The Acolyte: A Star Wars Story

As soon as Russian Doll came out, I was like “I’m calling Lucasfilm. That’s where I want to work. That’s what I want to do.” So I pitched them. My elevator pitch was Frozen meets Kill Bill. And Kathleen bought it in the room, and said “I love it. I want to start working on it.”
Leslye Headland, Creator/Showrunner, The Acolyte.

Hello There!

I don’t often get to say I have anything in common with Kathleen Kennedy, being as she’s one of the most successful film producers in history, and I’m someone who fan-edits other people’s movies, sometimes, on the internet, for free, anonymously! But: absolutely loving that pitch? Me & Kathy are on common ground there, no doubt!

A tale of two sisters! Magical sisters! But instead of building snowmen and bursting into song and lugging Josh Gad around, these sisters are, into doing, you know, NINJA THINGS: Vengeance-fueled, stupid-sexy-shirtless STAR WARS Sith-Celebration-Come Drink With Me-Type-Stuff! Who wouldn’t love that? Well… uh… as it so happened…

This TV-to-Movie edit takes the 8-episode series, and re-shapes it into a 2hr, 14min movie, cutting away most everything not core to that solid-as-hell elevator pitch. And so:

TRAILER HERE

The Acolyte: A Star Wars Story is now a kung-fu revenge flick wherein a creepy cop, weirdly fixated on kidnapping a kid, drags his three partners into an unholy mess as he bumrushes a coven of moon witches just minding their business at the ass-end of space. This, inevitably, screws up both the kid (who he ends up discarding after a couple years) and her twin sister, who he leaves for dead after kinda/sorta/accidentally/on-purpose causing the total destruction of everything she’s ever loved and then covering that up for the next 16 years. Naturally, Sith happens.

This cut goes in straight chronological order; NO flashbacks, NO “reveals.” There is zero mystery as to what happens, and who does what and when they do it. Because this cut doesn’t do the Rashomon thing at all now, it can occupy a recognizable Shaw Bros revenge rhythm: Monks wreck temple, young student escapes, learns ancient arts, kills their way up the ladder to the real villain; who is running around like a chicken with his head cut off trying (and failing) to stop what’s coming: big-ass fight scenes every 15min or so, and then a righteous kill. But now that structure’s got lightsabers in it! A whole bunch of ‘em! And also the first real peek at what Sith training looks like, and uh… it’s hot? And therapeutic?

There’s also no forced and squishy ambiguity because of that, which I think is fine for a simple kung-fu revenge flick: Sol is clearly a sweaty (and crappy!) cover-up artist who could make this movie a 3 min Digital Short if he just admitted he sucks; but he can’t, so now everyone’s gotta die. Mae is clearly teamed up with Qimir, a simple man who enjoys philosophy, bartending, cooking and killing; he is clearly hot as hell, twice as funny, makes some great points, and most importantly: has never skipped arm day in his life. Osha is clearly even more about that life than Mae is, but is crazy-repressed because a creepy crooked space cop openly brainwashed her straight outta homeschool. Yord is Yord. Yoda and Plagueis do not exist in this Dojo. There is no main title, no opening crawl, no iris out to John Williams music. For better or worse, it’s a Star Wars Story where the “good guys” (-ish!) are witches and Sith (or proto-Knights of Ren, who knows). I don’t really have a frame of reference for how you iris out of that story into Luke Skywalker’s theme. So I didn’t!

Anyway, in keeping with the pitch that started it all, I tried applying the sort of crispy, early 2000s-era digital intermediate look the Kill Bill blu-rays had: Contrasty, sharp, a tiny-bit saturation boosted, with some Kodak 35mm film emulation laid in. It’s also got a way faster running time than the show did:

The Acolyte: A Star Wars Story

2hrs, 14min. 1080p, 2.39:1, 5.1 Dolby Digital. English Subtitles.

Chapters:

1. Under the Bunta Tree
2. The Power of Two
3. Ascension
4. Failing the Test
5. Starting a Fire
6. 1 - Master Indara
7. Mae is Alive
8. 2 - Master Torbin
9. Streets of Olega
10. 3 - Master Kelnacca
11. What Extraordinary Beings
12. Masters and Pupils
13. Osha’s Strength
14. 4 - Master Sol
15. I’m With You, You’re With Me
16. The Acolyte/End Credits

Notable changes can be found in this follow-up post here

Any questions, suggestions, let 'em fly, I’m all ears and always happy to hear what you might have to say! If this sounds at all enticing, Please don’t just ask for a link in the comments, DM me here, or send me an email directly at straightcutsnochaser at gmail.

The trailer looks great. It seems a lot of editors of this just try to condense the show. It’s refreshing seeing a new take with a clear vision.

Amazing trailer! Definitely interested in seeing your vision for this, looks quite transformative which I think the show really needed!

I admire how your edit aims to pay homage to the classic Shaw Brothers movies. As someone who skipped out on the show, I never would’ve thought of drawing comparisons to a defunct movie studio based in Hong Kong! 😄

CamSMurph said:

I admire how your edit aims to pay homage to the classic Shaw Brothers movies. As someone who skipped out on the show, I never would’ve thought of drawing comparisons to a defunct movie studio based in Hong Kong! 😄

I wouldn’t have thought it either! Or at least, not until I got about halfway through the season and was like “they’re really paying homage to wuxia films huh”

and then I read some interviews, and that’s where I came across the classic “Elevator pitch” quote that Headland gave re: “Kill Bill meets Frozen,” but then LATER said they were ALSO inspired by “Come Drink With Me,” considered by many to be the birth of the wuxia genre (it got nominated for Best Foreign Film in 67). Kurosawa’s “Rashomon” also got namechecked to explain why the show is jumping all over the place with the timeline and basically creating “mysteries” by only showing you half a story and then showing you the rest later like “Gotcha!”, but I clearly didn’t think that worked too well, so yeah. Outta here.

Whereas the standard “You destroyed my temple, now I vow revenge against yours! FIGHT ME!” setup/follow through of a TON of Shaw Bros kung-fu classics IS still present here. The trick is to try and stick as close to the story spine of that Shaw Bros inspiration, and its “get in a big-ass fight every 15-20min” rhythm with what’s given in the show, and how the show tried to present that as a lore-filled prequel-y Star Wars rule-bound THING.

I will say, even though this isn’t anywhere near as focused on all that mishigoss as the show proper was, I believe the way this plays, it’s a LOT easier (and a lot more easy to explain the stray Ren music motifs that appear to this end) for someone to headcanon this cut as the potential origin of the Knights of Ren. If one wanted to, I guess.

Okay, the cut is now live!

CHANGES
I didn’t keep a complete changelist: notating the sheer amount of micro-edits being done to improve pace, cut dialog/the spaces between dialog, would be EXHAUSTING to read, but I can note some of the more impactful alterations to take the show from being 5hrs 29min down to 2hrs 14min

• NO YODA. NO PLAGUEIS. Qimir does say the Jedi could call him Sith, but he never does quite say he is one, so considering that Kylo theme keeps getting quoted in the score, it can still be freely headcanon’d that these two somehow start the Knights of Ren, if you like that (most of the “Lore” this show had distracting it from the Kill Bill/Shaw Bros vibe is gone so it’s a lot of room to head canon whatever, really).

• While Mae is reticent to participate in the Ascension as per the show (the ceremony itself has been cut down to 70 seconds total before the Jedi interrupt it) her inclination to join the Order is now implied to be an idea not-so-subtly put there BY SOL via the Force. So now when Mother Koril suggests he mindtricked her… well…

• The prison ship uprising is entirely told via Sol pulling seven shots from the madman’s head while he’s in Jedi Jail.

• Yord is still Yord, but shirtless Yord is, unfortunately, gone. It’s a lot of shirtless Qimir still, though (actually, almost all of that is still here!)

• Qimir is not a Stranger. Mae knows who he is in this cut; their Apothecary scene on Olega has been cut so his Kramer-isms are eliminated, his music from the lagoon has been laid into the score, and his voice has been pitched back down to its normal register. His goofy high-pitched persona is only put on for the Jedi. He is not hiding his identity from Mae, and all references to her not knowing who her master is and trying to kill Jedi with no weapon (her blood type is apparently Knife-O-Positive, she just doesn’t have her own lightsaber) are omitted. Since there’s no Plagueis at all, you’re free to imagine that Mae & Qimir have been hanging out at that Dark Side Day-Spa for… awhile now. Getting FAMILIAR. Probably a little tired of each other, too.

• Kelnacca’s death isn’t a race between Mae/Qimir & the Jedi anymore, it’s just a straight-up trap in this cut. Everyone knows where Mae’s going (even Ki-Adi Mundi knows it, LOL) We no longer see Mae & Qimir land on Khofar at all. The reveal of Kelnacca’s death now happens as a shaky vision Sol has after Bazil goes missing (“We need a tracker for our tracker”) that he is scared & confused by while Osha is bugging him about being allowed to confront Mae (again.) Immediately after having this vision Bazil starts howling and they take off for his house.

• Bazil is mostly gone, too! He’s maybe the only thing in this show weirder and creepier than Sol, and at least you can understand Sol. I don’t know what the hell Bazil is doing, and I think the only real reason he’s on the ship is to get Pip into Mae’s hands. So yeah. The drawer-huffing rat thing is 85% gone!

• The big reason Mae & Qimir fall out now is due to her getting pinched by Jecki after letting him do 90% of the dirty work, keeping him out in the open and then trying to bail (she’s clearly a little shook at finding out Osha is alive)

• Vernestra is only here to reinforce that she is primarily interested in covering up whatever this is, from beginning to end, however she has to do it. She’s present at the jail when she just wants to pin it on Osha and call it a day; at the secret meeting w/ Ki-Adi (This dude SHOWS UP when Wookiees are down bad, huh!) when she wants the “investigation” out of Sol’s hands because he’s clearly going to screw it up; and when they finally go to the Brendok aftermath. Sorry, no lightwhip sequence while looking at the Khofar aftermath.

• Unfortunately, keeping Vernestra Coruscant-bound and only present when needed on cover-up duty means the great David Harewood (the Martian Manhunter himself!) is only in one shot of this cut, at the very end, with no lines, when she is chucking Sol’s dead body under all four tires of the bus and telling the bus to back up.

• Mae no longer suggests Osha can and will come find her at the end, and Qimir no longer says he will “attempt” to wipe her memory. He says definitively that he can, and he does - she doesn’t stumble or try to recite another syllable of their poem once he performs the mindwipe.

Other than that, it’s just a lot of shoe-leather getting removed, mostly: wipes to and from locations (this show had a LOT of wipes!) where people basically just have variations on the same conversations (“Why won’t you let me have revenge?” “Why do you keep telling me this very obvious thing I refuse to believe for no reason?” “Why are you pretending not to know the thing you and I were both there for?”) before getting to the scene where characters and/or plot actually advance, typically through VERY COOL fight sequence, as a proper kung-fu revenge flick SHOULD resolve most emotional conflicts.

I threw together a quick poster for my Plex server, figured I’d share!

NICE! Thank you 😃