Star Wars fans hate The Acolyte so much they review-bombed the wrong movie

Disney has a new Star Wars series for us: The Acolyte, about a pair of twin sisters trying to figure out whether to embrace the light or dark side of the Force a hundred years before even the prequel trilogy. The show has gotten decent reviews, but audience ratings have been dismal; the show currently has a 14% audience approval rating on Rotten Tomatoes, compared to an 85% fresh rating from critics.

The criticisms fall into a few different buckets. Some object to alleged breaches of Star Wars canon. There are plenty of people like me, who just kind of find the show boring and flat; I don't personally think The Acolyte is giving people much reason to get excited.

But neither is it giving people reason to get enraged. Others feel differently, as many have angrily attacked the show for being "woke," which in this case pretty much translates to, "This show has black people and women in it and I don't like that." Star Amandla Stenberg, who plays the duel roles of Osha and Mae, produced a music video about it called "Discourse" and posted it on her Instagram. “Happy Juneteenth," she wrote. "And to those who are flooding me with intolerable racism — since it took me 72 hours on my laptop to make this song and video, u got 72 hours to respond. and I expect choreo!!”

It's pretty impressive that she did all that in three days. Anyway, it's easy to believe that Stenberg suffered "intolerable racism" at the hands of a vocal minority of Star Wars fans, probably the same ones who harangued John Boyega and Kelly Marie Tran when they starred in the sequel trilogy. The fandom has been here before.

The Acolyte star calls out Star Wars fans for flooding her with "intolerable racism"

You can kind of tell when there's an outsized, politically driven backlash to a show or movie based on how loud the detractors are in proportion to the size of the offense. At least from where I'm sitting, The Acolyte is a toothless wet noodle of a show; it looks alright, it's fine, but it's just sorta blah. And yet the detractors are so rabid that they have also review bombed a 2008 Australian horror movie called Acolytes that has nothing to do with Star Wars whatsoever; using the Wayback Machine, Games Radar determined that the audience score for Acolytes recently dropped from a 42% score to a 33%.

So this has all the hallmarks of a pile-on. The Acolyte cannot win right now. For instance, in the latest episode, there's a moment where Osha is confused over the pronouns for a wee furry creature named Bazil. Writer Claire Kiechel confirmed on Twitter that this was a little joke, which is how it played to me when I watched it. But the way people reacted, you'd think it was a call to arms. Far-right publications like The Daily Wire mocked the joke as "woke," the invocation of gender pronouns long being a trigger point for far-right types. Meanwhile, writing for Polygon, Pete Volk attacked the joke from the left, criticizing it as wrong-headed and "othering."

As milquetoast as I find The Acolyte, I don't think it deserves this. It's become a flashpoint in our ongoing online culture wars, which seems to happen a lot with Star Wars movies and shows in particular. The actual show, which I'm guessing people will barely remember a year from now, is being lost in the din.

That said, if you're interested in seeing what everyone is fretting about, new episodes of The Acolyte drop on Disney+ on Wednesdays.

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