The Masked Man Reviews the Star Wars Movies

[The Lone Ranger]

Ruminations on the Star Wars Original Trilogy

Let me say right up front that I enjoy the Star Wars movies. I really do. They’re lots of fun to watch, even though they don’t make much sense when you stop to think about them. Certainly, I don’t see anything wrong with mindless popcorn movies – and when it comes to mindless but fun entertainment, the Star Wars movies immediately leap to mind. Having said that, I don’t feel there’s any contradiction between enjoying a movie and noticing that it has flaws.

When you think about it, it’s amazing that most movies are as good as they are. Movies are almost never filmed in sequence, so scenes that take place only a few seconds apart on screen might have been filmed weeks or even months apart. I would imagine this is quite disorienting for even the most talented of actors. In science-fiction movies, actors have it even worse, because so often they’re supposed to be reacting to things that will be added in by special-effects technicians months or even years later. (I remember reading an interview with Dirk Benedict of Battlestar Galactica in which he claimed he felt like an idiot standing in front of a blue screen and pretending to be under attack by an enemy he couldn’t see.) Surely, it takes a truly talented actor to convincingly “react” to things that exist only in the imaginations of the people involved.

Fantasy and science-fiction movies typically take place in universes where the laws of physics clearly function differently than they do in our own universe. That’s fine with me, so long as they’re consistent about it. I’m much less forgiving of logical inconsistencies and instances of supposedly-intelligent characters behaving stupidly.

So, what am I interested in discussing here? Well, I’m not going to concern myself with such questions as “Is the acting any good?” There are plenty of others who are better-qualified to answer those questions. For the most part, I’m not going to worry too much about whether or not the physics of Star Wars conforms with the physics of the real world either. (That said, there will inevitably be some things that just can’t be overlooked.) What I thought would be fun for this “review” would be to take a light-hearted look at how believable the Star Wars movies are: do they make sense? Of course, lots of articles and books have been written that “explain” seeming inconsistencies in the Star Wars movies; some of them are quite good. I’m not concerned with those here; what I’m interested in is whether or not the movies make sense on their own. If you must go to outside sources to resolve seeming inconsistencies, the film-makers haven’t done their jobs properly, in my opinion.

What follows, then, is a light-hearted examination of the original Star Wars trilogy. I hope you enjoy it!


The Physics of Star Wars

Let’s just say that the physics of the Star Wars universe bears only a vague resemblance to that of ours. An in-depth analysis would easily fill a book. Still, before we get to the actual “movie reviews” section of this essay, I thought it might be interesting to discuss some of the more obvious ways that Star Wars physics differs from our own.

Spacecraft Performances and Related Phenomena:The first thing you notice about spacecraft in the Star Wars universe is that the small ones seem to behave just like terrestrial aircraft, and the big ones move like terrestrial naval vessels. This is odd, since they’re usually moving in a near-vacuum, instead of air or water.

At this point, a brief discussion of how fixed-wing aircraft (as opposed to helicopters) fly seems to be in order. To fly, aircraft use their engines to generate thrust, which pushes them forward. Friction with the air creates drag, which will slow the aircraft – constant engine thrust is therefore necessary to overcome this drag and keep the aircraft moving forward at a constant speed. As air flows over the craft’s wings, it generates lift, which pushes the aircraft upward and overcomes the craft’s weight, keeping it from falling to earth. (If something happens so that the wings are no longer generating lift, the aircraft stalls. This has nothing to do with whether or not the engines are functioning properly; stalling occurs when the wings are no longer generating sufficient lift to keep the aircraft up.)

Exactly how wings generate lift is a surprisingly controversial topic. Still, there are some points that seem pretty clear -- basically, wings work by deflecting oncoming air downward, and thus pushing the aircraft upward. You’ve probably noted that aircraft wings are tilted so that the leading edge (the front of the wing, where moving air first hits) is usually rounded and is slightly higher than the trailing edge. So, as the aircraft moves forward, air hitting the underside of the wing is deflected downward. Since for every action there’s a reaction, as air hitting the wing is deflected downward, the air pushes the wing upward, helping to generate lift. Also, aircraft wings are typically shaped such that the top surface is convex. As oncoming air hits the smooth, rounded leading edge of the wing, it is split into two streams -- one of which travels along the top surface of the wing, and one of which travels along the bottom surface.

The Coanda effect is the tendency of a fluid to stick to a surface over which it is flowing. If the top of the wing is smooth-enough and if the trailing edge of the wing is angled downward, air flowing over the top of the wing sticks to the surface of the wing and is then deflected downward at the trailing edge, again helping to push the wing upward. (If the top of the wing is not smooth enough, instead of air traveling smoothly over the wing surface and then being deflected downward, turbulence is created and the plane may stall.) The faster the aircraft is moving, the greater is the force with which oncoming air is deflected downward, and so the more lift is generated.

Aircraft typically turn by using ailerons and rudders to push against the air they’re flying through. When you want your plane to turn left, for instance, you can elevate the ailerons on the left wing; this creates extra drag on the left side of the plane and slows it somewhat, causing the plane to turn left. It also has the effect of pushing the left wing downward, so the plane banks as it turns. To turn more quickly, you can elevate the ailerons on one wing and depress them on the other – this makes the craft bank even more sharply, since one wing is pushed upward and the other is pushed downward.

On a related note, since water is much denser than air, a ship moving through water must have a constant source of “thrust” too. Otherwise, friction between the water and the ship’s hull will soon slow the ship to a halt, relative to the water.

What does this have to do with Star Wars? Well, for one thing, there’s no particular reason that space-going craft should need wings, though most fighters and even larger craft in the Star Wars universe appear to be built with aerodynamics in mind. This is not necessarily a criticism, since the designers may have intended the craft to spend a fair amount of time operating in planetary atmospheres. It still seems odd, though.

Much less reasonable is the fact that Star Wars fighters bank just like terrestrial aircraft when they turn. There’s no reason why spacecraft should bank like that, because there’s no air to push against – ailerons and rudders wouldn’t work. Real spacecraft turn as the space shuttle does – by using rockets or other thrusters to push the craft in the desired direction. To be sure, if you put enough thrusters on your spacecraft, you could make it bank as it turns, but it would be a pointless waste of fuel.

Also, you’ve probably noticed that Star Wars spacecraft seem to have their engines going constantly while in space, which makes no sense. When in normal space, Star Wars spaceships don’t seem to be moving any faster than modern aircraft do, so there would be essentially no drag. This means that a spacecraft moving at speed “X” will continue to move at speed “X” if it shuts off its engines, since there’s no drag to slow it. As long as its engines are on, the craft should be accelerating. Oddly, though, we frequently see ships moving through space with their engines glowing brightly and therefore presumably generating lots of thrust – yet the craft don’t appear to be accelerating. For instance, as the Rebel X-wings and Y-wings approached the Death Star in A New Hope, we could clearly see their engines glowing, but they didn’t seem to be accelerating. (In fact, the attack leader told them sometime after this shot to accelerate to attack speed.) Similarly, in The Empire Strikes Back, we saw an Imperial stardestroyer approaching the planet Hoth with its engines glowing brightly, yet it didn’t appear to be accelerating at all.

Isn’t it odd that spacecraft in the Star Wars universe always agree on which end is up? “Up” is a virtually meaningless term in space, so why do spacecraft always orient themselves in the same plane? To be fair, this is probably due to viewer expectations more than anything else – many viewers would doubtless think it disorienting to see two spacecraft approach each other with Spaceship A “on its side” or “upside down” compared to Spaceship B. Supposedly, Gene Roddenberry (the creator of Star Trek) claimed that test audiences complained when he showed them footage of spaceships approaching each other while oriented on different planes.

Personally, I think it’d be neat if movies more-often dared to show us spaceships that actually moved like spaceships, and that didn’t pay any particular attention to their orientation. (The television series Babylon 5 showed us spaceships that generally moved realistically, but even the creators of B5 didn’t have the guts to show spaceships operating with different orientations.)

What is galling about Star Wars spaceships is that they’re asymmetrical – that is, they have definite “top” and “bottom” halves, which makes no sense at all for spacecraft, even if you accept Star Wars physics. In space, you have three complete degrees of freedom in your movements. This means you can approach ships from the front/back, from the sides, and from above/below! Despite this, you’ve no-doubt noticed that the fighters in the Star Wars movies virtually always attack capital ships from above, just as if they were terrestrial aircraft attacking naval vessels. Why not fly under the big ships to attack them, which they can certainly do? Why fighters don’t do this is even more inexplicable when you notice that the big ships appear to have few guns or none at all on their undersides. To say that this is a stupid design for a space-faring warship is quite the understatement!

At least some of the spaceships in the Star Wars universe use ion propulsion, notably the TIE (Twin Ion Engine) Fighters. Ion engines could be used to boost spaceships to quite impressive speeds, it’s true, but they would have terrible acceleration. Somehow, I doubt the Empire would be building interceptors that take weeks to reach speeds chemical rockets could achieve in seconds!


[B]Sounds in Space:Sound is a compression wave moving through a medium such as air. Space is a near-vacuum. No medium = no sound. So, we should not be hearing spaceships go “whoosh” as they fly past the camera, we should not be hearing laser guns go “zap” as they shoot at those spacecraft, and we should not hear the explosions go “boom” when the laser guns find their targets.

Some have suggested that spaceships’ computers in the Star Wars universe are programmed to create sounds, so as to give pilots auditory clues as to what’s going on around them. This actually makes a lot of sense, but it doesn’t explain why we the viewers can hear these things.

Explosions in Space:It’s not entirely clear what the various spacecraft use for fuel in the Star Wars universe, but some of them presumably use chemical propellants, complete with oxidants. (Since there’s no oxygen available in the vacuum of space, you need to supply your own.) Of course, the ships must contain oxygen for their occupants to breathe as well. So? Well, fire requires oxygen to burn. Typically, when a Star Wars ship is hit, it explodes and burns brightly for several seconds. In reality, the available oxygen would be used up almost instantly, and the fireballs would be snuffed out almost immediately. Instead of a brightly-burning fireball, you’d probably see a brief flash followed by pieces of the ship flying off in all directions.

While we’re on the subject, why do the explosions typically come to a relative stop? If a spaceship has velocity “X” at the moment it’s hit by enemy fire, the explosion (which is simply the pieces of the spaceship) will have – as a whole – exactly the same velocity as the spaceship did at the moment of its destruction. In other words, the explosion will continue to move forward at the same speed the spaceship was traveling at the moment of its destruction.


[B]Lasers:Characters occasionally refer to both shipboard weapons and sidearms as “lasers” in the Star Wars movies. Whatever else they may be, they definitely are not lasers, though. A laser beam is a beam of coherent light. In a vacuum, a laser beam is invisible, since there are no particles to scatter the beam and make it visible (it’s typically invisible in air too, unless there is smoke, fog, or dust in the air to scatter the beam). The “laser” beams in Star Wars would not be visible if they were actually lasers. The only person who would be able to see a laser beam is the unfortunate sod at the receiving end – and he wouldn’t see it for very long.

Light moves at the goodly clip of 186,282 miles per second in a vacuum. Whatever those things are that’re being fired from the “laser” guns in the Star Wars movies, they’re moving a lot slower than this!

Laser guns would have no recoil, unlike the guns in the Star Wars movies. Long story short: the ship-mounted guns and the personal blasters we see in the Star Wars movies are most-definitely not laser guns. Or if they are, lasers don’t behave the same way in the Star Wars universe that they do in ours.


[B]Lightsabers:It’s unclear what a lightsaber is, exactly. If a lightsaber generates an intense laser beam, what makes the beam stop a meter or so out from the weapon’s emitter? The only thing that could make a beam of light turn back on itself would be a gravity field from an object so dense that it formed a black hole. Needless to say, there’s no way that each lightsaber has a black hole in its hilt! (Light wouldn’t be able to escape in the first place to form the blade; no one could lift the thing, since it would weigh as much as a mountain; and it would have a disturbing tendency to absorb all matter in the vicinity while emitting lethal gamma radiation.)

Maybe there’s a rigid rod that extends outward a meter or so from a lightsaber’s hilt when it’s activated, and the saber’s “blade” consists of laser beams that are focused to converge on the tip of the rod, where they’re absorbed. That’s my hypothetical explanation anyway. This would explain why lightsabers can interact with each other, since if the “blades” were actually made of light, they’d pass right through each other.

Or maybe the “blades” are actually made of plasma. If so, there must be some mechanism to confine the plasma so as to form the blades. No such mechanism is evident though. There’s also the nagging problem that plasma blades sufficiently powerful to cut through metal would emit so much heat that they’d cook the user almost instantly. This would limit their effectiveness as weapons, I should think.

Incidentally, this is one more reason to believe that the “lasers” in the Star Wars universe aren’t actually lasers. A lightsaber (whether the blade was a laser or a confined plasma) would not deflect a laser beam.

Some have suggested that the actual blade of a lightsaber is invisible, and that the bright glow is from ionized air. If that were the case, the blade would be emitting so much heat that it’d quickly cook the user’s hands.

Does the blade of a lightsaber weigh anything? They’re not too consistent on this in the Star Wars universe. If the blade is (somehow) made of light or is a plasma, it should be essentially weightless. Whether or not the blade is weightless is an important consideration, though, because it influences the saber’s performance as a weapon.

In the real world, different swords are designed for different functions. Some swords are intended to be used as chopping weapons. They typically have thick, heavy blades. Since heavier blades have more momentum, they’ll cut through resistant materials more easily than will lighter blades of the same sharpness. This shouldn’t be an issue with lightsabers though, since they’ll apparently cut through just about anything.

Every sword has a center of balance. This is the point where the sword is exactly balanced. The sword will tend to pivot around this point. For a chopping sword, you typically want the center of balance to be fairly close to the tip of the blade; the closer to the tip is the center of balance, the more momentum it can deliver to its target as it strikes. Such a sword is unwieldy, however. For a sword that’s designed with dueling in mind (lightsabers clearly fall into this category), you want the center of balance to be as close to the hilt as possible. The ideal dueling sword has the center of balance in or very near the hilt. This means the user can pivot the sword much more quickly than if the center of balance is somewhere closer to the tip, and so the user has far more control over the blade and can move the blade much more quickly for attack and defense.

If you watch how the lightsabers move in the Star Wars movies, it’s clear that the center of balance is usually (but not always) some distance beyond the hilt. This means the blades must have some weight to them; if the blades were weightless, the centers of balance would be in the hilts. When Luke was playing with his father’s lightsaber right after Ben gave it to him, it was clear that the saber’s center of balance was in the hilt, because it was pivoting around the hilt, even though he was using only one hand. (Using two hands, you can make a sword pivot around a point other than the center of balance; it's difficult with only one hand.) Later in the same movie, when Luke was “fighting” with the remote, he was using two hands, and the lightsaber’s center of balance was clearly a few inches out from the hilt, meaning that the blade had some weight to it.

On a related note, the blades of lightsabers sometimes cast shadows (which they wouldn’t if they were made of light), and at other times, they don’t. For example, in The Return of the Jedi, when Luke and Vader were fighting on the catwalk over the pit, both their sabers’ blades were casting clear shadows. At the end of the fight, when Luke was standing over the defeated and supine Vader, Luke’s blade cast no shadow.


[B]Hyperspace and Hyperdrives:Space is big – really big! No, seriously. You can’t imagine how vast it is! The fastest rockets we have built would take thousands of years to make it to the next-nearest star. Even if you could somehow build a spaceship that travels at the speed of light (you couldn’t – according to Einstein, it would require literally an infinite amount of energy to accelerate any material object to lightspeed), it would still take more than 4 years (as measured from Earth) for it to reach the next-nearest star. Clearly, we need some way around this. Star Wars would be a lot less exciting if it took the Millennium Falcon 10,000 years to travel from Tatooine to Alderaan!

So, I have no problems with inventing “hyperspace” where the normal laws of physics that restrict ships’ speeds to less-than-lightspeed apparently don’t apply, and “hyperdrives” that somehow allow ships to enter hyperspace. I have no idea what “point-5 beyond lightspeed” is supposed to mean, though!

So, let’s talk about the movies themselves!


[B]Star Wars: Episode IV: A New Hope

Consistency:Consider the really neat opening sequence with Princess Leia’s starship, the Tantive IV, being pursued by that enormous Imperial cruiser.

In subsequent episodes, those big, wedge-shaped Imperial starships were called “Stardestroyers,” but in A New Hope, they were consistently referred to as “Imperial cruisers.” And those “Imperial cruisers” were fast! The Tantive IV was clearly built for speed (heck the thing was practically all engine!), yet Darth Vader’s cruiser was able to run it down nonetheless. Later, Han Solo bragged about how fast the Millennium Falcon was, but we saw Imperial cruisers run it down, too, and Han even admitted that he couldn’t outrun them in normal space. [Luke: “At the rate they’re gaining!?”]

So how come, though they were clearly the same ships, they were about as fast and maneuverable as slugs in the following movies?

Han Solo bragged to Luke and Ben that the Millennium Falcon made the “Kessel Run” in less than 12 parsecs. He did this to boast about the ship’s speed! But parsecs are a unit of distance, not speed! (One parsec = 3.26 light-years.) [Yes, I know that fans have invented an “explanation” for Han’s seeming goof, but within the context of the movie, his statement made no sense.] On the dvd commentary, George Lucas claimed that his intent was to demonstrate that Han wasn’t quite the hotshot pilot he was claiming to be, but I think GL was rewriting history, frankly. Besides, it was made quite clear in The Empire Strikes Back that Han was every bit the hotshot pilot he claimed to be, so this “explanation” doesn’t wash.

Why didn’t Vader recognize Leia’s Force potential when he had her in his clutches? The Force seems to work rather differently in the prequels and the original trilogy, as best I can tell. In the OT, it seems that one’s potential ability to use the Force is determined genetically, but that one’s actual strength in the Force is determined by training and experience. Thus, Vader was able to detect Luke’s strength in the Force even from some distance away, but couldn’t detect any such strength in Leia, who was standing right in front of him. It doesn’t seem to work that way in the prequels, since, in The Phantom Menace, Qui-Gon Jinn seemed to recognize untrained Anakin’s strength in the Force right away.

How did the Death Star move? Every other ship we saw in the Star Wars universe had great big, glowing engines (even the TIE fighters, if you look carefully). But not the Death Star. So how did it get from place to place?


[B]Plot Holes:It was hinted in A New Hope, and fairly clearly established in The Empire Strikes Back, that a ship cannot be tracked in hyperspace (unless you put a homing beacon on it, perhaps). So how did Darth Vader manage to catch Princess Leia’s ship at Tatooine? From Leia’s comments, the Tantive IV was apparently on its way to Alderaan when it was intercepted, and they hadn’t planned to go to Tatooine at all. (Boy! For an insignificant planet in the middle of nowhere, an awful lot seems to happen on and around Tatooine!) Slipping Obi-Wan a message via R2D2 was clearly an improvised strategy on her part.

Okay, maybe the original idea was to make a brief stop at Tatooine, find General Kenobi, then make tracks for Alderaan with the Death Star plans. That still doesn’t explain how Vader knew they’d be there and was able to ambush them. Certainly, he didn’t know Kenobi was on Tatooine, so he couldn’t have anticipated that they’d stop there to pick him up. So what made him think to set up a trap at Tatooine of all places? Maybe there’s a semi-rational explanation, but these sorts of things bug me.

The general consensus is that Luke was 17 at the time of A New Hope. Even if we’re generous and assume he was as old as 20, how is it that his twin sister was a senator, for crying out loud? Clearly, family connections play a big role in the politics of Alderaan!

Why did the Stormtroopers bother to wear armour? It didn’t seem to do them a bit of good, and when Luke and Han tried to blend in by putting on some Stormtrooper armour, they immediately started complaining about how much it restricted their vision. Did people sign up for the Imperial Armed Forces for the snazzy but otherwise useless uniforms? Heck, in Return of the Jedi an entire legion of Stormtroopers was humiliated by a bunch of Teddy bears armed with sticks and rocks! So much for the utility of Stormtrooper body armour. All it seemed to do was restrict your vision and mobility.

Speaking of Stormtroopers, “only Imperial Stormtroopers are this precise,” Obi-Wan told Luke as they examined a shot-up Jawa Sandcrawler on Tatooine. What was Obi-Wan smoking? We saw later in the movie that a whole squad of Stormtroopers couldn’t manage to hit Luke when he was standing still about 50 feet away from them, still in shock over witnessing Obi-Wan’s “death” at Vader’s hands. If there’s anything that’s clear in this movie, it’s that your average Stormtrooper couldn’t hit the broad side of a bantha at 2 paces.

So, Jedi Knights and Sith fight with lightsabers? Granted, the lightsaber is just-about the coolest weapon ever conceived of, but wouldn’t it be wise to at least carry around a backup weapon to be used against targets that’re farther away than arm’s length? Oh, right, Jedi use the Force only for defense, never for attack. Sure. Ever notice that whenever a Jedi and Sith confronted each other in one of these movies, it was typically the Jedi who attacked?

Let me get this straight: Yoda and Obi-Wan hid Luke on Tatooine, the one planet in the Universe that Darth Vader knows best. Yeah, that makes sense! They didn’t even bother to give him a different name, like Lance Weedwhacker or something. And because Tatooine is a small, sparsely-populated planet, it’s easy to find people there, as Darth Maul commented in The Phantom Menace. To top it off, they “hid” Luke by having Vader’s own stepbrother adopt him! Why didn’t they just make Luke wear a t-shirt saying “I’m Anakin Skywalker’s son” everywhere he went? It would have been simpler.


[B]Planetary Ecology:How is it that Tatooine had a breathable atmosphere? From space, it didn’t appear to have any large bodies of water, nor did it have any visible patches of green that would indicate extensive vegetation. So where did all the oxygen come from?

Oxygen is a highly reactive element. Here on Earth, living creatures take advantage of that fact and use it to drive their metabolic processes. Because of its highly reactive nature, molecular oxygen would quickly disappear from a planet’s atmosphere (on geological timescales, anyway) unless there was some mechanism to constantly replenish it. Here on Earth, that mechanism is photosynthesis by plants and algae.

But Tatooine didn’t seem to have any plant life, to speak of. So how come it had an oxygen-rich atmosphere? It is, to say the least, highly unlikely. Most of the oxygen in the Earth’s atmosphere is produced by algae in the oceans, but Tatooine didn’t appear to have any oceans. Nor can I recall seeing a single plant of any sort anywhere on Tatooine. Certainly, Tatooine didn’t have any large rainforests to provide oxygen for its residents. So how come it had breathable air?


[B]Strange Physics and Astronomy:Grand Moff Tarkin had the Death Star blow Alderaan to bits, to set an example for the rest of the galaxy. (This might be a good way to instill fear, but it would hardly be a good way to convince people that the Galactic Empire was a benevolent entity, worthy of their loyalty.) How would it be possible for the Death Star to destroy an entire planet?

Assuming Alderaan was the same mass and density as the Earth, the Death Star would have had to generate a minimum of about 2.4 x 1032 joules of energy to overcome Alderaan’s gravitational field and so destroy it. (If any less energy were used, even if the planet broke apart, its gravity would cause the pieces to fall back together. We could clearly see that this did not happen.) For comparison, this is about as much energy as the Sun generates in a week! As Einstein taught us (E=mc2), matter can be converted to energy. The Death Star would have had to convert about 2.5 trillion (2.5 x 1012) tons of matter into energy to generate the power necessary to destroy Alderaan. Somehow, I doubt they had that much spare matter available, much less the means to convert it to energy so efficiently. (That would probably have been close to or perhaps even in excess of the mass of the Death Star itself!)

While we’re on the subject, what was the mysterious flaming ring that extended outward from Alderaan as the planet was destroyed? It looked cool and all, but I can think of no possible explanation for its existence. (The Death Star created another such ring as it was destroyed – again, for no apparent reason.)

Yavin was a gas giant planet, similar to Jupiter in our solar system. The Rebels’ secret base was located on a forested moon of that planet. If Yavin was about the size of Jupiter, it could indeed have had an Earth-sized satellite. There’s nothing impossible about that. It’s unlikely that a gas giant like Yavin would be found so close to its parent star though, because, being made mostly of hydrogen and helium, a gas giant would not be expected to survive in such a warm environment. It would essentially evaporate over time. Apparently, Yavin was made of different substances than the gas giants in our solar system.


[B]Military Incompetence:In the opening scene, could the Rebel troopers defending the Tantive IV from invading Stormtroopers have been any more pathetic? Imperial Stormtroopers seem to be the second-worst shots in the universe, but the Rebel troopers were even worse! Each side fired about 1,000 shots for every one that actually managed to hit something! The Stormtroopers were coming in through a single small opening, and the Rebel troopers were lined up all along the corridor facing that opening, using bulkheads for cover. Had the Rebel troopers been remotely competent, not one Stormtrooper would have lived long-enough to take two steps past the opening. A squad of U.S. Marines armed with M-16s would probably have mown down the Stormtroopers without taking a single casualty.

So, the Imperials spent zillions of credits to build a moon-sized space station that could blow up entire planets. From a military perspective, that sounds like a hideous waste of resources, given that you could build literally tens of thousands, if not millions of warships with that kind of money and materials – but I suppose it makes a certain amount of sense as a means of instilling terror.

Even so, what’s the first rule of naval warfare? That’s right: the more important the vessel, the more heavily it’s escorted! If the Imperial Navy was being run by anyone even remotely competent, the Death Star wouldn’t go anywhere without a whole fleet of stardestroyers (or “cruisers,” whatever) running interference.

Why weren’t the designers of the Death Star publicly executed for incompetence as soon as they submitted their plans for consideration? The thing had a friggin’ hole in its side leading straight to the main reactor, so that a single proton torpedo could destroy the entire thing. This was not a minor design flaw! Clearly, somebody recognized that this was a potential problem, because it was stated that the opening to the reactor shaft was “ray shielded” to prevent an enemy from simply shooting a laser bolt into it. Furthermore, the trench leading to the reactor shaft was lined with turbolaser batteries that were clearly intended to discourage enemy fighters from approaching the shaft and firing at it. That’s the only possible reason for them to be there, since they clearly couldn’t be elevated enough to fire at targets out of the trench, and only fighters would be able to enter the trench to attack the reactor shaft.

In other words, the designers clearly knew that the Death Star could potentially be destroyed by an enemy fighter simply flying up to the reactor shaft and lobbing a torpedo down it – yet they didn’t correct this monumental design flaw! We saw in Return of the Jedi that they could have done so, yet they didn’t even take the elementary precaution of putting a baffle plate over the thing! (World War II-era warships such as battleships often had thick, perforated steel plates called “baffle plates” in their smokestacks. The idea was that the perforated plates would allow smoke to escape while preventing enemy bombs or shells from entering the smokestacks and exploding inside the ships.)

In the final battle of A New Hope it’s really hard to figure out which side was more utterly incompetent. Since the Rebels ultimately won, I suppose we’ll have to award the boobie prize to the Imperials.

First of all, as mentioned earlier, had there been anyone remotely competent in the upper echelons of the Imperial Navy, the Death Star would have been accompanied by a whole fleet of stardestroyers, fast attack craft, and other escort vessels. No Rebel starship would have even gotten close to it.

Second, while the Imperials’ ultimate goal in this battle was to use the Death Star’s superlaser to blow up the moon and thus eradicate the Rebel headquarters and eliminate the Rebel leadership, no remotely competent military commander allows the enemy to attack his most important units when he doesn’t have to. So, the moment the Death Star dropped out of hyperspace, it should have launched about a zillion fighters and ground attack craft to assault the Rebel base, while maintaining a substantial reserve to act as CAP (Combat Air Patrol) to protect the Death Star should a Rebel craft somehow get past the initial attack wave and approach the Death Star. Against such an overwhelming force as the Death Star and its escorts could surely have fielded, the 30 or so Rebel fighters would have been obliterated in seconds, and the Death Star could then blow the moon up at its leisure, safe from retaliation.

If the Imperials had been even remotely competent, the Rebels wouldn’t have stood a chance. But if the Imperials were astonishingly inept militarily, the Rebels weren’t much better. Did they think that if they just buzzed around for awhile, letting the Imperials shoot down their ships one at a time, they’d eventually be able to sneak a ship up to the reactor shaft without the Imperials noticing? That seems to have been their general strategy, after all.

The Rebels were attacking the Death Star with some 30 ships, but for some idiotic reason, the Imperials didn’t bother to launch any fighters to oppose them, at least initially. One of the Rebel pilots claimed that the Death Star had only about 20 anti-fighter emplacements, at least in the vicinity of the target shaft. So the very first thing the Rebels should have done was mount an attack against the anti-fighter emplacements. (First rule of military engagement: first, destroy the enemy’s ability to destroy you!) True, the Imperial gunners didn’t seem capable of actually hitting anything, but it would have taken all of 30 seconds or so for the Rebels to eliminate all the gun emplacements, had they made a concerted effort to do so. Then they could have attacked the target shaft with impunity, at least until Vader (apparently, the only Imperial present with more than 5 working brain cells) figured out what was going on and ordered a few TIE fighters to be launched.

Now, for some reason, the Rebels were too stupid to figure out that destroying the enemy anti-fighter batteries would be a good idea, but what’s really amazing is that they insisted on flying for miles down a narrow trench lined with anti-fighter batteries to attack the target shaft. Hello! Why not just fly straight to the target point, drop down, loose your torpedoes, then fly away to watch the resulting explosion? The Battle of Yavin would have lasted a grand total of 2 minutes had the Rebels shown the slightest ability to think clearly. (The first minute and 30 seconds would have consisted of the Rebels clearing the anti-fighter batteries, then one of their craft could simply have dropped down in front of the target shaft, hovered there for awhile as the pilot took all the time he needed to ensure that he had a perfect shot, then finally loosed its torpedoes.)

Don’t try to help or anything! Why did the Rebels put Luke – their least-experienced pilot – in charge of his flight group? Wouldn’t Biggs or Wedge have been a much more logical choice? Anyway, not once but twice we saw Luke and his flight group simply hang around and watch as Darth Vader shot down Rebel fighters that were attempting the Trench Run. Wouldn’t it have been a really good idea for Luke, Biggs, and Wedge to have swooped down and opened fire on Vader and his wingmen? At the very least, this would have distracted the Imperial fighters long-enough for the Rebel fighters to have gotten good shots at the reactor shaft.

In short, the Good Guys were unbelievably incompetent, and they succeeded only because the Bad Guys were even worse.


[B] Star Wars: Episode V: The Empire Strikes Back

Consistency:Early in The Empire Strikes Back, Han said that he was leaving the Rebel base, because he had to pay Jabba the Hutt, who had put out a contract on him. Clearly, some time had passed after the events in A New Hope, where Han was given lots of money for his role in saving Princess Leia. Since it had been clearly established that you could get from just-about anywhere in the galaxy to anywhere else in the galaxy in just a few hours, why didn’t Han simply take a few hours’ time to zip over to Tatooine and pay Jabba right after the award ceremony in A New Hope? How hard could it have been to make a quick trip to Tatooine, given how easy it is to get around in the Star Wars galaxy?

Darth Vader, upon seeing the report about a base on Hoth, exclaimed: “The Rebels are there, and I’m sure Skywalker is with them!” Wait a minute. Later, when speaking with the Emperor, Vader expressed surprise and doubt that the “young Rebel” who destroyed the Death Star was his own son. Is Skywalker such a common name that it never occurred to Vader that there might be a connection?


[B]Plot Holes:How did the wampa freeze Luke into the ceiling of its cave? To do that, the wampa would have had to hold Luke’s feet to the ceiling while somehow spraying liquid water onto them. The water would then freeze, holding Luke in place. So, where did the wampa get the water to do this, and how did it spray it onto Luke’s feet? If the wampa had an unusually capacious bladder and was a male, a possible solution presents itself, but I think we’ll just move along now.

When Luke left Hoth and headed for Dagobah, did he bother to inform anyone of his plans? Presumably, one does not learn to be a Jedi overnight, so he must have been planning to spend some time there. Surely, his friends would begin to worry after a few weeks or months of not hearing from him? The considerate thing to do would have been to drop them a line, at the very least.


[B]Planetary Ecology:How is it that Hoth, like Tatooine, had a breathable atmosphere? Like Tatooine, it didn’t appear to have any plant life. Regardless, an ecosystem cannot possibly survive if it consists only of heterotrophs (animals, fungi, etc.); there must be autotrophs (plants, algae, certain bacteria) that can directly harvest energy to make food. Plants harvest solar energy; some bacteria can harvest geothermal energy. The point is this: an ecosystem depends absolutely on autotrophs harvesting energy and using it to make the food that everything else in the ecosystem depends upon.

So where were the autotrophs on Hoth (and Tatooine) that would not only provide the food for everything else in the ecosystem, but the very air they breathe?

Han said of Hoth: “There isn’t enough life on this ice cube to fill a space cruiser.” So what were the wampas eating? They were clearly endotherms, otherwise they wouldn’t be able to function in sub-freezing temperatures, and they were definitely carnivores. But endotherms (warm-blooded animals) require a lot of food to keep their body temperatures up, especially in cold climates. So where the heck were the herds of prey animals that the wampas must have been dining on? (For an ecosystem of endothermic animals, the prey must outweigh the predators by something like 100 to 1 or more – usually more like 1,000 to 1 – else the predators will gobble up all the prey, and then starve.) And what the heck were the prey animals eating, since Hoth didn’t seem to have any plant life?

Bespin, where Lando oversaw Cloud City, also had a breathable atmosphere, oddly enough. That seems highly unlikely, given that as a gas giant, it surely had no plant life. Also, it’s unlikely that a gas giant would be orbiting close-enough to its parent star for its upper atmosphere to be warm-enough for humans to feel comfortable. (Again, there’s that pesky problem of the planet evaporating over time.) But then, Bespin clearly wasn’t made of the same stuff that Jupiter and Saturn are, or it wouldn’t have so much free oxygen in its atmosphere.

Han, Leia, and Chewbacca spent some time hiding in a cave on an asteroid, waiting for the Imperials to go away. Leia saw something strange, so they went outside to check it out, wearing breath masks but not space suits. Suddenly, mynocks attacked! Oh no! Wait a minute.

How come this asteroid had an atmosphere about as dense as the Earth’s? The asteroid was not nearly big enough to have a gravitational field strong-enough for it to hang onto an atmosphere that dense. (Come to think of it, that asteroid had a lot of gravity for a rocky body that was only a few hundred miles in diameter at most. When Han shot that mynock, it fell at exactly the rate such a thing would have fallen in Earth’s gravity. That asteroid had a lot more gravity than it should have!) Han, Chewie, and Leia should have died of explosive decompression within moments of stepping out of the Millennium Falcon, breath-masks or not. Okay, they were actually inside a giant space slug – maybe that (somehow) explains the atmosphere. In that case, shouldn’t they have been more suspicious? You’d think that Han, at least, would have known that asteroids don’t have dense atmospheres.

What did that giant space slug live on anyway? You can’t possibly convince me that spacecraft happen by every few days with tasty morsels inside! If the ecologies of Tatooine and Hoth made no sense, the ecology of this asteroid field made even less! What did that slug eat? How did it breathe? Where did it come from? (For that matter, where did the mynocks come from?)


[B]Strange Physics and Astronomy:Ever noticed those interesting flaps on the wings of the Rebels’ snowspeeders? Presumably, they were maneuvering flaps that functioned on the same basis that ailerons do. Ever noticed that they weren’t raised and lowered consistently with how the speeders actually turned?

The Millennium Falcon’s hyperdrive was non-functional when it left Hoth to escape the Imperial attack, yet the running fight between the Falcon and the Imperials took them from the Hoth system to the Anoat system. Without hyperdrive, it should have taken centuries or even millennia to travel between star systems! Then they somehow got to the Bespin system without hyperdrive. You can’t chalk it up to stars being unusually close together in the Star Wars galaxy, because if stars were close-enough that a sublight trip between star systems took less than several months’ time, there would surely be enough gravitational interaction between neighboring stars to prevent planets from having stable orbits.

No asteroid field even remotely as dense as the one we saw in this movie could possibly exist for any length of time! The asteroids would quickly be drawn together by their own gravitational attraction. Yet, many of the asteroids had clearly-visible craters on their surfaces, implying that they were fairly old. So this asteroid field had evidently existed for some time. No way!

Cloud City must have weighed millions of tons at the very least. They would have had to expend a vast amount of energy to keep it floating in the clouds. Wouldn’t it have made a lot more sense to just build it in orbit?


[B]Military Competence or Lack Thereof:The Imperial task force: Darth Vader’s command ship, the Executor was surrounded by a whole bunch of lesser stardestroyers, apparently acting as escort. It would appear that the Imperials learned their lesson from the Death Star disaster and realized that important ships should be escorted. Good for them! If only they showed such competence in other areas!

When the Imperial task force arrived at Hoth and deployed so that “nothing gets off the surface,” the Rebels managed to disable a stardestroyer almost immediately with their ion cannon. Did the idiot in command of that stardestroyer not have his shields up? Why not? Surely it must have occurred to him that the Rebels would have had defenses in addition to the planetary shield?

Okay, so the Rebels managed to get one ship away from Hoth, using the element of surprise. Had the Imperials been competent, the Rebels wouldn’t have gotten any more ships off Hoth though. Consider: the Imperials had maybe a dozen stardestroyers at hand, and probably thousands of fighters. All they had to do was set up a constant barrage of the shield, directed at two targets – the shield generator and the ion cannon. The Rebels would not have been able to lower the shield for any more ships to escape, because the shield generator and ion cannon would have been destroyed immediately. Meanwhile, the Imperials would be free to put together and launch a ground assault to capture the hapless Rebel base.

The Imperial ground assault was spearheaded by slow, lumbering AT-ATs. That’s supposed to stand for “All-Terrain Armoured Transports,” if I recall correctly. All-terrain? Who were they trying to kid? How well would those things perform in a swamp, or in a dense forest? Never mind that they could literally be defeated by tripping them! And imagine what would happen if one of there were to step on a mine. The hover-tanks in The Phantom Menace made a lot more sense.

Those AT-ATs were something like 20 meters tall, it seems, and we saw Rebel snowspeeders flying above them. So, the Rebels’ planetary shield must have been at least 20 or so meters up, and it was probably much higher. In other words, fighter craft could operate under it. So, how come the Imperials didn’t take advantage of their overwhelming aerial superiority and send in about a thousand TIE fighters and bombers to wipe out the Rebel defenses? The battle would have been over in 30 seconds. The ground forces would simply have come in to mop up. We know that TIE fighters could operate in an atmosphere, because we saw them doing just that later in the movie.

The AT-ATs’ guns were clearly designed to fire at targets to the front, and were clearly incapable of firing to the sides, much less to the rear. (Pretty poor design, that!) So, were the Rebel pilots suicidal or just stupid? They kept attacking the AT-ATs from just above ground level and from the front! If Luke had the slightest grasp of elementary tactics, he’d have had his pilots attacking from the sides, above, and perhaps behind; he would not have had his pilots flying right into the Imperials’ guns! Luke’s comment that “that armour’s too strong for blasters” was belied moments later when, after Wedge immobilized one of the walkers, it was quickly destroyed by shooting at its “neck”. So, you’d think the Rebels would have realized that the walkers could be easily destroyed by simply flying up above them (where the guns couldn’t shoot at them) and targeting the neck regions.

Why were the Rebels using those wimpy snowspeeders in the first place? They had X-wings and Y-wings, for crying out loud! Maybe the walkers were immune to blaster fire, but I’d bet a few proton torpedoes would have done the trick!

As the Millennium Falcon was fleeing Hoth, it was pursued by three stardestroyers, and two of them actually collided (a glancing blow). How could the helm operators of those vessels have been so monumentally unobservant? Besides, you’d think with all that sophisticated technology, the ships’ computers would automatically sound a collision alert and/or initiate evasive action.

When the Millennium Falcon made its “attack run” against the Imperial stardestroyer pursuing it, did no one on the stardestroyer’s bridge keep an eye on his tracking console? Perhaps we’re meant to believe that stardestroyers’ sensors had “blind spots” and that Han flew into a blind spot, hoping they’d assume he went to hyperspace while they couldn’t track him, instead of attaching to their hull as he did. (That certainly seems like a better strategy than hoping no one on the stardestroyer’s bridge was watching the tracking console when you attached to their hull.) You’d think Han would have mentioned the blind spot though, if that was his strategy.


[B]Miscellaneous Stuff:After Luke “disarmed” the wampa on Hoth, he ran from the cave into the freezing cold, without any shelter or communication devices. Worse, night was falling. Granted, Luke probably wasn’t thinking very clearly at this point, but wouldn’t it have made a lot more sense to have gone back into the cave? Maybe he wouldn’t have wanted to stay there, given the possibility that there were more wampas around, but it definitely would have been a good idea to go back and retrieve his survival and communications gear!

Han’s taun-taun died awfully fast, didn’t it? It went from looking pretty-much fine to falling over and dying within seconds. That’s not how endotherms succumb to hypothermia.

C-3PO claimed that the odds of successfully navigating an asteroid field were 3,720 to 1. He was either a lousy statistician or a liar, because this statement makes no real sense.

There are a number of ways to calculate probabilities. One possibility is that C-3PO was referring to a database of studies regarding ships attempting to navigate asteroid fields. If, on average, only 1 out of 3,720 ships managed the feat, then 3PO’s claim would make some sense, but it would still be an almost completely useless “fact.” It would be useless information because it didn’t take into account such vitally-important factors as the density of the asteroid field, the size of the ship in question, the maneuverability of the ship in question, the strength of its shields, or the skill of its pilot. In short, 3PO’s quoted odds were utterly useless!

Look at it this way: suppose I want to know the odds that it will rain tomorrow. One way would be to get a database from the past 100 years or so for my location, count the total number of days it has rained during that time, and divide by the total number of days. Doing so, I might calculate a 10% probability that it will rain tomorrow. That would be a stupid way to do it, but it would give me some numbers with which to impress gullible friends.

Why is this a stupid way to calculate the probability of rain? Because I know very well that rain is more likely to fall at certain times of the year than others. A better way to calculate the odds of rain would be to see how many times out of the last century it has rained on the day of the year I’m interested in. That’s better, but still not very good.

Rain falls only under certain conditions. So, the best way to figure out the likelihood that it will rain tomorrow would be to look at the relevant conditions. What is the barometric pressure? Is it rising or falling? Do satellite images show any cloud masses moving in my direction? Doing it this way, I could much more accurately predict the probability that it will rain tomorrow than by utilizing either of the other methods.

C-3PO seems to have employed the first method when calculating the probability of successfully navigating an asteroid field. That is, he picked the stupid (and uninformative) method. His estimate was proven to be so much B.S. by the fact that a dozen or so stardestroyers entered the asteroid field, and all of them came out again (with one possible exception). If the odds of one ship doing it were only 1 in 3,720, the odds of 10 doing it were less than 1 in 500,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 (!).

So, C-3PO was full of it.

By the way, I know that Han was supposed to be a great pilot, but are we really supposed to believe that a freighter was faster and more maneuverable than state-of-the-art fighter craft?

Luke didn’t come across as too bright, did he? He landed on this strange planet called “Dagobah,” with instructions to find some guy named “Yoda.” He had a whole planet to search! Did he know what this Yoda looked like? No. Did he know whether this Yoda might be anywhere within a 1,000-mile radius? No. So what did he do the first time he encountered a local? He told him to bugger off! Granted, Luke hadn’t had the best day, but didn’t it occur to him that it might be a good idea to ask this strange frog-like creature if he had heard of somebody named “Yoda” before telling him to get lost?

Luke really seemed remarkably slow on the uptake sometimes. Even after this strange green guy started talking about how powerful a Jedi his (Luke’s) father had been, Luke still didn’t catch on that this was Yoda until Ben clued him in!

By the way, mastering the Force is apparently child’s play compared to the intricacies of basic grammar.

Why did Han need C-3PO to interpret what the Millennium Falcon’s computer was saying? Wouldn’t it have made sense to have long-ago programmed the ship’s computer to speak in whatever language he does? You know – for those times when the ship breaks down (which seems to happen quite frequently) and you don’t happen to have an interpreter droid on board.

Vader’s management style leaves something to be desired, it seems. Sure, he inspired fear, but one imagines that he didn’t inspire much loyalty. Perhaps Admiral Ozzel really was incompetent and therefore “deserved” to die, and perhaps Captain Needa was incompetent too. After all, Vader didn’t kill Piett; Luke and the Falcon ultimately escaped Vader’s clutches, but not because of anything Piett did wrong. Vader didn’t so much as give Piett a dirty look after the Falcon’s escape. So, Vader was apparently capable of recognizing competence. Still, how much initiative and imagination would your officers show if they were constantly worried that one slip-up would get them killed?

Granted, space is vast, but was it really standard Imperial procedure to dump garbage just before going into hyperspace? Wouldn’t this mean that heavily-used shipping lanes would have dangerous amounts of garbage floating about that a ship might collide with? A starship is necessarily a self-contained system – would it be that much trouble to hang on to your garbage ‘til you could drop it off at a recycling center or jettison it into a sun?

The light saber duel: suffice it to say that while it looked pretty cool onscreen, any remotely competent swordsman would have taken out Luke or Vader in 10 seconds flat. Those big, sweeping moves might look impressive, but they’d get you killed against an actual opponent. Real swordplay is much faster and more precise. (Also, you probably noticed that though Yoda claimed a Jedi uses the Force for defense, never for attack, it was Luke, not Vader, who attacked.)

Come to think of it . . .
A New Hope: Vader vs. Kenobi – Kenobi attacked Vader.
The Empire Strikes Back: Vader vs. Luke – Luke attacked Vader.
The Return of the Jedi: Vader vs. Luke – Luke attacked the Emperor.Hmm.


[B] Star Wars: Episode VI: The Return of the Jedi

Consistency:As C-3PO and R2D2 approached Jabba’s palace near the beginning of the movie, C-3PO commented that Lando and Chewbacca “never came back” from there. But we saw later in the movie that Chewbacca (with Leia) arrived at Jabba’s palace after R2 and 3PO did. Was this a mistake on the film-makers’ parts, or was 3PO deluded somehow?

When Luke was fighting Jabba’s henchmen, how was it that his lightsaber effortlessly sliced through metal, yet didn’t even singe the clothing of Jabba’s henchmen when he hit them with it? Do lightsabers have “stun” settings? (Surely, Luke didn’t think that, rather than killing them outright, knocking Jabba’s henchmen off the skiff and into the Sarlaac’s waiting maw to be devoured alive was the merciful thing to do?)

After the adventures on Tatooine, Luke went back to Dagobah. Yoda told him that he required no further training. Boy, that was fast! In the prequels, we learned that it took years, if not decades of training to become a Jedi. Luke had what, 3 or 4 weeks of training from Yoda, plus a day or two of training from Obi-Wan? He must have been a fast learner indeed! (How did Ben and Yoda expect him to be able to confront Vader and the Emperor after such a ridiculously short training period?)

Chewbacca was supposed to be an intelligent being, correct? The fact that, while on the Forest Moon, he tripped what had to be the most obvious trap in the universe really makes you wonder about that, though.

Toward the end of the movie, the Emperor kept trying to goad Luke into anger, and thus push him to the Dark Side. Okay. But under the circumstances, attempting to kill the Emperor was surely the right thing to do! There need have been no anger involved – killing this ruthless tyrant would have been doing the galaxy a big favor! And since when did Luke have qualms about killing? Luke had killed lots of people by this point – he had killed countless Stormtroopers, plus scores of Jabba’s henchmen, and he probably killed millions when he blew up the first Death Star. He hadn’t shown the slightest signs of regret about all those people he had killed, nor had he shown any sign of concern that all the killing would make him a bad person. So why was he suddenly worried that killing someone – a ruthless and evil tyrant no less – would drive him to the Dark Side?

Why did Vader prevent Luke from killing the Emperor? Vader told Luke in The Empire Strikes Back that together they could overthrow the Emperor and rule the galaxy as father and son. In the dvd commentary, George Lucas claimed that Vader had been perfectly serious – that he genuinely wanted to get rid of the Emperor and take his place. So why not let Luke kill the Emperor? If the Emperor was correct in his claim that Luke would immediately have gone over to the Dark Side in killing him, this would be a win-win situation for Vader. All he had to do was let Luke complete that saber swing and Luke would have turned to the Dark Side and thus been available as an apprentice, and the Emperor would have been eliminated, leaving Vader in control of the Empire. Maybe there were still a few secret Dark Side skills that the Emperor had promised to “eventually” teach to Vader, and Vader wanted to learn those before the Emperor died – but if he hadn’t gotten around to teaching them to Vader in some 20 years’ time, what made Vader think he’d ever do it?

After defeating Vader, Luke threw away his lightsaber to demonstrate his refusal to give in to anger and join the Dark Side. It was a very dramatic gesture, I suppose, but I don’t believe it. Even if Luke fully intended to die right then and there, you’d think his attachment to his saber would make it impossible for him to throw it away like that. A warrior's life depends on the proper functioning of his weapons. Consequently, warriors tend to become quite attached to their weapons. Granted, Luke could always have made a replacement lightsaber, but it nonetheless seems out of character for him to treat his weapon so disrespectfully and throw it away like that.


[B]Plot Holes:When Luke first entered Jabba’s throne room, he used the Force to snatch a gun from a guard, but was grabbed before he could do anything with it. Was he planning to have a shootout in the throne room? Without his lightsaber and with only Lando to help out, he really didn’t think he could win, did he? (R2 wasn’t nearby, so couldn’t have tossed him his lightsaber.) Was falling into the Rancor Pit part of Luke’s plan? If so, it sounds like a pretty foolhardy plan! Was it his intention all along to get Jabba sufficiently riled-up that he’d condemn Luke and company to the Sarlaac Pit? Again, this seems like an amazingly foolhardy plan – while it’s true that R2D2 was quite loyal and trustworthy, was Luke really betting the lives of himself and his friends that R2 would just happen to be assigned to Jabba’s sail barge and therefore be in the right place when needed?

Granted, Luke was a bit flustered at the time and perhaps not thinking too clearly, but why did he throw a skull to hit the button that dropped the overhead door on the Rancor and killed it? Why not simply reach out with the Force to push the button? It would have been a lot simpler, and it would have been consistent with his training in the Jedi arts.

After they were captured on the Forest Moon of Endor, Luke and his companions were taken to the Ewok village, where they were reunited with Leia, whom they feared had been lost or killed. Inexplicably, Leia was sporting a new set of clothes and a new hairdo. (Did the Ewoks just happen to have a dress handy in her size?) Why did the Ewoks initially view Luke, Han, and Chewie as potential food, but Leia as an honorary Ewok?

When Vader’s shuttle landed on the Forest Moon, we saw that there was an AT-AT guarding the shield generator. Boy, that sure would have been handy for repulsing the Rebel/Ewok attack that was to come shortly! Where did it vanish to?


[B]Planetary Ecology:What was that toad-like creature outside Jabba’s palace that snagged some small furry creature with its tongue, gulped it down, and then burped? Was it supposed to be an actual amphibian? That seems unlikely, given Tatooine’s desert climate. Earthly amphibians lack waterproof skin, and die very quickly in a hot and arid climate unless they’re in or very near water. This is no real nitpick, since Tatooine “amphibians” may well have evolved waterproof skin – it just bugs me that it looked so much like a terrestrial amphibian.

Why did the Rancor eat so much? We saw it scarf down an unfortunate dancer just a few hours before Luke arrived, then it gobbled down a Gamorrean before turning on Luke. An animal that size would probably be sated by the first meal, and almost certainly by the second, so it had no particular reason to go after Luke – certainly not hunger, anyway. This would be especially true since the creature appeared to be an ectotherm, given how slowly it moved. So it would have a slow metabolism and very low food requirements compared to an endotherm of the same size. In other words, when presented with Luke and the Gamorrean, it probably would have shown little or no interest. Perhaps it was territorial and disliked intruders in its lair, but that doesn’t explain why it tried to eat them.

Jabba claimed that Luke and his companions would know a new definition of pain and suffering as they were slowly digested in the Sarlaac’s belly over 1,000 years. What?? First of all, it’s hardly likely that the Sarlaac would have breathable air in its stomach, so its victims would be dead within minutes even if swallowed whole – at which point their pain and suffering would be over. Second, it’s beyond ludicrous to suggest that the Sarlaac’s digestive processes take 1,000 years to complete! Even 1,000 hours is ridiculous, since the victims’ bodies would have mostly rotted by then anyway!

As Luke and his companions were being taken to the Sarlaac Pit, they passed by a herd of banthas. How could Tatooine support so many large animals, given that it seemed to have almost no water, and didn’t appear to have any plants at all? What did those banthas eat? While we’re on the subject, what did the Sarlaac eat? An animal that size would require a considerable amount of food – did Jabba really provide it with enough victims to keep it going? What about “wild” sarlaacs? Were the populations of banthas and other such creatures in this waterless, plant-less environment actually dense-enough to provide sufficient numbers of victims for a creature the size of the Sarlaac to survive? It doesn’t seem even remotely possible!

Dagobah’s ecosystem was at least plausible, so I won’t worry about it further.

The Forest Moon’s ecosystem seemed fairly plausible, too, particularly if the moon had little or no axial tilt, and so didn’t have any seasons. From space, we could see that the Forest Moon had large bodies of water and extensive cloud formations, so it’s not surprising that it supported forests. It didn’t appear to have any polar icecaps, however, which seems a bit strange.

The graphics at the Rebel briefing showed that the Death Star “orbited” at or near the Forest Moon’s equator. Therefore, Luke and his companions were at or near the equator. Yet the climate did not appear to be tropical. If the moon had much of an axial tilt, it would have had marked seasons and we’d expect to have seen icecaps at one or both poles, whether it was tropical at the equator or not. Since it wasn’t all that warm even at the equator, the Forest Moon was apparently receiving a bit less solar radiation than the Earth does; this makes it all the more strange that it didn’t seem to have polar icecaps.


[B]Strange Physics and Astronomy:In the opening scene, we saw Darth Vader’s stardestroyer approaching the Death Star v2.0. The Death Star was “in orbit” around the “Forest Moon” of Endor. Since the Forest Moon had a very Earth-like atmosphere, climate, and surface gravity, it seems reasonable to assume that it was approximately the size of Earth. But wait a minute. As we saw the Death Star hanging over the Forest Moon in the opening scene, the moon’s curvature was barely evident. That means the Death Star must have been only a few hundred miles up at most. What was holding it up?

It couldn’t possibly be in orbit! At that altitude it would take the Death Star less than 2 hours to complete an orbit of the moon, and you would have clearly seen it moving across the sky from the moon’s surface. Admiral Ackbar stated at the Rebel briefing that the Death Star was in orbit around the Forest Moon, and the graphics he showed seemed to indicate the Death Star was in a geostationary orbit (that is, it orbited the planet at the same rate the planet rotated). If the Forest Moon took less than 2 hours to complete a rotation, sunrise and sunset would be less than an hour apart, and the sun would appear to race across the sky. Clearly, this was not the case! Also, if the moon were spinning that fast, centrifugal force would have caused it to be obviously bulged at the equator and flattened at the poles. Since the moon did not show any such distortion, we can confidently conclude that it did not have such a ridiculously fast rotation.

Clearly then, the Death Star was not in orbit, but was hovering directly over the surface installation that generated its shield. Presumably, either the installation or the Death Star itself (or both) were generating some sort of repulsion force to hold the Death Star up and prevent all those trillions of tons of metal from crashing to the moon’s surface. Talk about a ridiculous waste of energy! Wouldn’t it make a lot more sense to have constructed the Death Star in a higher, geostationary orbit? (Assuming the Forest Moon was the same size and mass as Earth, with the same rotational period, that would be at about 36,000 kilometers’ altitude.) That way, there would be no need to expend energy to hold it in position.

“Wouldn’t that make it harder for them to project a shield around the Death Star?” I hear you ask. Well, yes, but I’d be willing to bet it would be a lot less costly than the energy expenditure of holding it in place over the shield-generation facility. Besides, why not just build the shield generator in space, on or near the Death Star? It could be powered by matter/antimatter annihilation, or by power generated on the Forest Moon and beamed directly to the shield generator. Such a space-based shield generator would be far more energy efficient, and would also be more difficult to infiltrate and sabotage, I should think.

Where was Endor? It was repeatedly claimed that the “Forest Moon” was a moon of the planet Endor, but we saw no planets in the Forest Moon’s sky. Even when we saw the Rebel Fleet approaching the Forest Moon from a distance of at least several million kilometers away, Endor was not visible – just the Forest Moon and the Death Star. So why did they keep referring to the Ewoks’ home as a moon if it wasn’t in orbit around a larger planet? Perhaps the Death Star destroyed Endor to test its superlaser, but that would have disrupted the Forest Moon’s orbit, and debris from Endor's destruction raining down on the Forest Moon would have devastated its ecosystems, leaving the moon a ruined wasteland. You’d think the Rebel strike team would have noted Endor’s absence and the devastation of the Forest Moon, put 2 and 2 together, and realized that the Death Star was operational.

Not long after the Rebel strike team landed on the Forest Moon, we saw Chewbacca shoot a fleeing Trooper off his speeder bike. It’s interesting that Chewie’s “laser bolt” followed a flat trajectory. This raises the question of what the heck it is that those guns actually fire. A laser beam would indeed follow a flat trajectory like that, but would not be visible, and it would move far faster. If the guns were firing projectiles (e.g. bullets), the projectiles would be expected to follow parabolic (not flat) trajectories in a gravity field. If the guns fired plasma, the plasma would begin to expand rapidly the moment it left the gun’s barrel. Among other things, this would mean that the guns would have extremely limited effective ranges. So what did those guns fire?

Ewoks vs Stormtroopers: Let’s talk about how levers work. Arms and legs are levers. A lever has a turning point, called the fulcrum. A see-saw is a good example. You put a certain amount of force into one end of a lever, the lever turns around the fulcrum, and you get the same amount of force out the other end of the lever, assuming the lever is rigid. The force on both sides of the fulcrum is the same – the question is: how does the force come out? The utility of a lever is that it can be used to alter the power and the speed of what you put in.

Picture a see-saw with the fulcrum exactly in the middle. If you push one end down, so that it moves a distance of 2 meters in exactly one second, then the other end will also move 2 meters in one second (in the opposite direction), since it’s a rigid structure. Fine. Now move the fulcrum so that the portion to which you’re about to apply force (this is called the “Lever Arm In”) is exactly half as long as the portion where the force will come out (this is the “Lever Arm Out”). That is, the fulcrum is located 1/3 of the length of the board from the end where you’ll apply the force.

Since the lever is rigid, the end that you push down and the opposite end must take the same amount of time to complete their movements. If you push the short end down so that the end moves 2 meters in one second, the other end (being twice as long) must move approximately 4 meters in that second. So, a lever can be used to multiply speed. But since the force on both sides of the lever is the same, if one end moves faster, that means it must be moving with less power. By varying the position of the fulcrum, you can change the amount of speed the lever generates at the Lever Arm Out (that is, you can change the Velocity Ratio), and you can change the power that it generates (the Mechanical Advantage).

Because VR and MA are inversely proportional, a lever with a short Lever Arm In and a long Lever Arm Out will generate a lot of speed, but little power. (A baseball bat works on this principle.) A lever with a long Lever Arm In and a short Lever Arm Out will generate little speed, but a lot of power (a crowbar works on this principle).

There’s a portion of bone that sticks out beyond your elbow called the olecranon process. This is the Lever Arm In. For creatures like deer, the olecranon process is relatively short, allowing the forelimbs to generate a lot of speed for running, but not much power. For creatures like aardvarks, the olecranon process is relatively long, allowing them to generate lots of power for digging, but not much speed. [B]The same joint cannot produce both high speed and high power.

Given their short arms and legs, there’s simply no way that Ewoks could generate lots of speed. So, they would be relatively slow runners, and they would not be able to swing their arms fast enough to generate the force necessary to hurt somebody wearing body armour. (This assumes that Ewoks’ muscles are not much stronger than those of humans.) Since we could see how fast their arms and legs move in the movie, it’s abundantly clear that they weren’t moving their arms fast-enough to impart enough energy to their targets to do any real damage. In other words, even with the clubs they were carrying, they shouldn’t have been able to hurt armoured Stormtroopers!

It’s possible, if they had relatively long olecranon processes on those stubby arms, that Ewoks were quite powerful. If so, they might have been able to pull the Stormtroopers’ armour off, and maybe even pull off limbs. But we never saw them attempt any such things. Besides, their arms would look quite different if they were so powerfully-built. So, how the Ewoks were able to defeat armoured Stormtroopers in hand-to-hand combat is a true mystery.

By the way, there’s no way that hang-glider we saw had enough surface area to generate the lift necessary to support a hefty Ewok plus several large rocks! (I’m assuming the Forest Moon had an atmosphere and surface gravity similar to Earth’s, which certainly seemed to be the case!)

At one point, an Ewok threw a loop around a speeder bike, causing it to spiral into a tree. It exploded on impact and killed the pilot. No way! Unless the pilot had muscles like Superman, he couldn’t possibly have held on even if he’d wanted to, and so he would have been thrown clear.

The explosion of the Death Star only a few hundred miles (at most) above the surface of the Forest Moon would have caused an ecological catastrophe that would surely exterminate almost all life on the moon. The energy released by the Death Star’s explosion and intercepted by the Forest Moon would have been at least comparable to that of a large asteroid hitting the moon. If the Death Star had much antimatter on board when it went up, the Forest Moon would have been bathed in lethal radiation that would have almost instantly killed every living thing on that portion of the moon from which the Death Star was visible in the sky. This was evidently not the case, but the effects of the Death Star’s destruction would certainly render the Forest Moon uninhabitable within a few days at most, and probably within a few minutes. (Better get those victory celebrations in quickly!) For the Ewoks, the Rebels’ victory would most-definitely not be a cause for celebration. You could argue that the Rebels had no choice, and that sacrificing the Forest Moon served the greater good – but would the Ewoks have made that choice if they’d known the consequences of the Death Star’s destruction to their world?


Military Incompetence:One thought that occurred to me upon watching The Return of the Jedi was this: “At last! movie bad guys who can learn from their mistakes!” (Well, to a limited extent, anyway.) How many times have we seen some variation of this in movies and television shows?

[B]Bad Guy: “My fiendish plan/device will utterly destroy all opposition! It cannot fail!”
Good Guy: “Actually, that would indeed be true except that it has this one glaringly obvious flaw, which I will now exploit to destroy it.” [Does so.]
Bad Guy: “Oh fudge. I’ll never try that again. Well, back to the drawing board.”Why is it that movie villains almost never seem to think of the obvious thing to do in these situations, which is: correct the flaw in your foolproof scheme and try again? The original Death Star had a huge flaw that the Rebels were able to exploit. The Emperor, unlike 99% of movie villains, was apparently capable of recognizing that it might be a good idea to correct that flaw and then try again. Good for him! (One presumes, anyway, that had the Death Star v2.0 been completed, many of the original’s design flaws would have been corrected.)

No offense to Lando, but surely the Rebels had more experienced flight leaders available. Even if he had Han’s support, why would they choose Lando – whom they hardly knew – over well-known and experienced pilots like Wedge Antilles to lead the attack on the Death Star?

Why would the leaders of the Rebel Alliance allow Leia to go on the potentially dangerous mission to destroy the shield generator on the Forest Moon? Leia was an important political leader in the Rebel Alliance, and it hardly seems likely that she’d be allowed to go off on a risky assignment like that. It was irresponsible of her to volunteer in the first place. For that matter, Luke was the last surviving Jedi (discounting Vader), and an important symbol to the Rebel Alliance; it doesn’t seem likely that they’d want him to go on such a mission either.

As Luke and his companions approached the Forest Moon in their stolen shuttle, Vader, aboard the Executor, detected Luke’s presence. Why did he then allow them to land on the Forest Moon, where they might actually succeed in their mission to destroy the shield generator? Wouldn’t it have made more sense to wait until they were well within tractor beam range (they were practically skimming the Executor’s hull – how much closer did they need to be?), snare the shuttle with a tractor beam, and drag it into the landing bay? That way, Vader would have succeeded in his goal of capturing Luke. He would also have gotten Leia as a nice bonus, plus Han Solo. (Leia was a prominent leader in the Rebel Alliance and probably high on the Empire’s “Wanted” list; sooner or later they’d have figured out that she was Luke’s sister. Presumably, Han was a wanted criminal in Imperial Space too.) All of this without endangering the shield generator.

“Soon I’ll be dead, and you along with me,” Luke smugly told the Emperor. Was it really such a good idea to warn your enemy of an imminent attack?

Presumably, the designers of the Death Star v2.0 were going to get around to correcting the design flaws of the original Death Star. If that was the case, considering that the Emperor manipulated the Rebels into attacking at a time of his choosing, you’d think the Imperials would have been better-prepared for the attack. Putting the shield around the Death Star was a good start, but surely any competent designer would have taken steps to ensure that the new DS couldn’t be destroyed in the same way that the original was! So, why were there shafts extending from the surface all the way to the reactor core that were large enough for fighters and even the Millennium Falcon to fly through? That there were lots of twists and turns in these shafts was apparently in response to the Rebels’ destruction of the original by firing torpedoes down a shaft that led straight to the reactor core. So, the Imperials were at least capable of learning from their mistakes – to a limited extent, anyway. Especially since they expected the new Death Star to come under attack before it was completed, you’d expect the builders to have put baffle plates in the shafts, to ensure neither fighters nor torpedoes could penetrate into the Death Star’s interior.

Why did the Imperial ships have exposed bridges that could be taken out relatively easily, killing the command crew in the process and causing the ship to spin out of control? You’d think the command centers would be deep in the bowels of the ship, where they’d be immune to direct enemy fire and kamikaze A-wing pilots!

Why couldn’t the Rebel capital ships evade the Death Star’s superlaser? The thing apparently has to be pointed right at its target in order to hit it. How fast could something the size of the Death Star turn in order to track an evading enemy ship?


[B]Miscellaneous Stuff:When Vader first arrived on the Death Star, its commander complained that his men were already overworked, and couldn’t complete the station on the schedule Vader demanded. Vader insisted that they should increase their efforts nonetheless, as the Emperor was coming – but offered to provide no additional workers. Was this wise? If the workers were already pushed to the limit, demanding that they “redouble their efforts” would probably do little more than increase the rates of accidents and errors. If it was so important to complete the Death Star on this schedule, bringing in more workers would have been a really good idea!

Why was it that apparently every droid in the Star Wars universe spoke its own language (many of them apparently uninterpretable by humans), thus making translator droids like C-3PO necessary? Wouldn’t it make a lot more sense for most droids to speak Intergalactic Standard, just as most people did? Translator droids would still be useful, but standardization of droid languages sounds like it would be an awfully good idea.

In Jabba’s palace, we saw a droid being tortured by placing red-hot metal on its feet – and it screamed in response! Why on Earth would anyone put pain receptors in a droid and program it to scream when they’re activated?

How did Jabba move? He had no legs, after all. I imagine he was supposed to move like a large snake, but he was definitely not built for it. Small snakes typically move by folding their bodies into “S” shapes and using the folds to push against surface obstacles (or water, if they’re swimming). This is called lateral undulation, and it works well for small snakes, but not so well for big ones. Big snakes like pythons can use lateral undulation to push off against really sturdy supports (like trees), but they generally have to use rectilinear motion when such sturdy structures aren’t available. Rectilinear motion involves the use of large scales called scutes on snakes’ bellies, to which muscles are attached. Snakes can move these scutes forward individually and anchor them on surface irregularities, and so drag their bodies forward. This is a very slow form of movement at best, and it doesn’t work at all on smooth surfaces.

So, Jabba’s body was too short, squat, and heavy for him to be able to use lateral undulation effectively, and try as I might, I could see no evidence that he had scutes for rectilinear motion. How did he move?

Why did Jabba find human(oid) females attractive? This makes about as much sense as a human male looking at a slug and thinking “Sexay!” Was Jabba considered some sort of sexual pervert among Hutts, given his unhealthy attraction to humanoid females? Why didn’t he find himself a nice 800-pound, legless Hutt girl? What would he possibly find attractive about a human female who weighed next to nothing, had all that repulsive hair, and had those excess limbs? Maybe the point of making Leia wear the bikini was to humiliate her and thus break her pride, but it was nonetheless clear that Jabba found her appealing – why?

Why did the Rancor drop Luke when he jammed a bone in its mouth? It got rid of the bone by clamping down until it broke, so the Rancor didn't need that hand free to clear its mouth.

Leia strangled Jabba – in only a few seconds’ time? I call “No Way!” If Jabba was a tidal breather like terrestrial mammals, he’d have had a considerable reserve of air in his lungs at the moment Leia threw the chain around his neck, even if he’d been unfortunate enough to have exhaled at exactly that moment. If his respiratory system was a flow-through system like that of terrestrial birds, he’d probably have had even greater oxygen reserves in his system. Either way, an animal that size should have had several minutes’ worth of oxygen in its system. Leia might have been strong, but it hardly seems likely that she was strong enough to crush Jabba’s trachea through all that protective blubber, and that she could have kept up the necessary pressure for several minutes as he was trying to pull the chain off his neck.

Perhaps Leia was cutting off blood flow to Jabba’s brain by stopping flow in his equivalents of the carotid arteries, instead of shutting off air flow. If Jabba’s anatomy was anything like that of terrestrial animals though, that would be an even harder task than shutting off his air flow – it would be a faster way to render him unconscious, though.

Say, what was that rope attached to that Luke and Leia swung on from Jabba’s sail barge to Lando’s skiff? By my calculations, it must have been anchored more or less directly between the two vehicles. I don’t recall seeing a tree or tower there.

“So, what I told you was true – from a certain point of view.” What a cop-out! Admit it, Ben! You lied to Luke!

Luke’s compassion for Vader was laudable, I suppose, but why would he allow himself to be captured, thus betting his life on the slim chance that he could turn Vader away from the Dark Side? If he had taken Leia’s advice and run away, he might have served a very useful purpose and distracted Vader from the coming Rebel assault. Allowing himself to be captured served no real purpose, and could be regarded as not just foolish but immoral. He had a duty to help train Leia in the ways of the Force (who else was going to do it, if not him?) and to restore the Jedi! For that reason alone, he should not have gone on the mission at all, much less let himself be captured.

The Emperor referred to the Forest Moon as the “Sanctuary Moon.” Was the moon designated a wildlife sanctuary? That’s quite interesting, since I’d not have thought the Empire would be so environmentally conscious. Maybe it was designated so during the time of the Old Republic, and the Emperor simply hadn’t gotten around to finding something better for it (other than a conveniently out-of-the way place for constructing the new Death Star, that is). It is a big galaxy, after all, and Palpatine couldn’t be expected to micromanage every little administrative detail. The fact that C-3PO spoke Ewokese (wasn’t that convenient?) implies that the Sanctuary Moon had been surveyed at some point in the past. It’s curious that anybody bothered to program such an obscure language as Ewokese into a protocol droid though.

Why did Imperial speeder bikes and walkers explode when they hit something or something hit them? This seems like a serious design flaw!

Granted, the surviving Imperials would have been demoralized by the loss of the command ship Executor and the Death Star with Vader and the Emperor aboard at the Battle of Endor, but they still had a large fleet available that greatly outclassed the Rebel fleet. Did the surviving Imperials turn and run after the Death Star’s destruction? Maybe so, but they certainly could have wiped out the Rebel fleet had they chosen to do so. All of the “Original Trilogy” Star Wars movies portrayed Imperial officers as highly motivated and seemingly sure of the rightness of their cause. It seems that the surviving Imperial commanders would therefore likely be inclined to avenge their leaders’ deaths and annihilate the surviving Rebel ships. Why not try to salvage a partial victory, after all?

At the end of the movie, we saw celebrations on Bespin, Tatooine, Naboo, and even Coruscant. This seems odd, given that nothing in the previous movies had suggested that the average citizen of the galaxy found Imperial rule to be terribly loathsome. Surely, the Emperor maintained an extensive propaganda network and kept tight control over the Imperial news services. As such, you’d think most Imperial citizens, at least in the Core Worlds, would have been inclined to regard the Rebels as little better than terrorists. You’d think most Imperial citizens would have found the thought of the political chaos that would inevitably follow the deaths of Vader and the Emperor to be rather unsettling. In any event, it seems highly unlikely that there would be dancing in the streets of Coruscant in response to the Rebel victory at Endor.

Despite the psychological impact of the loss of Vader and the Emperor, to the Imperial Fleet, the Battle of Endor would have been only a minor tactical defeat at worst. The Imperial Navy would still be a vast and powerful force that would surely remain loyal to the regional governors appointed by the Emperor. If the Emperor had no clear line of succession, then it seems that by far the most likely outcome of the Battle of Endor would be an eruption of civil war as local warlords began to vie with one another for the chance to take the Emperor’s place.

No matter how you look at it, the Battle of Endor would be only a small (but important) step on the Rebels' road to victory.