A Study in The Force

Welcome A Study in The Force.

Here I wanted to give some acknowledgement to a series that, in many ways, made a movie-lover out of me.  But how to do that?  There’s so much stuff out there with regards to Star Wars that I wouldn’t know where to start.  My first idea here was to talk about the movies one by one, but I feel that coming off of the exhausting Spielberg Month, I wanted to dial down and try something new.

So, all this week I’m going to deal with the mystical aspects of Star Wars, not the visual effects, but the ideas, the force and the strange uneven legacy of the Jedi as the series plays out.  In order to do that, I must begin where the whole saga began, not with The Phantom Menace but with A New Hope.

Through out the history of Star Wars, that being the seven films, the two TV series and the expanded universe the idea of The Jedi Order and how they function within this world have gone, admittedly, from one extreme to the other.  The expansion of what The Force is and how it is properly (and improperly) used varies widely as we move from the Original Trilogy through to J.J. Abrams brave attempts to untie the knots the Lucas has tied in his own series.  To understand that, you must understand how the series has evolved.  For these purposes we are not going to move through the series chronologically in SW time but chronologically in real time beginning with the Original Trilogy, then very briefly through The Expanded Universe (before Disney obliterated it) then through the prequels then the TV shows and finally into The Force Awakens.
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About the Author: Jerry Roberts

Jerry Roberts is a film critic and operator of two websites, Armchair Cinema and Armchair Oscars.