Entry tags:
Star Wars (minimal spoilers)
So we saw Episode 9 last night. As always, the special effects are great. The characters of episodes 7-9 are more engaging and interesting than those of episodes 1-3. But NOTHING MAKES SENSE.
It has bothered me for a long time that single-seat fighter ships, both good-guy and bad-guy, are apparently capable of interstellar travel. In fact, in Episode 4 there was a line about "short-range tie fighters" that couldn't operate far from the support of a larger ship. And yet in Episode 9 you see a bunch of tie fighters follow the Millennium Falcon through a series of lightspeed jumps to several different planets. (Why all of these seemingly-random lightspeed jumps, with all the vacant space in the universe, happen to put the Falcon within a hundred yards of a planet's surface, surrounded by tall obstacles to dodge, is of course not explained.) And as far back as Episode 5, Luke flew an X-wing from planet to planet, with no suggestion that the planets in question were in the same star system. Rey does that again in Episode 9. So let's just swallow this: not only is there a lightspeed drive enabling interstellar travel, but it's cheap enough to include in an expendable single-seat ship (we certainly see enough of them get blown up!) whose primary goal is tactical combat. Which makes you wonder about the point of all those larger ships, but anyway....
In Episode 8, a fleet of rebel ships is outnumbered and outgunned by a fleet of Empire ships at fairly close range (say, millions of miles tops), and the good guys have a matter of hours to depolarize the framistans on the Empire ships so the rebel fleet can escape. So several of the main characters decide to go find and recruit the framistan expert on a planet in a different star system, making their way through the seedy underbelly and the glitzy gambling resorts of that planet -- all of which should take at least hours if not days by itself, not counting any time it takes to get to that planet. If it's that quick and easy to go to a different star system, why not just move the fleet? The same thing happens in Episode 9: with hours to go before the bad-guy fleet mobilizes to destroy a gazillion planets, the good guys visit a colorful folk festival on another planet in another star system, make friends with the natives, and leave the festival (pursued by storm troopers, of course) to find a wrecked space ship that might contain a clue telling them how to get to the planet (in yet another star system) where the bad-guy fleet is. A clue, BTW, that Luke had spent years looking for, and they're hoping to find and use it in hours. Then they need help from a particular expert in the seedy underbelly of a particular city on yet another planet in yet another star system, so of course they go there and do that, still within those few hours.
Then there's the light-saber duel on the platform in the middle of a raging ocean (you've seen it in the trailers, even if you haven't seen the movie). WHY are they having this fight, other than because it looks cool? What is either of them hoping to achieve by "winning" the fight (which determines what "winning" means)?
For the final multi-ship battle, one ship has been sent off to "the Core worlds" to beg for reinforcements from the dispirited but secretly rebellious people of those worlds. I imagine the response taking days or weeks to develop the political will, and days or weeks more to mobilize the forces; here it all happens within an hour or so. And when the motley reinforcements arrive, from dozens of worlds (reminiscent, as![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
shalmestere points out, of the rescue scene at the end of "Pirate Radio"), they all arrive at once, in formation, despite having no apparent command structure.
In short, an awful lot of things seem to happen for no reason except that they look really cool on screen. And I think with a little more creativity, they could have made equally-cool-looking things happen AND MAKE SENSE.
Kvetch, kvetch, kvetch....
It has bothered me for a long time that single-seat fighter ships, both good-guy and bad-guy, are apparently capable of interstellar travel. In fact, in Episode 4 there was a line about "short-range tie fighters" that couldn't operate far from the support of a larger ship. And yet in Episode 9 you see a bunch of tie fighters follow the Millennium Falcon through a series of lightspeed jumps to several different planets. (Why all of these seemingly-random lightspeed jumps, with all the vacant space in the universe, happen to put the Falcon within a hundred yards of a planet's surface, surrounded by tall obstacles to dodge, is of course not explained.) And as far back as Episode 5, Luke flew an X-wing from planet to planet, with no suggestion that the planets in question were in the same star system. Rey does that again in Episode 9. So let's just swallow this: not only is there a lightspeed drive enabling interstellar travel, but it's cheap enough to include in an expendable single-seat ship (we certainly see enough of them get blown up!) whose primary goal is tactical combat. Which makes you wonder about the point of all those larger ships, but anyway....
In Episode 8, a fleet of rebel ships is outnumbered and outgunned by a fleet of Empire ships at fairly close range (say, millions of miles tops), and the good guys have a matter of hours to depolarize the framistans on the Empire ships so the rebel fleet can escape. So several of the main characters decide to go find and recruit the framistan expert on a planet in a different star system, making their way through the seedy underbelly and the glitzy gambling resorts of that planet -- all of which should take at least hours if not days by itself, not counting any time it takes to get to that planet. If it's that quick and easy to go to a different star system, why not just move the fleet? The same thing happens in Episode 9: with hours to go before the bad-guy fleet mobilizes to destroy a gazillion planets, the good guys visit a colorful folk festival on another planet in another star system, make friends with the natives, and leave the festival (pursued by storm troopers, of course) to find a wrecked space ship that might contain a clue telling them how to get to the planet (in yet another star system) where the bad-guy fleet is. A clue, BTW, that Luke had spent years looking for, and they're hoping to find and use it in hours. Then they need help from a particular expert in the seedy underbelly of a particular city on yet another planet in yet another star system, so of course they go there and do that, still within those few hours.
Then there's the light-saber duel on the platform in the middle of a raging ocean (you've seen it in the trailers, even if you haven't seen the movie). WHY are they having this fight, other than because it looks cool? What is either of them hoping to achieve by "winning" the fight (which determines what "winning" means)?
For the final multi-ship battle, one ship has been sent off to "the Core worlds" to beg for reinforcements from the dispirited but secretly rebellious people of those worlds. I imagine the response taking days or weeks to develop the political will, and days or weeks more to mobilize the forces; here it all happens within an hour or so. And when the motley reinforcements arrive, from dozens of worlds (reminiscent, as
shalmestere points out, of the rescue scene at the end of "Pirate Radio"), they all arrive at once, in formation, despite having no apparent command structure.In short, an awful lot of things seem to happen for no reason except that they look really cool on screen. And I think with a little more creativity, they could have made equally-cool-looking things happen AND MAKE SENSE.
Kvetch, kvetch, kvetch....
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Maybe all the food is synthesized, using lightning as the energy source, and nobody ever leaves the ships for the obvious reason that the planet is a hellhole. Which gives you some idea why the crews of the ships are so gung-ho to destroy other people's planets....