Yeah, I hear that.
The first part, I mean. I watched the original Star Wars movies as a kid and they were… fine. I’ve rewatched them as an adult and they are still fine, although for different reasons.
Star Wars was written as a tribute to B Movies and does a very successful job of being a series of B Movies.
But I don’t much care for B Movies. So being the best B Movie is still pretty “meh.”
They’re certainly watchable – unlike the prequels.
I liked the first one because it looked like the space opera I used to read as a kid, even though the story was rubbish and the characters were flat. By the third one I was thinking, “What am I doing here?” I never saw another.
Yet_One_More_Idiot
Welp, I’m 37 and I’ve never watched Star Wars. ANY of them. (And i don’t intend to xD)
Now, Star Trek on the other hand… (or my #1 SF, Doctor Who!)
HECK YEAH! CINDEL! Disney totally messed up when they removed her movis from canon. Not like they impact anything >< Where are the Ewoks Disney? WHERE ARE THE EWOKS?!
I was thinking about this the other day and while there are scenes I *like* more I find Rogue One to be the most re-watchable. The mainline SW films feel like event movies that I need to devote my attention to. RO is good and beautiful but also something I can put on while surfing the web. I think that’s because I used to do the same with a TV channel that showed a lot of the war movies RO evokes.
I’m old enough that I remember a time when saying that my favorite Star Wars movie was Return of the Jedi would get me mocked. That was the “bad” Star Wars for 16 years.
Even though it has more awesome shit that any other film in the trilogy: Jabba’s palace, the Rancor, the sand barge, the speeder bikes, the bigger and more exciting Death Star battle, Yoda’s emotional death, Luke’s confrontation with the Emperor, Vader’s redemption, and Leia and Han getting together. But it had Ewoks so fuck me for liking it.
Then the prequels came out and Jedi was cool now, we hate the prequels instead. And then the sequels so now we forgive the prequels and hate on those.
This is why I can’t take any of the current Star Wars “controversy” seriously. Seriously, I’m old and I was there, SW fans have always been like this.
Right? Vicious little bastards, nearly eat the heroes. And they have empty Stormtrooper helmets at the end, so what do you think was being served at the victory party?
But they looked cute and toylike. If they’d been reptile or insect looking then no one would have had a problem with them being badasses. Even though in real life even small bears are bad news.
Ohmsford
I thought we forgave the Skywalker Saga as a whole on account of Solo
But Solo is better, in all measurable ways, than the prequel trilogy and A New Hope.
nlips
Solo was an objectively terrible movie, and I still liked it better than most of the others because it was fun. 🙂
woobie
Wasn’t Solo so bad it killed any future standalones?
Josh Spicer
In terms of box office, yeah, but that was mostly due to backlash from Last Jedi, among other date issues.
Solo as a whole seems to be well received by fans and critics alike. Add that with the positive reception Rogue One got and it’s still kinda stupid why Kathleeen dropped the idear.
Matticus
It’s not a great movie, but it isn’t terrible. It underperformed at the box office, but it had little to do with backlash to TLJ. Much more important to its perceived failure were a) the release date (too close to TLJ), b) the lack of a marketing push (it didn’t even get a trailer until 3 months before release), c) the very publicly troubled production and d) it being a Han Solo movie 30 years too late and without Harrison Ford.
Wolfbeckett
By what “objective” measure specifically was Solo terrible? It was not as good as Rogue One but it was way better than episode 7 or especially episode 8. The Last Jedi was by a fair measure the worst Star Wars movie ever made and The Force Awakens was only marginally better.
the force awakens was a good movie. It held a lot of promise for the new triology, with interesting new characters, and a great jump on point.
The Last Jedi then wasted all that potential by focusing on the boring as hell Kylo Ren instead of on the far more interesting duo or Finn and Rey.
thejeff
I love how we’re handwaving “objective” for what’s essentially a matter of taste.
Episode III was actually very good, as was the final half an hour of Episode II for me.
He Who Abides
I dunno, the effects and writing on the prequel trilogy make them unwatchable to me.
Yeah, I know that I’m gonna get mocked for it. But seriously, bad special effects and/or dialogue can destroy a film for me way more than most other flaws
LITERALLY THOUGH. Every time something new comes out, it’s the worst thing ever and ruins Star Wars. Then the next thing comes out and old thing was fine, it’s the new thing that’s awful and on and on and on.
I don’t think there’s anything that could come out that would make me like the current movies, and I don’t think there’s as much a cycle of hate it, now love it! I think people got a little tripped up by ewoks, maybe. But then Jar Jar was goofier. I think people mostly liked 2 and 3 because they were mostly war again, minus a few cheeseball or wooden delivery lines.
BBCC
I saw it with the fandom every time like clockwork. First it was the prequels, then Star Wars: The Clone Wars, then TFA, then TLJ and Rebels, etc. I look forward to whatever comes next.
JBento
I have no dog in this race, seeing as I’m not a Star Wars FAN (and also I stopped watching the movies after episode VII, because if Rey’s already beaten the bad guy in both the physical and psychological plances, why would I care about the rest of the trilogy?), but as an aside I’ve never heard anyone talking about Clone Wars that WASN’T praising it?
BBCC
When it first came out, good god, you’d be hard pressed to find someone who didn’t think it ruined the franchise forever.
if you were going to define “milking a franchise”, is there a better example in any medium than the seventy-thirteen iterations of this schlock? it isn’t really a question of which was worst, it’s mostly about which insult is freshest in your mind.
Seriously. Watching Phantom Menace, my two takeaways before I noped out were:
– Sheesh, that is some awful dialogue, and
– The consistency with which EVERYONE is giving these awkward line reads that seem designed to cram too much info in a short time says to me this is very much a directorial/writing choice, not an acting one, which makes the harassment the actors got even worse. (Not that ANYONE deserves the harassment that fandom has inflicted on its creators. You can critique things without being a vitriolic shithead.)
I was okay with the prequels, they weren’t great, but at least they filled in the backstory, and it was fun seeing the younger versions of the various heroes and villains. When I watched the Last Jedi and very quickly realized that they had tossed out 30 years of very carefully curated extended universe it killed it for me. All I could think of was “WTF, the empire lost, what is going on here? and where is Mara Jade, and where are the other offspring, there were more kids than that whiny emo twit.” And when I realized I had already seen this movie when it was called A New Hope, that is when I lost any interest in watching any more of the sequel movies, and I grew up a huge Star Wars fan, watched the first one in the first theatre in my area to get surround sound, as a teenager in 1977.
BBCC
In fairness, they announced they were tossing the EU into ‘separate timeline’ territory a long time before the movie came out.
Freemage
Blowing up the EU was a necessary step, much like the equally controversial time-travel reset in the Star Trek universe, simply because the canon was so bloated and so mixed up that trying to keep it all would’ve been nigh-impossible. So instead, declare, “Here is the limited canon. Anything else we decide to keep from the EU will be piecemeal, if it fits the story we’re trying to tell.”
thejeff
Not only was it bloated and mixed-up, but it was also completely unknown to 90+% of the movie audience they were hoping for.
Roborat may have been wondering where Mara Jade was, but the vast majority would have been wondering who she was. And you couldn’t really answer that without doing more movies about the original trio and thus needing to recast. Completely unworkable.
That die was cast the moment they decided to do sequels.
Lailah
Also, that’s already happened. With the prequels. We never had a truly solid idea of what the clone wars were, but they weren’t what Lucas did. While Disney is surely making mistakes with the new, extended canon (And they’re not my circus, not my monkeys, because I’m totally not paying attention anymore) it’s at least actually trying to curate it, and Disney does know how to do that.
I would also say that the EU always suffered from the same problem of many other uncurated settings where you have huge, apocalyptic throwdowns every other year, at most. They somehow managed to squeeze like 3 of them into a two year period (With the resurrected emperor and then Kyp Author-SIrron stealing a superweapon). And this is notwithstanding that most of it is honestly just Bad. There are things I like, that I’ll use in like, star wars TTRPGs and that otherwise are just, if they never get ported over, ~whatever~. It’s a big galaxy, there’ll surely be new things, some of which are interesting and many of which are bad, to get concerned with.
I mean, as stated above, I’m not exactly a fan – BUT I will say that I watched the first prequel in the theater and hated it walking out of the theater. I didn’t even bother watching the next two in theaters (saw them on rental).
On the other hand, I like the new Star Wars films fine. I would almost rank Last Jedi as my favorite except for the stupid bombers at the start. And yes, that’s my criticism of that film – not ANY of the other stuff people complain about – just the bombers. Hate em.
Well, there’s also the fact that if the New Order had even mildly competent leadership the rebels would be a fine plasma cloud pretty quickly.
“Sir, there’s a rebel X-wing hailing us.”
*blank stare* “Shoot. It.”
insomniac
This is Star Wars, so… no, not really, people don’t space.
I mean, I’m all about sci-fi that has at least a passing relationship with actual science, but Star Wars isn’t that and never has been. It’s a setting where a farmboy and a wizard meet a cowboy in a bar to rescue the princess from the dark knight and his Nazi army and then have a WW II Pacific dogfight. Only in vaguely space-ish drag.
thejeff
Yes and no. Yeah, it’s definitely always been WWII Pacific dogfights. It doesn’t really space.
OTOH, the bombs dropping was more blatantly not-space than most of the other action and if it drags enough people out of their suspension of disbelief while watching it, that’s a failure.
Matticus
Except they’re not? The Because Science! YouTube channel did a video on the space battle stuff, and the bombs falling is actually accurate even without the “magnetic acceleration” from the sourcebooks or the “clearly falling already in the ship’s artificial gravity” factor.
TL;DR: gravity doesn’t cease to exist in low orbit. The only reason the ISS doesn’t drop like a rock is because it has enough horizontal momentum to (mostly) overcome gravity. If you released an object with little to no horizontal momentum it would go straight down towards the planet–just like the bombs do.
…but who cares, because they’re literally B-17s in space.
thejeff
Was the mega star destroyer in low orbit at the time? I honestly don’t recall?
So what? It doesn’t matter. It doesn’t matter if there are potentially valid explanations, whether they’re implicit in the scene or added in later sourcebooks.
If it pulls too many people out of their suspension of disbelief and makes them think it shouldn’t be working rather than being immersed in the scene, it’s a failure as a movie scene.
If it just makes fans argue over how it would work after the fact, then that’s cool. That doesn’t really matter, as long as the scene works for the audiences watching it.
Matticus
Yes, the dreadnaught was in low orbit* at the time. It had just used its ventral Giant F-U guns to flatten the Resistance’s land base. So the bombs falling in that scene are more realistic than the similar scene in ESB where TIE bombers bomb the big asteroid.
If it broke your immersion, then fine, I guess. I’m just pointing out that this is one of those times where common perception of things (in this case gravity in space) isn’t actually accurate.
*Fun fact: astronauts on the ISS still feel ~90% of the gravity as people on the Earth’s surface. They appear “weightless” because the ISS (and thereby the astronauts themselves) is moving so fast. Basically, the ISS is constantly falling–it’s just falling in such a way that it constantly misses the ground. You know how you sometimes lift out of your seat when a roller coaster hits the apex of a hill? The astronauts are like that in a constant state.
Lailah
Honestly at this point modern audiences do seem far more ready to pick everything apart, so things that are legit will ‘break immersion’. If ‘everyone’ has their immersion broken by a thing that is legit… who fucking cares. That’s on y’all. You don’t get to hold it up as a failure of the movie, and overconcerning yourself with the validity of immersion is already overfocusing on a thing that isn’t particularly important in the first place.
insomniac
Han puts on a breather mask to walk around in hard vacuum in Empire. Star Wars is glorious nonsense.
Freemage
Honestly, I had no issue with the bombers. I just assumed that there was technology going on there that actually was causing the bombs to ‘fall’ like that, and was happy.
I think the much-despised casino diversion was given too much screen time, even though it absolutely was trying to fill part of the film’s philosophical roots (no, not the pro-social justice stuff–the film is really very deliberately Kirkegaardian in its moral framework, which delights me to no end).
I feel like a couple things could’ve been executed better – building up the new cast’s relationships with each other rather than separating Finn and Rey for the entire movie being the biggest one to me – but on the whole? I like the biggest plot beats that get the most shit. (Still wish they’d made Finn a Jedi too, though.)
Okay, okay, I’ll say a thing: I thought Jedi was only okay – not bad, a perfectly good finish, just not amazing – until I watched prequels II and III with the original three in Machette order. (New Hope, Empire, Clones, Sith, Return) And while that order really did not help the prequels, it did make Return of the Jedimuch better, and not as some sort of snide “by comparison” thing. Knowing how shit went down back then actually improves Return of the Jedi for me, like, a lot.
(I did this before going to see The Force Awakens because I hadn’t ever seen Revenge of the Sith, and wrote it up on Dreamwdith. Seriously, II and III do so much for Jedi, and it’s too much to put in a comment here.)
I’ve never watched them in Machete order, but I’ve loved the logic of it since I read that post back in the day. And it makes me really happy to hear that it worked for someone!
Of the original trilogy, Empire Strikes Back is my favorite, but Return of the Jedi is second. I think all three of them are good though. I never hated any of the newer Star Wars movies, though I admit the prequels weren’t as good, and there’s some things I didn’t like in both the prequels and the sequels. I also really like Rogue One, and I think Solo was pretty good as well.
I don’t get the hate for Solo. It’s supposed to be a side-story, and it is one, and somehow people get mad about that? Why? I liked it.
Also, Donald Glover was note-perfect in every frame and I adored his performance so much.
Anonymsly
As nearly as I’ve ever been able to tell, people hate it because Alden Ehrenreich isn’t Harrison Ford. (I too liked Solo, but then there’s only one Star Wars movie I actively dislike and that’s Phantom Menace. So you may need to take my stated liking with a grain of salt.)
thejeff
IMO, it was a perfectly good heist movie in space. It was even a decent Han Solo movie.
It tried a little too hard to hit every throwaway line about Han’s past in one movie. I’m not sure what could actually have been left out though – it wouldn’t have really been a Han Solo movie without Chewie and the Falcon (and thus we need Lando).
“Is there a dork in the room”
Danny, to self: “This is it! My moment to shine. Finally my particular skillset is needed.”
Eric: “Sure!” *fingerguns*
Danny: “…but I am the dork…”
194 thoughts on “Clingy weirdos”
Ana Chronistic
I… don’t think I actually HAVE a favourite Star Wars??
[by contrast, my very Star Wars-y relative is getting hitched this coming 5/4, why am I not surprised]
LeslieBean4shizzle
Yeah, I hear that.
The first part, I mean. I watched the original Star Wars movies as a kid and they were… fine. I’ve rewatched them as an adult and they are still fine, although for different reasons.
Star Wars was written as a tribute to B Movies and does a very successful job of being a series of B Movies.
But I don’t much care for B Movies. So being the best B Movie is still pretty “meh.”
They’re certainly watchable – unlike the prequels.
BarerMender
I liked the first one because it looked like the space opera I used to read as a kid, even though the story was rubbish and the characters were flat. By the third one I was thinking, “What am I doing here?” I never saw another.
Yet_One_More_Idiot
Welp, I’m 37 and I’ve never watched Star Wars. ANY of them. (And i don’t intend to xD)
Now, Star Trek on the other hand… (or my #1 SF, Doctor Who!)
Jeff K!,
Y’know what? Battle For Endor. Cindel Towani is the best Star Wars protagonist.
Fight me.
Undrave
HECK YEAH! CINDEL! Disney totally messed up when they removed her movis from canon. Not like they impact anything >< Where are the Ewoks Disney? WHERE ARE THE EWOKS?!
Bruceski
I was thinking about this the other day and while there are scenes I *like* more I find Rogue One to be the most re-watchable. The mainline SW films feel like event movies that I need to devote my attention to. RO is good and beautiful but also something I can put on while surfing the web. I think that’s because I used to do the same with a TV channel that showed a lot of the war movies RO evokes.
Punaparta
What’s special about the 5th April?
Ana Chronistic
Fifth the April be with you
Doctor_Who
I’m old enough that I remember a time when saying that my favorite Star Wars movie was Return of the Jedi would get me mocked. That was the “bad” Star Wars for 16 years.
Even though it has more awesome shit that any other film in the trilogy: Jabba’s palace, the Rancor, the sand barge, the speeder bikes, the bigger and more exciting Death Star battle, Yoda’s emotional death, Luke’s confrontation with the Emperor, Vader’s redemption, and Leia and Han getting together. But it had Ewoks so fuck me for liking it.
Then the prequels came out and Jedi was cool now, we hate the prequels instead. And then the sequels so now we forgive the prequels and hate on those.
This is why I can’t take any of the current Star Wars “controversy” seriously. Seriously, I’m old and I was there, SW fans have always been like this.
Dean
Those people were jerks, the Ewoks are awesome.
Doctor_Who
Right? Vicious little bastards, nearly eat the heroes. And they have empty Stormtrooper helmets at the end, so what do you think was being served at the victory party?
But they looked cute and toylike. If they’d been reptile or insect looking then no one would have had a problem with them being badasses. Even though in real life even small bears are bad news.
Ohmsford
I thought we forgave the Skywalker Saga as a whole on account of Solo
Kamino Neko
But Solo is better, in all measurable ways, than the prequel trilogy and A New Hope.
nlips
Solo was an objectively terrible movie, and I still liked it better than most of the others because it was fun. 🙂
woobie
Wasn’t Solo so bad it killed any future standalones?
Josh Spicer
In terms of box office, yeah, but that was mostly due to backlash from Last Jedi, among other date issues.
Solo as a whole seems to be well received by fans and critics alike. Add that with the positive reception Rogue One got and it’s still kinda stupid why Kathleeen dropped the idear.
Matticus
It’s not a great movie, but it isn’t terrible. It underperformed at the box office, but it had little to do with backlash to TLJ. Much more important to its perceived failure were a) the release date (too close to TLJ), b) the lack of a marketing push (it didn’t even get a trailer until 3 months before release), c) the very publicly troubled production and d) it being a Han Solo movie 30 years too late and without Harrison Ford.
Wolfbeckett
By what “objective” measure specifically was Solo terrible? It was not as good as Rogue One but it was way better than episode 7 or especially episode 8. The Last Jedi was by a fair measure the worst Star Wars movie ever made and The Force Awakens was only marginally better.
Lailah
that’sbait.jpg
Lore Krajsman
the force awakens was a good movie. It held a lot of promise for the new triology, with interesting new characters, and a great jump on point.
The Last Jedi then wasted all that potential by focusing on the boring as hell Kylo Ren instead of on the far more interesting duo or Finn and Rey.
thejeff
I love how we’re handwaving “objective” for what’s essentially a matter of taste.
Jim
THIS.
DSL
Presenting personal preference as universal truth? That NEVER happens …
Corey
I still dont know anyone who likes the prequels honestly.
Falcon
Episode III was actually very good, as was the final half an hour of Episode II for me.
He Who Abides
I dunno, the effects and writing on the prequel trilogy make them unwatchable to me.
Yeah, I know that I’m gonna get mocked for it. But seriously, bad special effects and/or dialogue can destroy a film for me way more than most other flaws
timemonkey
I do. They’re not my favorites and there’s more obvious flaws than the original trilogy but I still like them.
Jim
Two and Three were decent, the only thing that I strongly disliked
about Phantom Menace was Jar-Jar Binks.
timemonkey
I don’t even dislike Jar Jar, he was just overused.
BBCC
LITERALLY THOUGH. Every time something new comes out, it’s the worst thing ever and ruins Star Wars. Then the next thing comes out and old thing was fine, it’s the new thing that’s awful and on and on and on.
Shane Wegner
I don’t think there’s anything that could come out that would make me like the current movies, and I don’t think there’s as much a cycle of hate it, now love it! I think people got a little tripped up by ewoks, maybe. But then Jar Jar was goofier. I think people mostly liked 2 and 3 because they were mostly war again, minus a few cheeseball or wooden delivery lines.
BBCC
I saw it with the fandom every time like clockwork. First it was the prequels, then Star Wars: The Clone Wars, then TFA, then TLJ and Rebels, etc. I look forward to whatever comes next.
JBento
I have no dog in this race, seeing as I’m not a Star Wars FAN (and also I stopped watching the movies after episode VII, because if Rey’s already beaten the bad guy in both the physical and psychological plances, why would I care about the rest of the trilogy?), but as an aside I’ve never heard anyone talking about Clone Wars that WASN’T praising it?
BBCC
When it first came out, good god, you’d be hard pressed to find someone who didn’t think it ruined the franchise forever.
ego
if you were going to define “milking a franchise”, is there a better example in any medium than the seventy-thirteen iterations of this schlock? it isn’t really a question of which was worst, it’s mostly about which insult is freshest in your mind.
DrunkenNordmann
Honestly, when people started claiming the sequels are worse than the prequels, I wa sjust like “Really no? Really?
Because while the sequels have some flaws, they definitively don’t have the wooden as fuck dialogues the prequels had.
I watched Revenge of the Sith again a few years ago and not even the German dub could save the dialogue.
And Revenge is probably my favourite of the prequels (probably beause Palpatine is a treat to watch and Anakin doesn’t get nearly as much to say).
Regalli
Seriously. Watching Phantom Menace, my two takeaways before I noped out were:
– Sheesh, that is some awful dialogue, and
– The consistency with which EVERYONE is giving these awkward line reads that seem designed to cram too much info in a short time says to me this is very much a directorial/writing choice, not an acting one, which makes the harassment the actors got even worse. (Not that ANYONE deserves the harassment that fandom has inflicted on its creators. You can critique things without being a vitriolic shithead.)
ValdVin
(it) makes the harassment the actors got even worse…
The combined forces of Errol Flynn, Humphrey Bogart, Spencer Tracy, Audrey Hepburn, and Carole Lombard could not have made the prequels better.
StClair
IMO, it is absolutely 100% Lucas. He was being called out for unreadable dialogue all the way back in ’77 (by Ford, of course).
Roborat
I was okay with the prequels, they weren’t great, but at least they filled in the backstory, and it was fun seeing the younger versions of the various heroes and villains. When I watched the Last Jedi and very quickly realized that they had tossed out 30 years of very carefully curated extended universe it killed it for me. All I could think of was “WTF, the empire lost, what is going on here? and where is Mara Jade, and where are the other offspring, there were more kids than that whiny emo twit.” And when I realized I had already seen this movie when it was called A New Hope, that is when I lost any interest in watching any more of the sequel movies, and I grew up a huge Star Wars fan, watched the first one in the first theatre in my area to get surround sound, as a teenager in 1977.
BBCC
In fairness, they announced they were tossing the EU into ‘separate timeline’ territory a long time before the movie came out.
Freemage
Blowing up the EU was a necessary step, much like the equally controversial time-travel reset in the Star Trek universe, simply because the canon was so bloated and so mixed up that trying to keep it all would’ve been nigh-impossible. So instead, declare, “Here is the limited canon. Anything else we decide to keep from the EU will be piecemeal, if it fits the story we’re trying to tell.”
thejeff
Not only was it bloated and mixed-up, but it was also completely unknown to 90+% of the movie audience they were hoping for.
Roborat may have been wondering where Mara Jade was, but the vast majority would have been wondering who she was. And you couldn’t really answer that without doing more movies about the original trio and thus needing to recast. Completely unworkable.
That die was cast the moment they decided to do sequels.
Lailah
Also, that’s already happened. With the prequels. We never had a truly solid idea of what the clone wars were, but they weren’t what Lucas did. While Disney is surely making mistakes with the new, extended canon (And they’re not my circus, not my monkeys, because I’m totally not paying attention anymore) it’s at least actually trying to curate it, and Disney does know how to do that.
I would also say that the EU always suffered from the same problem of many other uncurated settings where you have huge, apocalyptic throwdowns every other year, at most. They somehow managed to squeeze like 3 of them into a two year period (With the resurrected emperor and then Kyp Author-SIrron stealing a superweapon). And this is notwithstanding that most of it is honestly just Bad. There are things I like, that I’ll use in like, star wars TTRPGs and that otherwise are just, if they never get ported over, ~whatever~. It’s a big galaxy, there’ll surely be new things, some of which are interesting and many of which are bad, to get concerned with.
LeslieBean4shizzle
I mean, as stated above, I’m not exactly a fan – BUT I will say that I watched the first prequel in the theater and hated it walking out of the theater. I didn’t even bother watching the next two in theaters (saw them on rental).
On the other hand, I like the new Star Wars films fine. I would almost rank Last Jedi as my favorite except for the stupid bombers at the start. And yes, that’s my criticism of that film – not ANY of the other stuff people complain about – just the bombers. Hate em.
Illithid
Too right! Do these people even space?
Well, there’s also the fact that if the New Order had even mildly competent leadership the rebels would be a fine plasma cloud pretty quickly.
“Sir, there’s a rebel X-wing hailing us.”
*blank stare* “Shoot. It.”
insomniac
This is Star Wars, so… no, not really, people don’t space.
I mean, I’m all about sci-fi that has at least a passing relationship with actual science, but Star Wars isn’t that and never has been. It’s a setting where a farmboy and a wizard meet a cowboy in a bar to rescue the princess from the dark knight and his Nazi army and then have a WW II Pacific dogfight. Only in vaguely space-ish drag.
thejeff
Yes and no. Yeah, it’s definitely always been WWII Pacific dogfights. It doesn’t really space.
OTOH, the bombs dropping was more blatantly not-space than most of the other action and if it drags enough people out of their suspension of disbelief while watching it, that’s a failure.
Matticus
Except they’re not? The Because Science! YouTube channel did a video on the space battle stuff, and the bombs falling is actually accurate even without the “magnetic acceleration” from the sourcebooks or the “clearly falling already in the ship’s artificial gravity” factor.
TL;DR: gravity doesn’t cease to exist in low orbit. The only reason the ISS doesn’t drop like a rock is because it has enough horizontal momentum to (mostly) overcome gravity. If you released an object with little to no horizontal momentum it would go straight down towards the planet–just like the bombs do.
…but who cares, because they’re literally B-17s in space.
thejeff
Was the mega star destroyer in low orbit at the time? I honestly don’t recall?
So what? It doesn’t matter. It doesn’t matter if there are potentially valid explanations, whether they’re implicit in the scene or added in later sourcebooks.
If it pulls too many people out of their suspension of disbelief and makes them think it shouldn’t be working rather than being immersed in the scene, it’s a failure as a movie scene.
If it just makes fans argue over how it would work after the fact, then that’s cool. That doesn’t really matter, as long as the scene works for the audiences watching it.
Matticus
Yes, the dreadnaught was in low orbit* at the time. It had just used its ventral Giant F-U guns to flatten the Resistance’s land base. So the bombs falling in that scene are more realistic than the similar scene in ESB where TIE bombers bomb the big asteroid.
If it broke your immersion, then fine, I guess. I’m just pointing out that this is one of those times where common perception of things (in this case gravity in space) isn’t actually accurate.
*Fun fact: astronauts on the ISS still feel ~90% of the gravity as people on the Earth’s surface. They appear “weightless” because the ISS (and thereby the astronauts themselves) is moving so fast. Basically, the ISS is constantly falling–it’s just falling in such a way that it constantly misses the ground. You know how you sometimes lift out of your seat when a roller coaster hits the apex of a hill? The astronauts are like that in a constant state.
Lailah
Honestly at this point modern audiences do seem far more ready to pick everything apart, so things that are legit will ‘break immersion’. If ‘everyone’ has their immersion broken by a thing that is legit… who fucking cares. That’s on y’all. You don’t get to hold it up as a failure of the movie, and overconcerning yourself with the validity of immersion is already overfocusing on a thing that isn’t particularly important in the first place.
insomniac
Han puts on a breather mask to walk around in hard vacuum in Empire. Star Wars is glorious nonsense.
Freemage
Honestly, I had no issue with the bombers. I just assumed that there was technology going on there that actually was causing the bombs to ‘fall’ like that, and was happy.
I think the much-despised casino diversion was given too much screen time, even though it absolutely was trying to fill part of the film’s philosophical roots (no, not the pro-social justice stuff–the film is really very deliberately Kirkegaardian in its moral framework, which delights me to no end).
Regalli
I feel like a couple things could’ve been executed better – building up the new cast’s relationships with each other rather than separating Finn and Rey for the entire movie being the biggest one to me – but on the whole? I like the biggest plot beats that get the most shit. (Still wish they’d made Finn a Jedi too, though.)
Chris
I just figure that the bombers were an objectively bad experimental ship design that the Resistance was able to get real cheap.
Dara
Okay, okay, I’ll say a thing: I thought Jedi was only okay – not bad, a perfectly good finish, just not amazing – until I watched prequels II and III with the original three in Machette order. (New Hope, Empire, Clones, Sith, Return) And while that order really did not help the prequels, it did make Return of the Jedi much better, and not as some sort of snide “by comparison” thing. Knowing how shit went down back then actually improves Return of the Jedi for me, like, a lot.
(I did this before going to see The Force Awakens because I hadn’t ever seen Revenge of the Sith, and wrote it up on Dreamwdith. Seriously, II and III do so much for Jedi, and it’s too much to put in a comment here.)
Astro-L
I’ve never watched them in Machete order, but I’ve loved the logic of it since I read that post back in the day. And it makes me really happy to hear that it worked for someone!
Keulen
Of the original trilogy, Empire Strikes Back is my favorite, but Return of the Jedi is second. I think all three of them are good though. I never hated any of the newer Star Wars movies, though I admit the prequels weren’t as good, and there’s some things I didn’t like in both the prequels and the sequels. I also really like Rogue One, and I think Solo was pretty good as well.
Dara
I don’t get the hate for Solo. It’s supposed to be a side-story, and it is one, and somehow people get mad about that? Why? I liked it.
Also, Donald Glover was note-perfect in every frame and I adored his performance so much.
Anonymsly
As nearly as I’ve ever been able to tell, people hate it because Alden Ehrenreich isn’t Harrison Ford. (I too liked Solo, but then there’s only one Star Wars movie I actively dislike and that’s Phantom Menace. So you may need to take my stated liking with a grain of salt.)
thejeff
IMO, it was a perfectly good heist movie in space. It was even a decent Han Solo movie.
It tried a little too hard to hit every throwaway line about Han’s past in one movie. I’m not sure what could actually have been left out though – it wouldn’t have really been a Han Solo movie without Chewie and the Falcon (and thus we need Lando).
Alan Lafond
You forgot Slave Leia. 😀
Khantalas
Mike you are not alone in this Dexter Jettster is just an absolute daddy.
Sporky
I don’t know the names of minor characters, but that’s the diner guy, right?
He Who Abides
Yes.
Bagge
“Is there a dork in the room”
Danny, to self: “This is it! My moment to shine. Finally my particular skillset is needed.”
Eric: “Sure!” *fingerguns*
Danny: “…but I am the dork…”
It’s always painful to be beaten in your own game
Deathjavu
I think Eric meant Ethan?
Which really only makes it worse for Danny, frankly.
Bagge
True. Being outdorked by perfect Ethan and his harem of boyfriends is even worse. Not even being a dork is safe from someone better to snag from him.
Nono
Oh no. Mike is the only person that can notice Danny’s presence.
Lawzlo