I don’t think I’m misunderstanding what I think is a pretty obvious oversight regarding the nature of the force on the part of RJ but I’m open to hearing any possible explanations.
I think NFB’s post above is a great response, but if I could add my own counterargment on top of it: whether Rian broke the rules or not - those rules being broken led to a better movie, which is the most important thing.
Because as everyone here should be painfully familiar with by now: George Lucas doesn’t always have good ideas, and sticking to something he dreamed up simply because he dreamed it up is a pretty unnecessary set of handcuffs to put on yourself if you don’t have to.
And Rian didn’t have to.
And that’s all IF I agree with the notion he didn’t get The Force, which I DON’T agree with. We can’t even properly wrap our head around REAL religions, much less half-baked fictional ones that more or less only exist for the sake of giving a fantasy movie its magic analog. The Force being shaded and re-interpreted for each trilogy (or even each movie, really) is just as much a Star Wars tradition as the opening scroll and blue closing credits.
Once again, one of the bigger discussions i’ve seen in the past 20 years comes down to rules-lawyering a fictional religion in a fantasy movie - but the only reason that rules-lawyering has been allowed to go on so long is because Lucas had the brilliant idea to retcon Return of the Jedi with the Prequel Trilogy, retroactively making the OT and PT into Anakin’s story, and using a tired “CHOSEN ONE prophecy” arc for him, created a shaky, and almost ALWAYS misunderstood concept of what “balance” means in the force as the engine for that prophecy to run through the prequels.
If I agree that Rian Johnson tweaked or changed the idea of how people interact or concieve of the Force in-universe, I’d say that’s fine. Adhering to bad ideas, executed badly, for the sake of keeping canon sacred, is just another form of bad storytelling. If there’s room for re-interpretation (and there obviously is - Lucas himself keeps doing it both in the movies and in interviews ABOUT the movies, as NFB showed above) then I think that re-interpretation should be done if you have a good angle or idea on it that helps YOUR STORY.