Just prior to the release of last year’s The Force Awakens, Star Wars creator George Lucas revealed his major concern was that the Force, that nebulous metaphysical energy field whose presence powers both the good-hearted Jedi and evil Sith in the long-running space opera saga, didn’t “get muddled into a bunch of gobbledegook”.
The warning might have seemed a bit rich coming from the man who invented the concept of midi-chloreans, microscopic creatures living in the bloodstream of all living things that supposedly communicate the Force’s will.
In any case, JJ Abrams largely chose to ignore his predecessor’s advice. We don’t see a revolution in the way the Force manifests in Episode VII, but there is a sense that some of the old rules have been thrown out. For instance, you no longer need to be a Sith to display dark-side powers (as Adam Driver’s Kylo Ren proved with merciless cruelty), and there now exist Jedi-aligned allies of the Resistance who have no capabilities themselves (Max Von Sydow’s Lor San Tekka and Lupita Nyong’o’s Maz Kanata).
Subsequent spin-off books have revealed San Tekka was part of an order known as The Church of the Force on Jakku prior to his death – the villagers murdered by Ren’s stormtroopers would have been his fellow acolytes. So there certainly seems to have been a subtle expansion of Jediism (if anyone has a better term to describe it do let me know) in The Force Awakens, from an elite religious order exclusive to a tiny minority of individuals capable of wielding the Force to a more outward-looking cult that’s open to including those who don’t benefit directly from its existence.
And now there’s Rogue One, which, according to comments from Gareth Edwards this week, via an interview in Entertainment Weekly, seems to be going a whole lot further.
The Force is basically in Star Wars like a religion, and they’re losing their faith in the period that we start the movie. We were trying to find a physical location we could go to that would speak to the themes of losing your faith and the choice between letting the Empire win, or evil win, and good prevailing. It got embodied in this place we called Jedha.
In a wider level, there must be loads of people who just believe in the Jedi and believe in the Force and have been affected by it. If it’s a really ancient religion, as Obi-Wan Kenobi said, it’s got to exist in thousands or millions of people in the galaxy.
Rogue One seems to be betting heavily on Star Wars fans buying into this new, expanded take on the Force, as it largely takes place on Jedha. But there are surely real issues in realigning previously nebulous Star Wars theological concepts along the lines of traditional religion.
I’ve already mentioned Jediism’s exclusivity. Unlike Christianity, Islam or Buddhism, you can’t really be part of it unless you are Force-sensitive. So why would Jedis need followers in the first place? The fact that there seem to be few Jedi preachers – perhaps Rogue One will introduce these – would suggest they don’t.
Traditional religions have often flourished by threatening their followers with eternal hellfire should they fail to sign up. Preachers in Judeo-Christian faiths, whether rightly or wrongly, believe it would be a dereliction of duty to leave their fellow man ignorant of this horrific peril. But as far as we know, there is no concept of Hades in Jediism – the non-canonical expanded universe novels don’t count – so why would the Jedis need to spread the divine word at all?
Previous Star Wars instalments have suggested they do not, beyond the occasional mystical moment of pithy wisdom from Yoda. Jedi masters thus far have always been focused on the need for their own disciples to follow the path of righteousness, rather than those living in the galaxy at large. This is perfectly natural: an ordinary Joe falling to the dark side would be a matter of rather less concern than Anakin Skywalker doing the same, because the former would lack the evil magical powers to make any real mischief. Moreover, there has never been any sense in Star Wars that one side of the Force triumphs over the other thanks to its more numerous flock, so why bother to recruit?
This Force-clunkiness also seems to have seeped into the new Rogue One trailer, where we see Donnie Yen’s monkish Chirrut Imwe launching himself into battle with a fatalistic cry of Jediist piety. “I fear nothing,” he tells an unseen opponent. “All is as the Force wills it!”
To quote Harrison Ford’s Han Solo in The Force Awakens: “That’s not how the Force works!”
Yoda and Obi-Wan Kenobi did not tell Luke Skywalker in The Empire Strikes Back to throw himself, lemming-like, at Darth Vader’s lightsaber, and hope the frickin’ midi-chloreans wanted him to live. Rather they suggested that if the young wannabe Jedi did not pursue the right path, in this case completing his training, he would ramp up his chances of defeat, of being turned to the dark side himself.
There are two explanations for Imwe’s determination to see the Force as a fatalistic religion. The first is bad screenwriting, while the second suggests that followers of Jediism in the galaxy at large don’t really have a clue what they are signing up to. Rather than religious puritans, they are just fanboys who have seen the odd lightsaber battle and reckon it might be cool to tag along.
Readers of this post might wonder why Disney and Lucasfilm should bother coming up with workable conceptual furniture for the Force when this is just a Star Wars movie, and Lucas himself chopped and changed the rules when he felt like it during earlier episodes. But plot holes and fuzzy storytelling are the ingredients for critical derision, fan disgruntlement and weakened franchises, as Suicide Squad and Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice have so disappointingly proved over the past calendar year.
To paraphrase Yoda (with a little late-era Lucas thrown in for good measure), muddling the Force “into a bunch of gobbledegook” is likely to lead to anger. Anger leads to hate. And hate leads to suffering ... both in the Hollywood corridors of power, and in the expectant aisles of the movie theater.
