Space Battles - a lost art in SW movies

Personally, I'm so torn on calling it "pure fantasy". On the one hand, I really dislike the idea of overanalyzing the films to try to find their logical shortcomings.

On the other... I mean, there are rules that the movies follow. Really, any sort of fictional setting still needs rules, even if they're something as vague and broad as "the force has a will of its own and works in mysterious ways". So, while I think almost any discussion on defining the limits of the force itself is likely to be fruitless, with space battles we're talking technology. Stuff that is, in theory, more measurable.

But maybe it isn't? Star Wars has "laser beams" that characters dodge- but do we know for absolute sure that their laser beams are the same as ours, or are they just a proxy for bullets? Still an impressive feat regardless, but a bit more manageable this way.

I think we should be mindful of the fact that while it's tempting to apply our own real life logic to fill in the blanks, we shouldn't assume that a failure of real life logic is necessarily a flaw with the movie, either. Take gravity, for instance. There's no scientific way that each of these planets has similar gravity, not to mention a planet like Tatooine having breathable air. And maybe there are EU explanations for these as well... but can we not just accept that maybe in this universe space behaves a bit differently? I mean, the characters themselves aren't really paying any mind to it, it's not like Han's walking around like "whoa, weird that I weigh the same on a moon of Endor as a gas giant like Bespin...". To them, nothing is different, so we as an audience should probably just accept that is the way things are in this fiction.

 

Oh...it really does!
lol

Cheers,
Jayson

 

Excellent post.

Follow the line of thought (be patient) !

Lucas told us right in the face, forget all you know about gravity in the real world. I'am taking a piss. Nobody really bothered, as nobody asked out of which metals was Excalibur forged. The narrative comes first. Since this is the creator's starting point, everything goes, e.g. dodge laser beams, lift rocks.

The next logical question one poses, is : Ok, then what are the rules in your cosmos ?

One tries to seek a logical coherency between the notions unfolding in the fictional cosmos, that follow a causality thread, which is familiar to him. For example, a two dimensional being would say : The three dimensional Euclidean distance, is a generalization of the two dimensional case.

This creates an incredible and inescapable logical conjunction, that leads to countless paths of mental masturbation, a.k.a. fandom. One fully recognizes that this is a bunch imaginary stories, and in the same time given his immense love for the story, wants to finds some meaning and rules to it all, which inevitably leads to him having the inherent tendency to explain what the hell is going on based on the best set of rules he has, which is his cosmos and many times his moral code, which is absolutely ridiculous.

It's like being in love. No rules, and all rules apply.

So and to answer (kind of); we know what's going on when we are in love, but still we will apply any and every logical or not notion we have in our head, to understand and explain what's in her's / his cosmos.

You can't go about "be mindful of the fact that while it's tempting to apply our own real life logic to fill in the blanks", and if we could, we wouldn't be in love you know

 

Legend of the Galactic Heroes had plenty and on a much bigger scale.