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Originally Posted by Cecil Terwilliger
It raises an interesting question though, why did they make the decision to move away from the Jedi/Sith lore?
I get why they moved away from a Skywalker story. Mark Hamill can not carry another trilogy. They needed to move away from the old stars and towards new heroes.
But it definitely feels like a conscious decision was made to scrub away a lot of the lore surrounding Jedi as a religion. I find this a bit odd because the religion aspect was never a focus of the original trilogy. I don’t think it was ever even called a religion. Why focus on that now? Was Disney worried audiences, international audiences specifically, wouldn’t react well to that? Was it Rian Johnson’s decision?
Thematically it was one of the few things I didn’t like, I love the Jedi/Sith dichotomy and I never even associated Jedi or Sith as religious fundamentalists.
All that being said, the hardcore fan base is a very small segment of the movie going audience and for better or for worse Disney has tried to move the film into a realm much more palatable for mainstream and international audiences.
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Tarkin refers to it as a religion as well in A New Hope. At the time of it being a standalone movie, I think it was to just hammer home the idea of the Jedi being like warrior monks, and wasn't part of something grander, and was basically abandoned for the other movies.
My problem with the prequels is that they made the Jedi too powerful and influential. Given the way people talked in A New Hope you would have figured the Force and its influence would have been fading for a long time. What are they talking about with it being an 'ancient religion' when these officers would have been alive at the time when the Jedi were still part of the administrative structure of the Galaxy.
The prequels failings were by not making a cynical galaxy towards the Jedi and Force users, and growing resentment of their 'outdated' beliefs having too much influence in the Republic, allowing for a more believable turn against them by the Emperor. This would have made Anakin's turn a lot more impactful and even understandable if he felt the traditional ways of the Jedi were failing to bring peace to the galaxy and those he loved, that they were even getting in the way of it with their obsession with (one-sided) balance and not using the potential power to truly defeat those that he saw as a threat, and Palpatine would have been able to exploit and nourish that mindset.