What in the Cosplay Hell Did 'Ahsoka' Do to Mary Elizabeth Winstead? - Pajiba Entertainment News

Allow me a brief rant. I'll be the first person to admit I don't have the kindest opinion about the current glut of Star Wars shows. Honestly, I'm in the camp of "Andor, that was good TV. The rest feel a bit like … content."

So I didn't have a great deal invested in Ahsoka, despite having immensely enjoyed the animated series that introduced her and the associated cast of characters. Then I saw Hera Syndulla brought to life by the wonderful Mary Elizabeth Winstead and … yikes.

Not because of Winstead, to be clear! As a rule, I find Winstead delightful. I mean, have you seen Birds of Prey? She took Huntress to a glorious, funny, strangely adorable place. So it's not as if it's her first time putting on the mantle of a franchise character.

What stopped me in my tracks was the costuming.

They have Winstead in what I can only call a bad cosplay. In the heart of the Disney mega-bucks empire, in a sci fi franchise famous for its practical effects and diverse alien species, Winstead enters the scene in costuming that is put repeatedly to shame.

Hera sure just reads as … Winstead painted green. At first, I thought, ah well, it's just a bit disconcerting to see a familiar face literally shifted to a flat primary color. Then I saw her bomber jacket with a bit of gray-and-red plastic glued to the front. And the strange way the appendage on her head doesn't actually seem to move. And those horrible color contacts. And suddenly, my blood's boiling.

She's not the only character with said bit of plastic glued to the front of her costume. But she's such a good, established character, and the visual translation from the animated series doesn't actually seem to have … you know, happened. There's plenty of picky, dog-whistle sexist "discourse" out there on Reddit about Winstead's face being wrong, but that's not what we're talking about there. We're talking about the awkward pinkness around her eyes where the paint doesn't seem to have settled, and those awful contacts, and the stiff not-quite-rightness of her headpiece, which honestly, I think compares somewhat unfavorably to Oola's in 1983.

In the same scene as Rosario Dawson in her role as Ahsoka, Hera seems like she's been costumed by a drastically different budget production. The awkward discrepancy, on Disney's formidable dime, threw me. Dawson's costuming as the title character is fantastic, rock-solid, for a far more fantastical-looking alien character than Winstead's.

Science fiction is a bad place to be a snob — you've got to roll with a bit of absurdity and silliness by definition. Let people have fun; silliness is a feature, not a bug. But I'm not having trouble with the starships and the lightsabers and the roster of talkative droids. I'm having trouble rolling with the strange choices made around bringing Hera's character to life in a show that feels otherwise, exceptionally polished and produced. In a franchise known for its practical effects from day one, this is just a really strange failure to behold.