As 'The Rise of Skywalker' hits theaters, a reflection on the rural spirit of Star Wars

Luke Skywalker on the Tatooine moisture farm where he grew up. (Screenshot from Star Wars: A New Hope)

Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker hits theaters tonight, concluding the nine-film arc that began in 1977 with A New Hope. In honor of the occasion, Adam Giorgi takes a moment to reflect on the rural underpinnings of the Star Wars universe. Giorgi is the director of digital strategy at the Center for Rural Strategies, which publishes The Daily Yonder.

"There is a rural spirit at the core of Star Wars," Giorgi writes for the Yonder. Much of the scenery in the Star Wars movies is rural (when not in space, of course). Iconic settings like Tatooine, Hoth, Dagobah, Endor and Jakku are all "patently rural," Giorgi writes. "They’re frontier settlements, farmsteads, distant refuges and, in the character’s own words, 'backwater planets.' I for one can’t hear the indelible John Williams theme for 'the Force' without immediately picturing young farm boy Luke, set against the sprawling horizon and twin suns of Tatooine."

The planetside scenes often feel "pastoral, hardscrabble and, as many fans have noted, covered in a certain soot and grime," Giorgi writes, noting that this illustrates how Star Wars pulls heavily from Western and samurai story genres, which have their own rural tropes. That's especially apparent in the new Disney+ series The Mandalorian, which essentially plays out like a spaghetti Western in space.

Giorgi's essay has more insights, but the bottom line, he writes, is that Star Wars reminds us "how rural people, places and stories are pretty inspiring and indispensable too, here at home and in a galaxy far, far away."