There's something uniquely amateurish, low-rent, fugly and shabby about the aesthetic quality of these Disney Plus shows. I don't know if it's the lighting, the use of the "volume", the Party City costumes, the drab sets, or the daytime CW-caliber blocking and centering of photography, but the very first thing I thought of when I saw the trailer for
Acolyte was:
"...This looks like the
Willow TV show."
Seriously, they all have this same cheap and ugly made-for-TV look:
Boba Fett, Ahsoka, Echo, Secret Invasion, Percy Jackson...they all have this shabby, budgeted, low-effort feel to them. You compare it to other TV shows on streaming like
House of the Dragon and the recent
Shogun series on FX, and those shows absolutely
blow this amateur shit out of the water in terms of production values and cinematography. Fuck, even
Andor looked better than this--piss-brown color grading or no, that at least had something resembling a visual eye in how shots were staged and action scenes were tracked with the camera.
Also, that last shot of all the characters lighting their lightsabers and charging the evil Dark Sider who pushes them back with the Force looked like something I'd see in a fanfilm or a cosplayer video at an anime con. Everyone looks like they were given different and inconsistent directions on what to do and how to move, and whatever clunky shot they ended up using for the trailer was the best take they had. You see this on that new
Last Airbender TV show as well; some of the footage of that clownshow looks like something a gaggle of cosplayers put together on a garage budget.
Oh, and if anyone has any doubts about how weapons-grade cringe the story for this is going to be, Leslie Headland has described the story as
"It's Frozen meets Kill Bill."
So expect the absolute worst.
