In other words, the nominal guardians of our spiritual and corporeal wellbeing couldn't be trusted not to abuse that power. Much of the plot of film eight revolved around Luke Skywalker's crisis of faith, prompted by the realisation that the power invested in the Jedi order, a power that was meant to safeguard the balance between light and dark in the universe, was in fact the gravest threat to that balance. 'I see Star Wars as taking all of the issues that religion represents and trying to distil them down into a more modern and more easily accessible construct that people can grab onto to accept the fact that there is a greater mystery out there.вЂќ 'I don't see Star Wars as profoundly religious,' he told interviewer Bill Moyers.

If there's one thing worse than having God shoved down your throat it's being force-fed a religion that's entirely cod.Д«ack in 1999, George Lucas explained his thinking in creating The Force. Now the saga has finally come to an end, and The Force has moved from the margins to star billing, and it's all become a bit of a farce. Sure, it was a space western, but it also had something to say about self-sacrifice and the common good, a refreshing tonic to the cynical, materialistic world of the 1970s. When the Star Wars saga kicked off 42 years ago, The Force was a quaint background noise that gave George Lucas' tribute to the Saturday matinees of his childhood the semblance of something a little more meaningful.

Warning: this article contains spoilers for Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker.

I felt a disturbance in the force