Film Theory: Star Wars, Why don't Force Ghosts do EVERYTHING?

so i think we can all agree the rise of skywalker was a perfect movie well almost perfect there was one teeny tiny little detail that prevented it from being the masterpiece we all expected ray ho skywalker uh no what else would her last name be organa because she trained under leia and had a special connection with her come on the obvious answer is naming herself after the grumpy green milk guy who ignored her for like a week and then [Music] disappeared the wayfinder's there what's the problem there a dagger pointing to a very specific piece of wreckage just floating there on a turbulent ocean planet it's almost like you don't understand how space erosion works need a bit of a bigger brain there friend [Music] okay yeah maybe the renlo kiss was a bit of a mistake they probably should have kissed a little bit longer no the only moment marring what was otherwise a master stroke of filmmaking was this jedi's weapon deserves more respect yep that's the one that is the one i can't even keep up the facade that is the one and only thing that this movie did wrong force ghosts are suddenly too powerful and if they're able to lift ships and catch lightsabers then why don't they do anything else in these movies why aren't they the ones fighting clone emperor skin suit over on planet eczema it's a problem that cinemasins calls out but i better see an army of jedi ghosts coming to fight the emperor after this it's a problem that how it should have ended calls out you can use the force and hold the lightsaber after you're dead yes heck it's what they list as the way it should have ended look what i can do now i don't know why everyone was so surprised by this revelation true fans have known that force ghosts can do anything just play lego star wars scrubs but all joking aside the first indication that we get in the series that force ghosts can actually interact with the physical world is in the original trilogy in return of the jedi obi-wan shows up as a force ghost right after yoda's death and while he's fumbling his way through retconning the series why didn't you tell me what i told you was true from a certain point of view obi-wan brushes some vines out of his way making physical contact with the world around him production mistake or critical lore detail i think we all know what it really is and i think we all know what i'm gonna pretend that it is anyway leave it to darth pad over here to be the best star wars apologist of all time because for all of the complaints leveled against this new movie and i do think there are a lot of valid complaints to be made at the expense of rise of skywalker i don't believe that the force coast one is valid you have to dig deep real deep but there does seem to be a reason that force ghosts are unable to help in these sorts of situations so just like rey it's time for me to bring balance to the force she did it by you know killing all the evil guys leaving herself as the only good force user aka balanced perfectly balanced this whole thing should be me on the other hand i'm gonna do it by you know trying to invalidate one very small nitpick in a sea of criticism using evidence that i'm sure was in no way ever really intended by anyone working on these movies take it away sheeve the dark side of the force is a pathway to many abilities some consider to be unnatural hello internet welcome to film theory where today we did it we got ourselves a star wars theory right kind of rey is a palpatine just like i kinda predicted sure it required the series to bend over backwards and practically retcon itself into oblivion but you know what i'll take a point in the win column any day i mean we are talking about the creative team that thought it would be a good idea to have palpatine's i am still alive announcement happened in fortnight so you know what do you expect at this point fun fact that brilliant marketing decision now opens the door for star wars and marvel to cross over since thanos and the crew also spent some time infinity stone hunting in fortnite so connected universe confirmed but seriously why was everyone so surprised about that reveal at the top of rise of skywalker as long as you ignore the entirety of last jedi play fortnite with the boys and read the canon book series associated with the new film trilogy palpatine's return made perfect sense anyway clearly i'm just trolling i think whether you liked it or not we can all agree that rise of skywalker was filled with a lot of strange storytelling decisions a lot of them and as you may or may not know theory crafting is at its best when you can try to fill in the logical holes left behind by sloppy storytelling or inconsistent world building and at this point the star wars universe is holier than swiss cheese but today i wanted to focus on one specific issue force ghosts and how opie they are or at least how opie they seem like at this point the franchise we've seen him catch lightsabers cast lightning give free therapy sessions smack people with ghost canes and lift spaceships out from underwater they appear on the planets where they die they appear on the planets where they don't die they sometimes don't even appear and just act as voices i mean they can really do it all obi-wan wasn't joking when he said if you strike me down i shall become more powerful than you can possibly imagine literally they are just as if not more powerful than the actual living force users walking around the universe so if everyone is so concerned about the rise of the dark side or the return of the evil emperor or whatever then why would you ever send someone living to do the job when you can just send ghost dad over there well i believe that there's a very real in-universe explanation and no it doesn't have to do with the living force and the cosmic force and the dead jedi not wanting to or not being able to interfere with those in the living world we'll talk about all that stuff briefly but that all feels like a cop-out and honestly i think that there's a bigger more obvious and more practical reason for this one that doesn't require extensive knowledge of the legends universe or the animated spin-offs to comprehend and that my friends is our theory for today the first thing i needed to do was to look into the history of force ghosts in star wars while there have been a fair share of non-canonical force ghosts in the legends or video game universes the core canon movies make the claim that qui-gon jinn invented the technique after his death or at least he was the first to discover it in his own time an old friend has learned the path to immortality in reality we learn in the clone wars that qui-gon started learning this technique through the teachings of forced priestesses only to get called away to help trade negotiations happening over naboo aka the start of the phantom menace and that his training is cut short since by the end of that mission he dies at the hands of darth maul as a result he never truly completed his training while alive which is why his body doesn't disappear at the point of his death notice how they burn qui-gon's body in phantom menace whereas obi-wan and yoda just kind of peace out when they die show yourself can you i cannot my training was incomplete as a result throughout the rest of star wars media qui-gon is only able to appear as a force ghost in places that are nexuses of the force super strong epicenters of force energy so that's the long answer for why qui-gon never appears as a force ghost anywhere else in the series short answer is that liam neeson was probably just too expensive for the cameo after qui-gon's discovery of the technique most powerful lightside force users try to learn it themselves yoda told i was to learn from you that show me you could how to manifest my life after death who then passes it on to obi-wan in your solitude on tatooine training i have for you obi-wan then spent years studying the technique in isolation on the deserts of tatooine anakin skywalker meanwhile just kinda does a last-minute deathbed conversion and gets to be a ghost too must have made obi-wan and yoda feel real stupid then of course there's luke who sacrifices himself in last jedi and not only gains force ghost abilities but also the hairstyle of a 70s rock band of course you have force ghost tupac and finally leia who becomes the final force ghost of the series until the inevitable next one at this point the force ghost plane is far from the special technique that only the highest level of jedi accomplished it's now just kind of like the memorial for cameos past and present but with so many forest ghosts floating around why aren't they actually doing anything official explanations have been vague about this the best we have is from the book from a certain point of view where we hear what it's like to actually be a force ghost from qui-gon jinn's perspective basically the person's consciousness passes from the living force over into the cosmic force where they suddenly transcend all time and space they are eternal and in order to manifest back as a ghost in the physical realm they have to choose to for lack of a better term reassemble themselves in a specific time and location the process is described to be kind of painful and that's all we get there's been speculation that since they're eternal beings who can see the past and can kinda see the future they can't interfere with the actions of the living but that is so not true i'd say that causing a lightning strike to burn down an ancient jedi temple is interfering just a wee bit or lifting a ship out of the ocean so the hero can go fly off to the sith planet or encouraging a young rebel to aim his missiles at the very obvious weak point all of these examples are absolutely altering the course of events sometimes in very physical ways so what gives here what are the force ghosts allowed and not allowed to do well here's my theory i think the answer is tied deeply to what obi-wan was trying to tell luke as he left dagobah the number one lesson in real estate location location location the force canonically is stronger in some places than others even on dagobah a planet with so much force activity that emperor palpatine couldn't sense yoda's presence yoda can point to a cave that's stronger in the force than other areas of the with planet dark side of the force this tells us that one the force is location dependent and two the light sides and dark sides don't share the same force sensitivity we see this imbalance play out the emperor's throne room in return of the jedi the emperor and vader both strong dark side masters have little to no trouble using their most powerful force abilities from lightning storms to vader's ability to use the force to read luke's mind your thoughts betray you your feelings for them are strong meanwhile luke is struggling so much in this interaction he swings his lightsaber around like this [Music] even his one use of the force in this battle when he grabs his lightsaber from the emperor's chair was done in anger as if luke in this moment had to channel the dark side in order to access the force at all i'm actually going to go even further than just suggesting that location is everything and link this to my ongoing dissection of the science of star wars and say that midichlorians are to blame i know we fans like to ignore midichlorians because they uh well they kind of suck but there's some really good reasoning behind the force midichlorians and their relationship to force ghosts as i concluded in an earlier theory midichlorians are like super hyped hyped-up mitochondria that evolved in the star wars galaxy midichlorians are as qui-gon put it microscopic life-form that resides within all living cells without the midichlorians life could not exist and we would have no knowledge of the force which means that more life leads to more midichlorians and more midichlorians leads to more force sensitivity for beings that are made entirely of the force like a force ghost this difference would be massive qui-gon says exactly this in the clone wars all energy from the living force from all things that have ever lived feeds into the cosmic force binding everything and communicating to us through the midichlorians because of this i can speak to you now as such planets with more life should naturally yield more powerful force ghosts with more abilities and conversely the further you get away from the abundance of life the weaker those force ghosts and their abilities are gonna be and wouldn't you know it but that's exactly what we see play out in these movies planets like dagobah a huge swamp and akh2 luke's hideaway in the new trilogy are teeming with life we're told that these are epicenters of force activity and true to form we see force ghosts in each of those locations able to be physically present ghost yoda bonks luke on the head with his ghost staff he summons force lightning to burn a tree ghost luke catches a lightsaber and lifts a spaceship over on dagobah ghost obi-wan is able to knock vines out of his way as he goes to talk to luke now look at the places where the ghosts can't be physically present in this series when obi-wan says that he can't help luke face darth vader in the original trilogy vader was on bespin a floating metal platform hovering over a gas giant planet other than the inhabitants of the mining cities the planet was basically lifeless not a whole lot of midichlorians there and as such not enough energy for a force ghost to physically manifest in a new hope luke is flying around in a spaceship at the surface of the death star no life there and as such obi-wan is only able to communicate as a voice in rise of skywalker the sith planet exigle appears to be made almost entirely out of barren rocks this guy is the emperor he has the ability to go anywhere like his beautiful home planet of naboo or kanto bite the casino planet but instead he tends to hang out in big empty throne rooms even far away from his own guards he has not taken a chance that one of these force ghosts is gonna get a chance to pop out of the blue teleport in a lightsaber and stab him but to me the most telling appearance is in hoth it's easy to forget but in the empire strikes back luke actually sees obi-wan as a force ghost on hoth and it presents us an interesting middle ground of these sorts of appearances hoth isn't completely devoid of life like exigal or bespin but it also isn't teeming with life like dagobah or octu it's a middle ground with a middle amount of midichlorians and true to form obi-wan's force ghost in this moment is also in a bit of a middle ground he's more transparent he's less fully formed despite snow blowing in the air and being on the ground his force ghost isn't physically interacting with any of that it's a lot like a radio signal with weak reception it's coming through but not as strongly as if you were in a better area it's exactly what you would expect to happen if amount of life or amount of midichlorians were the battery fueling these sorts of ghost appearances and for further proof compare that obi-wan appearance at the top of the movie to the one that happens later in that exact same movie on dagobah here he's fully fleshed out meaning that this wasn't just like a technical limitation or creative choice for this one film so the force ghosts and their powers in this new trilogy aren't so much a plot hole as it is just a very poorly explained mechanic that you really need to read between the lines in order to make sense of oh and that you also have to selectively choose your evidence i suppose because there is one plot hole that even i can't explain why didn't yoda and obi-wan do something to vader while he was on endor we know for a fact that endor is teeming with enough life to support stable force ghosts heck we see three of them hanging out at the ewok celebration that closes out return of the jedi mean to tell me that neither yoda nor obi-wan felt like helping luke out i mean yoda had just become a ghost so maybe he was just getting used to things but obi-wan really is the worst maybe that's my real theory today force ghosts can't solve everything but they could have at least done something on endor slackers but hey that's just a theory a film theory and cuts this is the subscribe button you're looking for this is the subscribe button you're looking for you will press the subscribe button you will ring the bell for future notifications you will help us achieve the 10 million subscriber milestone so we could get the glorified paperweight that comes with it is my force strong enough is it coming through the tubes maybe this is a dark side power i don't know see you next time

Channel: The Film Theorists

Views: 2,674,434

Rating: 4.9040833 out of 5

Keywords: star wars, force ghosts, force ghost, star wars movie, star wars force ghost, star war the rise of skywalker, the rise of skywalker, rey, kylo ren, yoda, baby yoda, luke skywalker, star wars squadrons, d23 star wars, the mandalorian, fortnite star wars event, star wars rise of skywalker ending, the film theorists, film theory, matpat, film theory star wars, star wars squadrons trailer, ea star wars

Id: lqMYMtZ8qSk

Length: 16min 10sec (970 seconds)

Published: Thu Jul 02 2020