Space Battles - a lost art in SW movies

The hyperspace skipping had 1 purpose. I was to show that even a momentary hyperspace jump took you incredible distances. This was to answer why didnt the First Order just hyperspace jump in front of the Raddus during the siege of the Raddus.

 

ESB, actually is ironic for the pick because it really fits more with what I've been saying. The only thing that matters is the narrative. In universe rules mean nothing really, to a story like this.

ESB's timeline is notorious for being horribly nonsensical and confusing.
Han didn't fly the Falcon through the asteroid field because the Falcon was in repair mode almost the whole time.
Han flew through the asteroid field because the Falcon was broken, which caused them to need to find a local place for repairs, which just happened to be his old friend's city in the sky. NEAT!
Now, when they get to Bespin ... from this point forward, the ship is "in repair mode".
And yes, it was for a big chunk of the film, but two questions:
A) How long was this time, exactly?
B) How long did it actually take them to do the repair, considering a vast amount of their time there was purposeful subterfuge, detainment, torture, and then escape?

For (A). No one actually knows. It's a complete mess. Given the visual information on screen, it appears maybe a period of a few hours. No one seems to go to sleep or anything, and there's one meal indicated...which no one ate, and no one mentions the idea of meals for the rest of the film (good thing there's no Hobbits in Star Wars!)
However, it starts at 1 hour and 20 minutes and we're done waiting by no later than 1 hour 49 minutes.
So that's 30 minutes of runtime for subterfuge, detainment, torture, and then escape. How much of that time did the repair take exactly?

That leads us to...(B)
For (B), again, no real idea of how long that took. For all we know, it was fixed in a few minutes right after they arrived, or it was barely finished just before they left.

However, in TPM, they get a hyperdrive generator from winning the pod race bet, Qui-Gon tells Obi-Wan to install the Hyperdrive generator and Obi-Wan says, "It shouldn't take long".

"It shouldn't take long" ... in the middle of nowhere without a docking bay or repair shop of any kind.

So if it "shouldn't take long", and by "not long" we mean one scene away from now (because that's how long we're gone from the ship), then it appears that it doesn't really take that long to do repairs in the Star Wars universe if we actually care about in-universe rules....which I ... lol... I really don't (this whole conversation is horribly silly and not very enjoyable to me, to be honest).
But, come on...they're what, 5 maybe 10 miles tops from the settlement at best? You can see it pretty well from where they're standing near the ship, so it's not that far away.
They ride a sort of camel like desert thing (Eopie), which are pretty slow, about as slow it appears as camels (which walk rather slow - about 3 mph).
I don't think it's ever listed anywhere what they're speed really is, but we can see they don't move fast and appear to move about the speed of a person walking, which is around the same rate as a camel.

Let's just assume the worst. Let's give this 3 mph and 10 miles apart.
We'll also assume that when they (Qui and Ani) return on foot, they maybe travel at about 2 mph because Ani is supposed to be 9, walking in the desert, with a pack on his back, so it can't be much better than those things they road on.

Again, we'll assume 10 miles.

So the way back to pick up Ani would be about 3 hours-ish, and the way back would be about 5 hours.
Tops.

So that's about 8 hours tops that it took in the middle of the desert with no repair shop or bay of workers or employees to fix a hyperdrive when they had the part.

And we represented this elapse of time with how long of a wait in the film? One scene. That's how long we bothered to wait for that repair.

So....how long should we wait for repairs in Star Wars? We jumped one scene and BAM it was repaired and ready to go.
It doesn't even feel like that long of a time when you're watching the film. You have to stop and do some math to figure out any length of time from it because it's not actually conveyed well at all in the film.

Just like ESB. We have absolutely no idea how long anything took.


God I hate that I just did all that stupid logistical breakdown of math just for a fictional film about magic, laser pistols, laser swords, and nonsensical spaceships.

What...and those rules are never broken by anyone ever? No one in any fair tale ever says that something is impossible and then another character does exactly what was just said to be impossible?
That never happens in a fairy tale...ever?

Strange fairy tale.

Which, if we want to go down that road, lol...oh lordy.
Do you know what crap Lucas got from his film friends when he showed them Star Wars?

Star Wars, as it was known before any sequels were ever to be known by viewers, is filled with narrative faux pas.

There was no "to be continued" at the end to let anyone know loose ends would be tied up if they thought there were any, and it wasn't ended as if there were any loose ends. It was ended as if it was a self-contained film and indeed, it was braced to do just that if need be. That's how people were seeing it and taking it when it first came out. A single film story with a solid beginning, middle, and a finale in the end. Done.

But it has two very big horrible flaws in its narrative - which I don't care about, and neither does anyone else because the dang film was fun and made you forget about stupid crap like rules! (Again, you can break narrative rules if you do it right - you just can't break narrative rules without being clever about it with the use of slight of hand or something.)

1) The antagonist and the protagonist never actually square off and have a resolution. Nope. They don't. Vader shoots at Luke from a spaceship and is shot off by Han...not Luke. Luke and Vader never actually square off and resolve anything. This is a huge "Nope!" in writing. The protagonist and antagonist represent two opposing ideals in typical writing, and they need to square off for their representative ideals to collide and resolve.
There's really only one other major film that does this...The Fifth Element. Again, the protagonist and antagonist never face off. Actually, in this film it's even more because the antagonist doesn't even really know of the protagonist before he is defeated and blown to pieces.

In both cases, everyone's so busy being pushed to the next moment that no one really has time to care that this rather obvious absence just happened.

2) The Arthurian Tale ... that wasn't.
In Star Wars (ANH), you have what Lucas himself calls the Arthurian Myth. That is, a boy, a magical sword, destiny, and his heroic rise.

But...do we actually have that in ANH?
Not really. This is one of my favorite middle fingers to narrative rules in all of history, and if you want to talk about not following through with a set up...phew, it doesn't get any better.

Here's the logical run in sequence.

1) Luke receives a sword from a wise wizard and learns of magic.
2) Luke learns to use magic a bit while wielding the sword.
3) Luke watches the wise wizard magically disappear when struck down by the villain in a sword fight, and learns he still lives on in voice from beyond the grave.
4) Luke is chased by the villain, who is kicked off his back by Luke's buddy, and uses his new found magic to shoot torpedoes from his spaceship at a battle station.

1) Luke, sword, magic.
+
2) Luke, sword, magic.
+
3) Luke's mentor, sword, magic.
=
4) Luke .... torpedoes .... magic.​

That is paramount to...

1) Arthur, sword, magic.
+
2) Arthur, sword, magic.
+
3) Arthur's mentor, sword, magic.
=
4) Arthur .... arrow .... magic.​

BUT...after saying ALL of that...
It really comes down to this....

YES!
And so am I!

My favorite act is ACT 1, my favorite SW film in each trilogy is the FIRST film of the trilogy, and I have abundantly said that I care about two things:
A) It looks cool.
B) It engages me.

Does this scene do that?
YES!

If it can be understood that Abrams works this way as a creator, then it should be perfectly understood that I work this way as a viewer.
And that because both this type of creator, and this type of viewer exist, then the idea of in-universe rules really mattering...isn't any sort of absolute at all.

I still enjoyed it, and I assume Abrams enjoyed making it.

I think it sucks if imaginative made up rules are getting in the way for some from enjoying it, but I can't control that.
I really don't see the logic in holding this scene to the flames - everything everyone keeps saying makes almost no sense to me, but I can see it must make some sense to those making the points because it means something to them...but to me? Nope. It's like religious logic being used to explain religious logic to an atheist.
No matter how many times you try to make that make sense to me...I'm only going to see made up pretend rules being used to explain why made up pretend rules shouldn't be doing something to the made up pretend rules in a scene that was a hell of a lot of fun to watch.

Cheers,
Jayson

 

@Jayson,
You showed quite nicely that Star Wars is a mess and if you are being honest at least half of the movies of this saga are medicore at its best. But we still love to watch or even talk about them. That's really great. These movies give us alot to discuss about. But in the end I would say let's agree to disagree.

But there's one thing I have to address- I would say the theatrical version of ANH is THE proof why following rules are important. This movie was a mess and then saved by editing, because the editors Paul Hirsch and Marcia Lucas stricly followed the rules of the 3-act-structure. ANH then pretty much became the blueprint of the hero's journey and follows its rules in almost every single detail.

 

Even after the edit, ANH was a mess by convention. All of my examples were post-edit. It defied convention with its story.
The edit didn't strictly follow 3-act structure. It desperately tried to cobble a pale semblance of a 3-act-structure together and kind of got one pulled together.
Even with the editing, Vader never squares off with Luke, and Luke still has this massive build up of magic and a sword which never pays off in the film.
And Lucas continued to defy convention with every film from then on.

In ESB he had the protagonists separated for most of the film and ended the film with zero payoff, and entirely on a down note.
No one thought this was a good idea, and if you pitched this as your script to an instructor, they wouldn't say, "Cool! Good work!"

In ROTJ, Marquand, Kasdan, and Ford all heatedly argued with Lucas that someone needed to die to elevate the threat and push the third film's emotional tension up because no one writes the finale of a story without any of the heroes dying.
Lucas said nope, that's not the film I'm making. Final answer. It drove everyone nuts.

And then there's the PT...lol.
Oh lordly. Talk about breaking conventions at every turn!
The PT is actually pointed to by many as what not to do. Lucas? 'These are my films and I do what I want.'

I've said it many times around here....
Things happen in Star Wars when and why they do because that is when and how the narrative needed them to so to accomplish its allegorical and symbolic tale...not because it ever made rational or logical sense (in-universe or otherwise).

Star Wars moves more like a religious text's story than a regular story. Huge gaps and nonsense happen all over the place and trying to make sense of everything requires more back bending than any chiropractor or spinal surgeon could ever fix.

This scene, for example. Why did Poe do this? How come this happened?
Answer: Because it happened in ESB and it also happened in TLJ (Holdo maneuver was actually a refrain reversal of ESB's asteroid maneuver - instead of running away from the big ship, you run toward the big ship - instead of surviving, the crazy person doing it dies, instead of doing it because you don't have a hyperdrive, you're doing it because you do have a hyperdrive, but using it to flee is useless), it therefore was refraining those scenes, and mixing them together.
You don't have a lack of hyperdrive, or a lack of fleeing with it, but you don't have the navcalc, so you use the hyperdrive in a severely dangerous way to run away from the threat that's chasing you, and barely make it out alive - damaging the heroe's ship this time around instead of either only damaging the enemy's ships, or destroying your ship as well as the enemy's ship.

That's why the scene exists. It's the <insert flee from danger in psychotic maneuver moment> token of the story. That's it. No other reason.
Like everything else in Star Wars.
Every refrained moment in Star Wars is basically a tiny little self-contained parable with a little message tucked inside of it.

These all say one thing: Hope in desperation produces motivation to try the wildest of ideas, and sometimes, that's what makes the difference in surviving. When everything's down, never be too afraid to do what everyone else says is crazy, because it might just work.

And sure, we can just agree to disagree.

Cheers,
Jayson

 

I do think this is an interesting contrast between types of Star Wars fans, though.

The moviegoer vs the wookiepedia editor.

The mystical vs the technologically defined.

Story vs lore.


The thing is, ,much as I don't think either is a wrong way to be a fan, I also don't think these things necessarily have to be diametrically opposed. You can have story with lore. You can have an enjoyable moviegoing experience while still being kneedeep in Star Wars trivia. And the mystical meeting the technological is where Star Wars thrives!

For me, it's all about attitude. If you're going into Star Wars wanting to nitpick it... well, I hope you at least get some enjoyment out of that, because otherwise it's pretty insufferable.

But if you take a scene and instead of saying "they wouldn't do that" instead ask yourself "since they did do it, what does that tell me about their character?".

Because Poe did take a risk. And it worked. That's... I mean, I am simultaneously surprised and not at all phased that we've gotten over two pages of discussion over that, but really I think that's what it boils down to.

 

So now can we discuss the inconsistent navigation of asteroid fields?

 

They can coexist - definitely!
I am simply not a good representative for that coexistence.
I personally favor pure cinema, even from my early days. Once The Lost Ark taught me that films were real people, and not visual concoctions, because Ford was in both this and Star Wars, I became obsessed with film. Not movies. Cinema. The art of moving pictures.

I still watch silent films, pure cinema, and find even "truthful cinema" (cinéma vérité) fascinating.
I have always turned the sound off, from a very young age, and just watched the visual language of film. Sometimes I put on instrumental music with a film's sound off and just watch it that way.
I used to go to parties where the main thing done for fun at the party was that we put on film previews and spun up music, and we would just mix-mash this stuff together and see what happens - what new meanings popped out to us from random mixes of things not intended for each other.
(Yes, while drinking - we were film nerds)

I became obsessed with the visual language of film, and all through school, all of my media works revolved around making short films that lacked any coherent dialogue or sound in any sort of narrative meaning by typical standards, and would take to making the equivalent of a preview as the film itself and assert that there was not a conceptual idea of a larger film than what was just watched - this wasn't a preview for a film that doesn't exist. This is the film that does exist. It also happens to be more similar to a preview in the modern mind.
I loved the idea of efficient storytelling - the absolute minimal amount of language (of any form) needed to communicate a message or narrative meaning to the audience.

For this reason, nothing...absolutely nothing, is better than Lucas' very first film on this planet: Look at Life.
It accomplished all of this in less than one minute!
Genius!

This bled over into my drawing. When I started becoming interested in drawing comics, the very first thing I became interested in was creating comics that lacked any dialogue at all. Purely visual story telling.

I STILL believe very much in this and this is my primary love in art. Even if I paint, I don't believe in the image being still or titled. It needs to express motion and action, fully, in its visual language, regardless how abstract or realistic the image, and the message should be a dialogue internal in the viewer, not in the medium - conveyed entirely by the visual language itself.
To me, the best poem I ever wrote was pure gibberish of made up words conveying a phonetic relationship, and focused purely on alliteration, rhyme, rhythm, and metre.

So for me, when I'm asked about great space battles...I don't think it is surprising that I immediately focus on how the camera is dictated by the shape and behavior of the ships, and how that visual narrative of the ship battle is conveyed through the medium of film.

In that way, to me, the OT and ST are fantastic, and a lot (but not all) of the PT suffer (strangely enough).

It is possible for people to be both ends of the spectrum, I agree.
It is simply not possible for myself. I am horribly twisted for far too long into a near absolute obsessive bias for the visual language above all else.

Cheers,
Jayson

 

Unless it's in the movies I have no idea who any of those other people are., nor does it matter. Because...

Obi Wan - "This is the weapon of a Jedi Knight. Not as clumsy or random as a blaster; an elegant weapon for a more civilized age."

 

General Grievous was in the movies. He was no Jedi, and he yielded four lightsabers.

That's not the same as saying only a Jedi can use a lightsaber. He doesn't say "and nobody but a Jedi can turn it on and off."

 

That's where it went off the rails, though.

I disagree on that and offerred a counter perspective that the ST gives great space battles that I once again love and kind of didn't get out of the PT.

That's when others chimed in to explain issues with the ST examples I gave.

Cheers,
Jayson

 

To expand...

I actually think if you had to distill the pure essence of what Star Wars is about at its core, then I think space battles does it the best.

It's because of what @cawatrooper said mixed with what I was talking about regarding Lucas and his heritage of pure cinema.

Star Wars works because it seems to say something, but what exactly it is that it's saying is highly subject to what each viewer brings to the screen with them.
It's a very two-way piece of cinema.

Spaceship battles in SW are the extreme form of this because they say the least out of any part of the film, while at the same time convey so much.
This is when dialogue truly takes a back seat in Star Wars and the Lucasian form of pure cinema narrative story telling (as with Hitchcock) leaps forward.

It can be shown in one question, and I think this gets right at the core of @Lock_S_Foils thread (feel free to tell me to shut it at any time Lock).

What makes a good Star Wars spaceship battle?

We're very used to subjective views of Star Wars, but I don't think it gets any more subjective than this.
What everyone is getting out of these spaceship battles almost entirely rests on what they are bringing into the theater with them.

I don't think there is a higher form of art than this in film.

Cheers,
Jayson

 

There are only two scenes in which a character is navigating in an asteroid field in the whole saga. Not much to discuss about I would say. Haha!

I think you forgot about a important group of fans, at least I see my self as such a fan:
characters > everything else

IMO the most important thing in a story is characters.

 

Sure, I'm sure I'd oversimplified that.

I guess I was just referring to the fans that take what Star Wars is (story, characterys, mythology, and all) vs those who like to delve deep into the lore like a science.

 

@Too Bob Bit I get your point from a logical analysis perspective, but and without wanting to sparkle tension, I think we have to distinguish between the existential and like hood question.

An archaeologist finds a jousting spear. This is a weapon used by knights. That's not the same as saying that only a knight can use a jousting spear, and the spear finding doesn't say nobody but a knight can use this weapon.

Yeah, but if I asked you: " Who used jousting spears", I guess you would answer: "knights".

Typically, you can answer knights used jousting spears, but also an archer could, but I don't think any one does, because simple put is not practical. An archer can use it, and so can a pike men, and even an untrained peasant can, but we don't go about listing everyone physically capable of using a jousting spear.

In the same sense, if I asked you : "Who uses a light saber", I guess you would answer : Jedi and the Sith.

To be clear, since no restrictions are implied you are typically right; it is possible, since the improbability of the event has not been clearly stated, but this answers to the "existential" rather to the "like hood".

 

I don't disagree, and you're sort of making my point for me. But I think you may have missed what triggered the responses in the first place. There was a suggestion that seeing specifically Han Solo just USE a lightsaber broke with some established rule about who can and CANNOT use one, a rule seemingly based on sensitivity with the Force. But that has never been established in the movies, or anywhere as far I am aware.

So yes, a lightsaber is a weapon mostly associated with and used by the Jedi Knights (and Sith), and their sensitivity with the Force helps give them the skill, finesse and the precognition to use it with style and grace. But anybody can pick one up, switch it on and gut open a dead beast of burden with it. Which is the point being being made. There is no reason or 'rule' within the narrative that says they can't.

It also means anybody - Force sensitive or not - could learn to yield one with skill, like learning to yield a sword. There is just no practical reason for them to do so... and they probably wouldn't stand much of a chance with one against a Jedi or Sith, who will know what moves they are going to make even before they do.

Anyway... about those space battles...!

 

A further point.
If you don't have magic to rely on, then using a sword when everyone else has guns is..."generally considered to be a bad move."



Cheers,
Jayson

 

Ok got it !

About those space battles...Well, we all know that movement in space has nothing to do with the WWII type of battles we get, unless gravity has drinking issues in the Star Wars universe. I won't even go into avoiding a laser beam moving at the speed of light, because I don't have enough wine.

So it's pure fantasy, isn't it ?

With that as a starting point, @Jayson #53 is a logical way to perceive things.