By Ross McIndoe
“They just don’t get what Star Wars is really about!”
That complaint has been circulating ever since those big yellow letters crawled back up our screens to announce the return of Star Wars in 2015. The resulting vitriol has been aimed at the filmmakers, the studio employing them, and anyone who praises the creative choices that many felt were tantamount to sacrilege.
So, what is Star Wars really about?
A long answer to that could go on for volumes, roping in samurai and Western cinematic traditions, science fiction, space opera, hero myths, good and evil, the Vietnam war, and more.
But perhaps, a short answer could simply be: the Force.
The Force has been at the center of all nine movies, from providing the inciting incident that sets our hero on his journey in A New Hope to playing a vital role in Rey and Kylo’s final showdown in The Rise of Skywalker. And the way the Force has changed across the series has been central to its varying failures and successes.
A Long Time Ago…
In the original trilogy, the Force is explained in the vague terms of a life force — akin to “chi” or “spirit,” something that flows through all living beings. Talk of “the Force” is met with the same glib disbelief reserved for astrologers and psychics in the real world, and the few remaining Jedi are seen as adherents to a dead creed.
Thus, the Force functions essentially as a religion or philosophy, and the most significant uses of it in the first three movies are all steeped in metaphor — its symbolic importance far outstripping its role as a plot device.
Of course, the true power of the Force is affirmed — Luke Skywalker is plucked from moisture-farming obscurity by Ben Kenobi to learn that the Force is very real.
As Luke adventures out into the galaxy, this mystical energy grants us some of the most iconic moments in the history of cinema — from Darth Vader choking an impudent underling from across the room, to Yoda raising Luke’s X-wing out of the Dagobah swamp, to Luke springing into the air to evade Jabba the Hutt’s thugs as they battle above the Sarlacc pit.
These imaginative moments land perfectly and set our minds reeling the way only Star Wars can. However, they are also few and far between. Most of the Jedi are gone, and those who remain don’t spend their days chucking things around with their minds. They are monk-like in their approach to the Force, treating it with reverence and calling on its power only when absolutely necessary.
Most notably, Ben Kenobi uses it to disappear as Vader strikes him down. The value here is symbolic — Kenobi refuses to win through violence and is willing to give up his life to uphold his beliefs.
The Force fulfills a similarly symbolic role in A New Hope, when Luke hears Kenobi’s voice while trying to pull off a difficult precision strike on the Death Star. The whole idea of Force ghosts — the ethereal blue form in which Kenobi and Yoda return to Luke — makes literal the metaphysical notion that those we care about stay with us, even after they die. It’s a magic power, sure, but one deeply rooted in a profound part of our life experience.
In Return of the Jedi, Luke doesn’t win the war by using his lightsaber to tear through the empire’s army. Instead, he triumphs by committing to the Jedi principles that value pacifism over dominance, redemption over punishment. Luke wins not by killing Vader, but by refusing to give up on him.
This idea is at the very heart of the Star Wars legend. It became one of the greatest pop cultural phenomena of all time by anchoring its space opera in friendship, love, and the will to do good. In a universal life force that connected us all.
You can pretty much chart the success of the two subsequent trilogies by how well they understood this.
The Hard Science of the Prequels
The prequels — which explain Darth Vader’s origin story and the fall of the Jedi — were never going to become hard sci-fi. That said, they did provide a more concrete explanation of the Force.
That brings us to the phrase Star Wars fans hate more than “Jar Jar Binks”: midi-chlorians.
Midi-chlorians, as explained in The Phantom Menace, are the tiny life forms which reside inside all living things and which make up the Force. Jedis have a lot of midi-chlorians and thus are able to manipulate this life force.
So, rather than being the spiritual gurus of the cosmos, Obi-Wan and co. are essentially the masters of space bacteria.
Essentially, this repositioned the Force as something more practical than metaphorical or metaphysical. If the original trilogy succeeds because it treats the Force as a mystical set of principles, the prequels fail by treating the Force like a biological phenomenon you must learn to harness. While Yoda was once a spiritual teacher, he now functions more like a military commander, helping naturally-gifted warriors physically excel.
To convey this new vision of the Force, the prequels took advantage of the boundless possibilities presented by CGI. This yielded a back-flipping Yoda facing off against Count Dooku. Regardless of how you feel about this action sequence, it definitely jarred our previous understanding of the character.
In the original films, Yoda is drawn straight from the realm of kung fu epics — a wizened sage whose unimpressive physical form and goofy demeanor mask his true power, a power he overwhelmingly chooses not to use.
It seems that, in Lucas’s excitement about what he could do with new CGI effects, he created a version of Yoda that is often unfamiliar to fans of the original trilogy. By getting too enthusiastic about his new toys, Lucas lost all sense of what Yoda and the Jedi were all about.
The Sequels and Their Space Kings
Then, The Force Awakens came along to make things right for fans.
This redemption would require more than merely reassembling the surface elements of the originals. It would require an understanding of the original Star Wars spirit. And, in a perfectly tragic twist, the way the new films (or at least Abrams’s two installments) insisted on honoring the past proved to be the seed of their undoing. Nowhere was this more apparent than in how the series understood the Force.
The Force Awakens tried to atone for the prequels’ sins by restoring everything the fans had lost — a good-hearted hero plucked from the arid obscurity of a desert planet, a black-clad, masked nemesis, and a cocky flyboy with a heart of gold.
It also brought back our old friends Han, Leia, and, very briefly, Luke.
The film also lovingly restored the original tone and look of the Star Wars universe. But even for the man whose work was being honored, the lack of originality was disturbing. “There’s nothing new,” George Lucas told Bob Iger, according to the Disney chief’s memoir.
After a Johnson-helmed interlude that we’ll get to in a moment, Abrams returned with the final film of the trilogy, in which he doubled down on this desire to reanimate the past. The Rise of Skywalker magically resuscitated the original antagonist, gave him a Vader-like disciple, and, once again, made our hero’s lineage the center of the story.
Further, the film basically insists that the Force is a genetic trait, one handed down from Force-user to Force-user. The Force was no longer a philosophy to adhere to, but a power you had to be lucky enough to inherit.
This lineage-obsessed vision of the Force infected every other part of The Rise of Skywalker. In its fixation on the past, the film lost sight of what made the original trilogy resonate.
Arguably, all of this could have been avoided if The Rise of Skywalker had paid more attention to its direct predecessor, The Last Jedi.
Rian Johnson’s film was highly-contentious from the moment Luke grumpily tossed his lightsaber over his shoulder.
It’s easy to see why some fans were caught off-guard — they expected to watch a Jedi Master of unrivaled skill taking Rey under his wing while demonstrating the incredible powers he had cultivated in the intervening years.
But the Force, as Luke reminds Rey, is about more than lifting rocks.
The Last Jedi is full of iconoclastic moments in which objects of great symbolic importance are destroyed or discarded — Luke’s saber, Rose’s amulet, Kylo’s helmet, and worst of all, the Jedi temple and its sacred texts.
Like the audience, Luke is panic-stricken at the destruction of this holy site. But, just like he did all those years ago, Yoda helps Luke, and the audience, see things more clearly by explaining that the ways of the Jedi have never, and could never, be bound to a place or a book or a lightsaber.
Many fans took issue with the sudden ability of Force ghosts to influence the material world. It raises the question: If they could pull this sort of stuff, why weren’t Ben Kenobi and Yoda and everyone else helping out after they died?
But more importantly, having Yoda harness his powers from beyond the grave to blow up First Order troops repeats the prequels’ mistake. That is, the mistake of equating mastery of the Force with a greater capacity for violence.
The Force is not a super-weapon to be unleashed on the enemy. It is not the Rebellion’s Death Star because having a Death Star is at odds with the whole purpose of the Jedi. Their religion, beneath the robes and the council and the lightsabers and the telekinesis, is centered on an unyielding respect for life. Or at least, it used to be.
But how do you reconcile such idealistic sentiments with the desire to make an exciting movie? As an audience, we want to be thrilled by the high-stakes drama of a fight scene. The battle between good and evil is inherently cinematic. But if all the good guys refuse to fight, you definitely don’t have a battle, and you probably don’t have a movie.
In its climactic fight scene, The Last Jedi explores this tension in spectacular fashion.
Here, the fans who bemoaned Luke’s decline into surly hermitage are given everything they wanted. He rides in when all seems lost and stands heroically before the First Order. After delivering a sizzling put-down, he goes head to head with Kylo — evading the young Sith’s furious blows with the grace and skill of a true Jedi Master.
And then, he vanishes.
Because he was never really there. Luke refuses to be drawn into a sword-fight, to see the fate of the galaxy decided by who is better at stabbing. Instead, the Jedi uses Kylo’s rage against him, manifesting as an illusionary stand-in for Kylo to battle as the Rebels escape.
Luke sacrifices his life, like Kenobi did before him, to craft a better future.
The film then ends with one of the most quietly beautiful shots in the series’ history — a young child, born into servitude, summoning a broom towards him with the Force. The message is that heroes can be found anywhere because the power to make a difference resides in all of us.
This is, of course, exactly how the original trilogy envisioned it. By the end of Return of the Jedi, we understand that even characters with no Jedi connections, like Han Solo, can tune in to the Force with enough practice. It is the energy of life itself, present in everyone regardless of their midi-chlorian count.
In this way, Johnson takes the original ethos of the Force and evolves it, allowing Star Wars, briefly, to grow beyond the legends of the original trilogy. After a series of technically stunning, basically soulless efforts, the series finally managed to let the past die.
Some saw this as a betrayal, a cynical attempt to garner attention by subverting expectations just for the sake of doing so. But ironically, every move The Last Jedi made, no matter how shocking or iconoclastic, was absolutely in accord with the spirit of the originals. The spirit of friendship, love, loyalty and, most importantly, hope.
That’s what the Jedi, what Star Wars, is really really about. Lightsabers are cool, and space battles are exciting, but what grounds the series has always been the idea that there are causes worth fighting, or not fighting, to preserve. Those causes unite us all and allow us to achieve things beyond what we believe is possible.
The Force.
