The Acolyte’s Mae has to kill a Jedi without using a weapon — but how?

The Acolyte, Disney Plus’ newest contribution to the Star Wars universe, is a homicide thriller. Not less than, that’s what we’ve been given to grasp by its advertising. However now that we’re two episodes into the season, a completely totally different puzzle has change into the brightest spot within the present to me.

It’s an irresistibly Star Wars-y query, however extra importantly, it’s an ideal body for precisely the sort of motion cred that was briefly, thrillingly, core to the Star Wars franchise.

[Ed. note: This piece contains spoilers for the first two episodes of The Acolyte.]

Picture: Lucasfilm

How do you kill a Jedi with out utilizing a weapon?

That is the problem posed to Mae, our erstwhile apprentice, by her grasp, who seems like a Sith and quacks like a Sith, however as but has not had a lot time to espouse his alliances or philosophy. As the ultimate lesson in her coaching, Mae has to kill no less than one Jedi with out utilizing a weapon, as a way to kill “the dream.” What dream? The dream that each one Jedi stay in, apparently, “a dream they consider everybody shares.”

In response to Mae’s grasp, “An acolyte kills with out a weapon; an acolyte kills the dream.”

What does that imply?

It means everyone’s kung fu preventing, child.

The Acolyte’s unarmed, hand-to-hand fight caught out from the second its trailers dropped. There’s little or no wherever in live-action Star Wars prefer it — the gravitational coolness of lightsabers is an excessive amount of to flee. Jedi and Sith battle with swords; everyone is aware of this. Smugglers and troopers use blasters. Wookiees have crossbows that shoot lasers. Even Donnie Yen’s enigmatic Drive adherent-but-definitely-not-Jedi Chirrut fights with a stick. Blame the marketplace for motion figures with equipment, I suppose.

For all that Star Wars is rooted in samurai movie, it has valuable few callbacks to the immortal trope of a fighter who refuses to attract his blade. However in The Acolyte, that’s how each Mae-versus-Jedi battle begins, as a result of a Jedi gained’t draw on an unarmed foe. In these first two episodes, Mae’s clashes with Carrie-Anne Moss’ Grasp Indara and Lee Jung-jae’s Grasp Sol are hyper-quick, riveting battles for dominance, the place we get to see Mae’s desperation contrasted with an unbreakable Jedi cool. We get these wild superhero moments when Mae reaches to steal a lightsaber mid-combat and is met with an impossibly fast twist of a supernaturally endowed physique. It’s the blow-for-blow, arm’s size, move-and-counter suspense of an amazing hand-to-hand martial arts sequence.

Mae’s quest to kill a Jedi with out a weapon returns Star Wars to the realm of Struggle Scene Cinema that the franchise developed throughout manufacturing on the prequel movies, however that has hardly ever, if ever, been equaled in stay motion since. But it surely additionally provides The Acolyte its finest thriller. Not a whodunit, however a How Do You Do It?

Sol and his allies are fixing a homicide thriller, certain — we’ve seen that 1,000,000 instances — however Mae is out right here beating her head towards a koan handed to her by a Homicide Buddhist, and I’m simply ready for the second when she realizes that possibly the reply isn’t literal.