini-series has finally come to its miserable conclusion.

I wrote a wholly negative review of the first three episodes of the show and remarkably the series managed to make the last three episodes even worse than the first three.

A drunk toddler playing with its feces in a bathtub has more commitment to narrative coherence than the makers of Obi-Wan Kenobi. It’s not hyperbole to say that Obi-Wan Kenobi is so illogical, idiotic and imbecilic as to be insulting.

For example, not once, not twice, but three times in this series, a character is killed/left for dead and then comes back to life.

Reva Sevander (played by the impossibly awful actress Moses Ingram) dramatically “kills” the Grand Inquisitor (Rupert Friend) by stabbing him with her light saber…and then he pulls a Lazarus and shows up again later. Darth Vader slices and dices Reva with his light saber but then, for some completely inconceivable reason, doesn’t finish her but just walks away and she goes on to no doubt get a shitty spin-off series (God help us!). And then there’s the Obi Wan and Vader battle where Obi-Wan vanquishes the evil one with some fine light sabering but decides to…you guessed it, just walk away instead of killing him.

To the show’s credit, the Obi Wan – Vader fight in the finale contains some of the few visually pleasing shots in the entire anemically photographed show, but for some ungodly reason they end up turning the cinematic light saber duel into a literal rock fight. Sigh.

Besides the apparent ineffectiveness of the light saber to kill anyone, other egregious inanities abound.

For example, in the finale Vader’s star destroyer is chasing and firing upon a transport vehicle filled with every single member of a rebel group, including Obi Wan. Obi Wan, in a cringy scene with O’Shea Jackson Jr., or as I call him Li’l Ice Cube, who is so bad at acting he makes his ham-handed father Ice Cube look like Sir Laurence Olivier, decides to leave the ship to distract Vader.

Obi-Wan then jets off in a small shuttle and Vader says ‘go after him instead of the rebel transport’. The Grand Inquisitor wisely retorts, ‘hey, we can kill the entire resistance right now if we go after the transport…’, and Vader says, ‘nah…let’s take this big star destroyer and follow Obi Wan instead’. Of course, anyone with half a brain in their head would say, ‘hey Darth, why don’t you go after Obi Wan in your own ship and we’ll kill the rebels?’  But no, that makes too much sense.

So then what happens? The star destroyer follows Obi Wan to some planet and then Vader says, ‘hey everybody, I’m gonna take my own ship down to the planet because I want to fight Obi Wan alone!’ If I were working on that star destroyer Vader would most definitely have strangled me because I would’ve told him, ‘Hey genius, why didn’t you do that in the first place so we could kill the resistance and finally put an end to all this stupid bullshit and put us all out of our fucking misery?’

It's this sort of clownish, childish storytelling that makes Obi-Wan Kenobi just not brutally bad but downright offensive.

The other absurd thing about the entire enterprise is that, as I stated in my initial review, it’s based entirely on false jeopardy. Obi-Wan, Darth Vader, Leia, Luke and his aunt and uncle, are never in actual danger because we know they’re going to live to star the cavalcade of movies about their futures that we’ve all seen already.

The whole series is like an grown-up watching home movies of themselves at the beach when they were a kid and trying to convince themselves they might have been eaten by a shark. You know you weren’t eaten by a shark because you’re sitting here two decades later entirely uneaten watching videos of yourself playing in the sand.  

And of course, the acting in Obi Wan Kenobi, sans a committed Ewen McGregor, is just as atrocious in the final three episodes as it was in the first three.

For example, I kept praying that they would just replace the terrible little kid playing Leia with Peter Dinklage in a wig. And I’ve already written much about the awfulness of Moses Ingram as Reva, and God-damn she is still utterly abysmal.

The thing that horrifies me about the monument to empty tokenism that is Moses Ingram’s acting career is that the ending of Obi-Wan Kenobi makes it perfectly clear that they intend to give this lackluster character and the talentless actress who plays her a spin-off series. One can only imagine the artistic and creative depths of the Disney/Star Wars septic tank that will be dredged to bring that turd to life.

In conclusion, Obi-Wan Kenobi is a great character, but Obi-Wan Kenobi is a truly heinous and atrocious, dead-on-arrival series which, if there is any mercy in the universe, will not see a season two.

If Disney does pull the trigger and there is a season two of Obi-Wan Kenobi, and/or a spin-off Reva Sevander series, the only sane response will be to simply say…May the Force Go Fuck Itself.

©2022

Obi Wan Kenobi (Disney +) : A TV Review

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

My Rating: 1 out of 5 stars

My Recommendation: SKIP IT. The first three episodes of this pile of crap feature some of the very worst writing, performances and direction in Star Wars history. So much so that I have lost all hope that the final three will be even remotely worthwhile.

We need to talk about the new Disney Plus series Obi Wan Kenobi. I just watched the first three episodes (the only three released thus far) of the six-episode series and holy shit. It isn’t just bad, it’s absolutely, ridiculously, insanely fucking atrocious. It is a gigantic monument to artistic, creative and narrative incompetence.

To set the context of my thoughts it should be noted that I am not a Star Wars fanatic or fanboy. I am not particularly well-versed in Star Wars mythology and lore but I do find it compelling and fascinating. That said, I have seen all the films and live-action tv shows but more out of pop culture duty and/or work obligations than anything else.

My aggravation over Obi Wan Kenobi has nothing to do with some betrayal of Star Wars canon, no my anger is because the writing, casting, directing and acting (save for Ewen McGregor – who, not surprisingly, does solid work in it) is so beyond amateurish as to be offensive. I mean, how can Disney pass this steaming pile of horseshit off on audiences and expect anybody to take it, or them, seriously?

Let’s begin with the basic premise of the show. Set in between The Revenge of the Sith (the third prequel film) and A New Hope (the original Star Wars movie), the series tells the tale of Obi Wan (Ewen McGregor reprising his role from the prequel films) as he watches over young Luke Skywalker, and eventually, young Princess Leia.

As a basic storytelling venture, Obi Wan Kenobi is already at cross-purposes with itself because if you put Obi Wan and Leia in danger in the show, viewers already know they’ll survive since there are mountains of movies in the storyline set after this mini-series that audiences have already seen which proves that point. As a big wig writer in Hollywood recently told me during a discussion about the show, Obi Wan Kenobi is based entirely on “false jeopardy”, which sounds like a direct-to-video Bruce Willis action romp. So, there’s no drama created when Obi Wan and Leia are put in jeopardy in the series because we all know they aren’t really in danger because we’ve followed their storylines for forty years.

Speaking of danger, the action sequences In Obi Wan Kenobi are the worst I can remember in a film or tv series. Deborah Chow directed the entirety of the series and she is so hapless and hopeless in the director’s chair that she should not only be banned from directing ever again for the length of her natural born life, but also, as a punitive measure, be banned from watching any sort of entertainment ever again.

An example of Ms. Chow’s incompetence is a fight in episode three, the details of which I will refrain from sharing for spoiler reasons, that is so visually and viscerally anemic and so devoid of any sort of narrative logic, that it looked and felt like something a mental defective child in a North Korean prison created while playing with straw action figures.

There’s also the absurd and ridiculous sequence where ten-year-old Little Leia runs away from three adult male kidnappers and it looks like parents letting their toddler score a touchdown during a family’s Thanksgiving Day touch football game so as to avoid a tantrum. The men (who are truly dismal at pretending to chase someone) in the scene keep running into fallen trees while pursuing Leia, who is apparently the most unathletic girl in the universe, as she “runs” away from them like she’s running under forty feet of water.

The girl cast as the ten-year-old Leia is nine-year-old Vivien Lyra Blair, who besides running like a midget with polio also happens to portray the most annoying character in the Star Wars universe since Jar Jar Binks. I know Leia grows up to be a hottie in a bikini at the end of Jabba’s leash in Return of the Jedi, but I kept wishing Obi Wan would just pull out his lightsaber and slice this annoying brat in two and put us all out of our misery.

The casting of an annoying nine-year-old who looks (and runs) like a four-year-old to play a ten-year-old, isn’t the only casting atrocity in Obi Wan Kenobi.

Moses Ingram is cast as the villain Reva Sevander and is the worst adult actor to ever appear in a Star Wars film or series, which is saying a lot considering even in Obi Wan Kenobi alone film director-turned-actor Benny Safdie and Red Hot Chili Peppers’ bassist Flea give abysmal performances in supporting roles.

Ingram’s Reva is a critical role, she’s supposed to be the big bad villain but she has all the presence of a tumbleweed. Ingram’s line readings are elementary-school-drama-class-reject level of God-awful and her inability to even remotely conjure some sort of menace is staggering to behold. The character of Reva would’ve had considerably more life to it if they had cast a cigar store wooden Indian in the role instead. The bottom line is that Moses Ingram’s performance is an absolute and utter embarrassment, so much so that, as insane as it sounds, I actually feel bad for her.

Adding to my discomfort for Ms. Ingram is the allegation that she has received racist comments on Instagram from Star Wars fans. If true, that is revolting and reprehensible. But I must say, I have my doubts about the voracity of those claims, not because I have some undying belief in the goodness of humanity…I don’t, but because I don’t trust Disney or its culture warrior minions in the slightest.

In the plethora of articles I’ve read about the alleged racist comments from rabid Star Wars fans, all but one has failed to actually share what any of the racist comments are, so I’ve yet to see them. The one article that did quote them said that Ingram has received “"hundreds" of racist and threatening messages, with one telling her "you're [sic] days are numbered" and another using the N-word.”

I find this less than compelling evidence that there is a cavalcade of racism coming at Ms. Ingram. I’m sorry but someone commenting that “you’re [sic] days are numbered” is not necessarily a racist attack, it could be someone saying that she will be fired for sucking at acting – which she should be because she does in fact suck at it.

The “n-word” comment is obviously repugnant, repulsive, egregious and disgusting, but if those two comments are the worst of the “hundreds” of allegedly awful racist ones – which the article implies that they are, then that seems like Disney and its stenographers in the establishment media and online are making a mountain out of a molehill by conflating criticism with racism.

Now why would Disney conflate criticism and racism and promote the idea that one of their minority actors is being inundated with racist attacks online? Because that helps Disney signal its woke bona fides as a diverse and inclusive company, and also acts as a way to limit any criticism of the show, even non-racist criticism, by creating the paradigm that being negative towards Obi Wan Kenobi is racist and being a supporter of the show is a way to signal anti-racist virtue.  

I, of course, could not care less about the color of Ms. Ingram’s skin, I just care if she can act or not, and the evidence I’ve seen thus far is a very compelling indictment regarding her acting ability, or more specifically, her decided lack of it.

The Moses Ingram story aside, the reality is that Obi Wan Kenobi is an utter creative disaster for Disney and its Star Wars property. If this were a one-off error than you could brush it aside. But Obi Wan Kenobi being bad and boring comes on the heels of the series The Book of Boba Fett being bad and boring. The Mandalorian was a terrific series that I greatly enjoyed, but batting .300 will get you into the hall of fame in baseball, but in the Disney Star Wars universe will get you to the hall of shame…and this doesn’t even factor in the shitty the Star Wars movies of recent years.

The same is true regarding Disney’s Marvel behemoth, which, post Endgame, has been stumbling and staggering around like a barefoot drunk on a frozen lake. The Marvel tv shows have been mostly miss, and even the hits have been mediocrities, and Disney’s Marvel movies since Endgame have been relentlessly egregious misfires.

I could not care less about the health of Disney, but the truth is that they are perilously close to shitting all over themselves and both their Star Wars and Marvel properties, to such a massive degree that they’ll never be able to remove the stink.

If the next batch of Star Wars shows coming out this year, which include Andor and Ashoka, are on the same level of bad as The Book of Boba Fett and Obi Wan Kenobi, then Disney is in deep doo-doo indeed.

That will suck for Disney, but it will suck even more for the legion of Star Wars fans, who, alleged racist assholes aside, deserve considerably better.  

©2022