Thread Where SkepticJ Will Rip Movies New Ones, And So Can You.

[Johnny Pneumatic]

In the movie Back to the Future, Marty McFly travels back in time from 1985 to 1955. There he accidentally causes his someday mother to fall in love with him endangering his existance because his mom won't fall for and boink his dad. Even if time travel to the past were possible this isn't. The reason is it would create a paradox. How could you go back in time to stop your birth; because if you didn't exist you couldn't go back to stop yourself from being born?

Number two: In Back to the Future 2 Marty's girlfriend sees herself as an old woman. How would this be possible? If she has skipped over 30 years that means she didn't live those 30 years and thus wouldn't be in the future. In fact her parents must have been worried sick wondering what happened to their daughter for all those years. Poor parents.

In the movie Independence Day the aliens destroy buildings one at a time using blue beams they shoot from their huge spacecraft. Don't they have nukes? It'd be a lot more efficient to shoot nuke missles from far away from Earth than to have fighter "jets" and mid air battles and all the other crap in the movie.

In the movie T2 why does the T-1000 walk so damn slow in the factory? Why does it always look like the same guy? Why would a smart matter robot fight like a human? Wouldn't it be much more effective for it to blob handcuffs onto the Terminator? Why doesn't it adopt a "blade spider" form and kick some serious ass? If it did anything rational it would have won. You couldn't stop it. It can't break.

[The Lone Ranger]

Oh, this is too easy!

I know it upsets some people to say it, but the Star Wars movies make no sense whatsoever if you stop to think about them.

Star Wars: Episode IV: A New Hope

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

I know that in subsequent episodes, those big, wedge-shaped Imperial starships are called “Stardestroyers,” but note that everyone refers to them as “Imperial cruisers” in this episode. Note also that they’re fast. The Tantive IV is clearly built for speed (heck the thing’s practically all engine!), yet Darth Vader’s cruiser is able to run it down. Later, Han Solo brags about how fast the Millenium Falcon is, but we see Imperial cruisers run it down, too, and Han even admits that he can’t outrun them in normal space. [Luke: “At the rate they’re gaining!?”]

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

Anyway, it’s hinted at here and clearly established in The Empire Strikes Back that a ship cannot be tracked while in hyperspace (unless you put a homing beacon on it, perhaps). So how did Darth Vader manage to catch Princess Leia’s ship in the first place? We get the distinct impression from her comments that they were on their way to Alderaan, and 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 there, after all, nor that Luke Skywalker was there. 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.


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


Why do the Stormtroopers wear armour? It doesn’t seem to do them a bit of good, and when Luke and Han put some Stormtrooper armour on, they immediately started complaining about how much it restricts their vision. I suppose that people sign up for the Imperial Armed Forces for the snazzy but otherwise useless uniforms. (After all, in Return of the Jedi an elite Stormtrooper unit was humiliated by a bunch of Teddy bears armed with sticks and rocks!)


Speaking of incompetent ground forces, could the Rebels defending the Tantive IV from the invading Stormtroopers be any more pathetic? Stormtroopers seem to be the second-worst shots in the universe, but the Rebel troopers are even worse! They fire about 1,000 shots for every one that actually manages to hit something! I mean, the Stormtroopers are coming in through a single opening, and the Rebel troopers are lined up all along the corridor facing them. 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.


“Only Imperial Stormtroopers are this precise.” What was Obi-Wan smoking? We see later in the movie that a whole squad of Stormtroopers couldn’t manage to hit Luke when Luke was standing still about 20 feet away, still in shock over seeing Obi-Wan get “killed” by Vader. 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 fight with light sabers? Granted, the light saber is just-about the coolest weapon ever conceived of, but wouldn’t it be wise to at least carry around a backup weapon that can be used against targets that’re farther away than arm’s length? Oh, right, Jedis use the Force only for defense, never for attack. Sure. Ever notice that whenever a Jedi and Sith confront each other in one of these movies, it’s typically the Jedi who attacks first?



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 Episode I. And 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?


So, the Imperials have spent zillions of credits to build a moon-sized space station that can 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.

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.

By the way, how does the thing move? Every other ship we see in the Star Wars universe has great big, glowing engines (even the TIE fighters, if you look carefully). But not the Death Star. So how does it get from place to place?


Why weren’t the designers of the Death Star publicly executed for incompetence as soon as they submitted their plans for consideration? The thing has a friggin’ hole in its side that leads straight to the main reactor, so that a single proton torpedo could destroy the entire thing. This is not a minor design flaw! Clearly, somebody recognized that this was a potential problem, because it’s stated that the opening is “ray shielded” to prevent an enemy from simply shooting a laser bolt into it. Furthermore, the trench leading to the reactor shaft is lined with anti-fighter batteries that are clearly designed to discourage enemy fighters from approaching the shaft and firing at it. That’s the only possible excuse for them being there, since they clearly can’t be elevated 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 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!


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

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 ever gotten close to it.

Second, while destroying a planet is an impressive feat, and the ultimate goal in this battle is to eradicate the Rebel headquarters once and for all, 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. Against such an overwhelming force, the 30 or so Rebel fighters would have been obliterated in seconds, and the Death Star could then blow the planet 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 get a ship up to the reactor shaft without the Imperials noticing? That seems to have been their general strategy, after all.

After all, the Rebels had some 30 ships at their disposal, and for some idiotic reason, the Imperials didn’t bother to launch any fighters to oppose them, at least initially. They 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. 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 take out 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 shaft 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 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.)


I could go on and on . . . Don’t get me wrong, the movies are a lot of fun to watch, but the Good Guys are unbelievably incompetent, and they succeed only because the Bad Guys are even worse. It’s possible to enjoy the movies only by ignoring the fact that they make no sense whatsoever.

Cheers,

Michael

[livius drusus]

Ooh! Ooh! Science nerds dissect the movies! This thread rules. Do y'all take requests?

[The Lone Ranger]

Ooh! Ooh! Science nerds dissect the movies! This thread rules. Do y'all take requests?


Hey, that could be fun! Throw out a suggestion or two, and if I've seen it, I may have a go!

Cheers,

Michael

[livius drusus]

How about that monstrosity Event Horizon? I'd really like to see it beaten with the science stick. Jurassic Park could always use a drubbing. Outbreak really emasculated Ebola, I thought, so it's past time y'all turned the tables on it. Oh, and how about Evolution? I know it didn't take itself seriously or anything, but the accelerated alien evolution theme just begs to be dissected.

[dave_a]

I triple dog dare anyone to try and deconstruct Dawn/Day of the dead. That shit is dead on.

[The Lone Ranger]

Jurassic Park

First, let’s look at the premise: dinosaurs were resurrected by taking dinosaur DNA from the guts of Mesozoic-Era mosquitoes preserved in amber. Would this work? Not bloody likely!

First of all, DNA is quite unstable, and will break down rapidly under all but perfect storage conditions. At best all you’d recover from the insect itself would possibly be some fragments of DNA. There are some very controversial reports of scientists extracting some fragments of DNA from insects preserved in amber, but attempts to replicate the feat have so-far failed. Still, it’s not a physical impossibility.

Digestion is a chemical process. Just because the mosquito dies doesn’t mean that the digestive enzymes in its gut will magically stop working. If a mosquito sipped some dinosaur blood then promptly got itself stuck in some resin and preserved for all time, there would still be considerable processing of the dinosaur DNA in its gut by the mosquito’s digestive enzymes, so even before we consider whether or not the DNA would survive more or less intact down to the present, we have to face the reality that it would already be seriously degraded by the mosquito’s digestive enzymes.

Did mosquitoes live that far back in time? Yes, but to my knowledge, only one mosquito has been found in amber that old. Anyone wishing to clone dinosaurs would have a very limited amount of material to work with, to be sure. By the way, I found it amusing that they claimed in the movie that they were getting dinosaur DNA from mosquitoes found in the Dominican Republic. Those amber deposits are only about 20 million years old or so, as I recall – much too young for any of the preserved mosquitoes they might have found to have dinosaur blood in their guts.

Here’s the deal: at best you could only hope to recover fragments of DNA under the circumstances depicted in the movie. Offhand, I’d say you’d be doing extraordinarily well to recover even one percent of a total DNA molecule, much less 99% as the movie implied. To give you an idea of why it’s ludicrous to think that you could reconstruct a dinosaur’s DNA in this manner, consider a similar (but much less complex) problem. Suppose I took a book and cut it up so that I had millions of pieces of paper, most of which contained only one letter – a few of them would contain two or three letters, maybe even a complete word here and there. Now, I throw away 99% of the pieces of paper. Now I hand you a bag containing the remaining pieces of paper and ask you to reconstruct the book. Could you do it? Of course not! You don’t know the name of the book, nor even the language it was written in (we have no way of knowing how many chromosomes any given dinosaur species had) – and the chances are that the letters I gave you were actually taken from several different books and then mixed together! In short, it’s an impossible task.

Just for fun, though, let’s assume that by some miracle, the scientists in question actually found a mosquito that had dinosaur DNA in its stomach that was so perfectly-preserved that 99% of the dinosaur’s genome could be reconstructed. What happens if you replace 1% of an organism’s 6 billion or so nucleotides at random? Do you get a dinosaur with some interesting behavioral quirks? No! You get something that’s dead! As Richard Dawkins likes to say, there are vastly more ways to be dead than to be alive. There’s only about a 1% difference between human DNA and chimpanzee DNA, remember – a 1% difference is not trivial! In any event, if you replaced 1% of any organism’s DNA at random, the vast majority of combinations would yield a non-viable organism.

In other words, the only way to reconstruct a dinosaur’s DNA would be if you already knew its complete DNA sequence. If that were the case, you wouldn’t need to extract it from the skeeters in the first place.

Okay, fine. Let’s be super generous and assume that by some miracle, you actually have a complete DNA sequence from a dinosaur. So, you just plug it into an alligator egg and wait for a baby Velociraptor to emerge, right? Wrong!

People have this grossly mistaken impression that DNA is a blueprint for a living organism. That’s not the case at all. DNA is more like a recipe – that is, a set of very general instructions. You know what you get if you have a complete set of DNA but you lack all the enzymes to activate the DNA in the proper sequence? That’s right – nothing!

In other words, the only way you could possibly hope to clone a dinosaur is if you not only had a complete DNA sequence, but you had an intact dinosaur egg (complete with all the necessary enzymes) to put it in! Good luck finding one!



Ian Malcolm does not understand Chaos Theory! He keeps going on and on about how his predictions regarding Jurassic Park will inevitably come true, and how certain things are “destined.” That’s just-about the opposite of Chaos Theory! He’s no Chaotician, he’s a bloody Determinist!


Why did they call it Jurassic Park and not Cretaceous Park? Almost all the dinosaurs we saw in the movie were from the Cretaceous Era, not the Jurassic Era.



Why do movie monsters always eat so much? Once, for fun, I worked out how much meat a 5-ton Tyrannosaurus rex would require per day, assuming it had a mammalian-style metabolism (which is being quite generous). It works about to about 90 kilos of red meat per day. In real life, an animal that size would probably eat one decent-sized meal per week at most. (Larger animals are more energetically efficient in some ways, and don’t need to eat anywhere near as often as smaller animals.) Are the Velociraptors and Tyrannosaurs of Jurassic Park bulimic? Are they scarfing down hapless humans (and Gallimimus) left and right, then sticking a foreclaw down their throats so that they’ll be ready for the next person who wanders by?


Could a Tyrannosaurus rex chase down a jeep? Not bloody likely. The stresses of running at 45 mph would likely shatter its leg bones, and if a 5-ton animal were to fall while running at that speed, it would certainly be killed. So no, it’s hardly likely that the critter would even try to run like that, even if it were physically possible (which, according to biomechanical analyses, it almost certainly is not), because a stumble would be fatal.


Speaking of the T. rex, how come the ground literally shakes when it approaches under normal circumstances, but when it’s convenient to the plot, it can literally walk right up to our heroes without them noticing? Granted, our heroes were distracted by the Velociraptors at the time, but don’t you think they’d have noticed a little thing like a Tyrannosaurus walking up to them? And how did it get into the Visitor Center at the end of the movie anyway? I don’t recall seeing any Tyrannosaur-sized doors.


Who designed the electric fence that’s supposed to keep the dinosaurs in their enclosures? Didja notice all the wires that connect the strands? You know what would happen about 0.001 seconds after they turned on the juice? That’s right – instant short-circuit!


How come the Brachiosaurus was chewing its food? Brachiosaurs had peg-like teeth that were definitely not suited for chewing food. Rather, they apparently swallowed stones (called gastroliths) that would have served to grind up the plant matter they swallowed.


How did Dr. Grant know that dinosaurs’ vision was movement-based, like a frog’s before he ever encountered a live dinosaur? Nothing about their skull anatomy suggests this. (In the book, there was at least a somewhat rational explanation inasmuch as they used frog DNA to “fill in the gaps.”) The skull anatomy of Tyrannosaurus rex suggests that it had an excellent sense of smell. That Grant and Lex could literally have been right under a Tyrannosaur’s nose without it knowing is beyond absurd!

Besides, just a few seconds later, when they were trying to get Timmy out of the truck, Grant and Lex were scrambling about in full view of the tyrannosaur, which didn’t seem to notice, despite its “movement-based vision.” Grant even climbed on top of the truck to yell at Timmy right in front of the Tyrannosaur, yet it ignored him. Apparently, it only notices people moving around in front of it when it’s convenient to the plot.


Okay, I’ll stop for now.

Cheers,

Michael

[wade-w]

In the movie Independence Day the aliens destroy buildings one at a time using blue beams they shoot from their huge spacecraft. Don't they have nukes? It'd be a lot more efficient to shoot nuke missles from far away from Earth than to have fighter "jets" and mid air battles and all the other crap in the movie.


Well, there are a lot of things to criticize about Independence Day; this particular complaint isn't nearly as bad as all the computer gaffes they made. Remember, the whole reason for the alien invasion is to appropriate Earth's resource. Those resources are going to be much more valuable and usable if you haven't nuked a large portion of the planet.

[The Lone Ranger]

Actually, the aliens wouldn't have to use weapons at all.

Consider, each of those alien spacecraft was supposed to be several miles across, right? Each of them would have weighed several million tons, conservatively. To hover just over the rooftops of a city, the spacecraft would have to exert a downward force equal to its own weight, presumably with rocket engines or some more exotic form of propulsion.

In short, the downward force exerted by the spacecraft in order to keep itself aloft would have been more than sufficient to flatten the city.

Cheers,

Michael

[wei yau]

(This one won't be nearly as good as the ones posted by the Masked Man...damn, you're good.)

Star Trek: Generations

The biggest plot hole is presented right at the opening of this movie. It's so big that if it were closed there would be no movie at all.

Dr. Soran is destroying stars to guide the Nexus wave toward a planet so that he can re-enter Paradise. How did he know about the Nexus? It destroyed his ship and he was sucked into it. That's how Guinan knew about it. That's how Kirk ended up in it.

So, why is he wiping out celestial bodies to re-enter the wave? A crewmember even asks why doesn't he simply fly into it. The response is that the wave would destroy any ship.

So fucking what?

We knew that already. Soran knew that already. Guinan knew it, too (she knows everything).

Fly into it, Soran! That's how you got there in the first place. Did the Nexus make him stupider or forgetful?

This HUGE plot hole irked me throughout the entire movie.

[Ymir's blood]

In the Aliens movies, the titular subjects apparently require organic material to deposit their eggs in. I assume the process was similar to that used on spiders by certain types of wasps. However, it seems unlikely that terrestrials, being from a completely different evolutionary process would be suitable as raw materials for alien lifeforms. Shouldn't the xenomorphs require completely different proteins, etc... than what earth people have? It seems no different than if a human tried to live eating only rocks. :chin:

[The Lone Ranger]

Fly into it, Soran! That's how you got there in the first place. Did the Nexus make him stupider or forgetful?

This HUGE plot hole irked me throughout the entire movie.

That always bugged me, too. Even more irksome is this: Soran is shutting down the nuclear fusion in stars in order to alter the Ribbon's course, right?

What????

Shutting down fusion reactions in the star's core, even if such a thing were possible, would not alter the star's mass, thus it wouldn't do anything whatsoever to alter the Ribbon's course.

Also, given how dense the sun's core is, it takes a photon something like 10,000 years to make its way from the sun's core to its surface. So if the fusion reactions in the sun's core were to stop right now, we wouldn't notice anything was amiss (except, perhaps, for a strange lack of solar neutrinos) for centuries, if not millennia. The star most-definitely would not collapse within moments.

Cheers,

Michael

[Johnny Pneumatic]

Also, given how dense the sun's core is, it takes a photon something like 10,000 years to make its way from the sun's core to its surface. So if the fusion reactions in the sun's core were to stop right now, we wouldn't notice anything was amiss (except, perhaps, for a strange lack of solar neutrinos) for centuries, if not millennia. The star most-definitely would not collapse within moments.

It's 100,000 years actually.

[Johnny Pneumatic]

In the movie Independence Day the aliens destroy buildings one at a time using blue beams they shoot from their huge spacecraft. Don't they have nukes? It'd be a lot more efficient to shoot nuke missles from far away from Earth than to have fighter "jets" and mid air battles and all the other crap in the movie.


Well, there are a lot of things to criticize about Independence Day; this particular complaint isn't nearly as bad as all the computer gaffes they made. Remember, the whole reason for the alien invasion is to appropriate Earth's resource. Those resources are going to be much more valuable and usable if you haven't nuked a large portion of the planet.

This is another huge plot hole. Why don't they mine asteroids for the metals they need? They can get all the water they could ever want from comets. For making plastics they could drain Titan's(or other worlds around the 100,000,000,000+ suns of the Milky Way) methane oceans which have enough methane for us to burn to fuel our society for about three million years. These aliens would of course have fusion power and thus make polymer materials with it instead of burning it wastefully. They wouldn't ever have to mine again if they recycled chemical elements using their nanites to tear apart their trash and build it into anything new they want.

They could use anti matter bombs which have no fallout. Just a gamma pulse when they go off. Or push an asteroid into Earth.

Stupid writers. I have a challenge. Find me a sci-fi movie other than 2001 that doesn't have these kind of asinine plot, logic and science holes in them.

[wade-w]

Shutting down fusion reactions in the star's core, even if such a thing were possible, would not alter the star's mass, thus it wouldn't do anything whatsoever to alter the Ribbon's course.

Also, given how dense the sun's core is, it takes a photon something like 10,000 years to make its way from the sun's core to its surface. So if the fusion reactions in the sun's core were to stop right now, we wouldn't notice anything was amiss (except, perhaps, for a strange lack of solar neutrinos) for centuries, if not millennia. The star most-definitely would not collapse within moments.

Cheers,

Michael

Actually, that's completely dependent on how massive the star is. For a massive enough star permanently shutting down it's fusion reaction will be noticed immediately, and the results are quite spectacular.

The reason for this is that a star is in a state of equilibrium between it's gravity and the fusion reaction at it's core. For massive enough stars (~3-5 solar masses and above), when the star has exhausted all of it's hydrogen a new equilibrium is reached and helium fusion begins. This process is then repeated up the periodic table until we reach iron. Iron will not fuse, so no new fusion reaction is generated. Once the fusion reaction goes out, the star's core collapses under it's own gravity, and then explodes in a supernova, leaving behind either a neutron star or a black hole, depending on initial conditions. This happens nearly instantaneously, and is called a Supernova.

So after consideration, if you could somehow stop the fusion reaction in a star, it would just start itself back up. Even if you could somehow keep the reaction from restarting, for small stars TLR is correct, you wouldn't notice anything for a very long time. Just for the record, our sun is a fairly small star. If the fusion reaction in it were to cease permanently today, we probably wouldn't notice in our lifetime.

[The Lone Ranger]

By the way, in case anyone’s wondering, I’m perfectly willing to suspend disbelief when watching a movie. So long as a movie is internally consistent and doesn’t violate the rules of logic, I’m perfectly happy to accept whatever premises they put forth.

So, when watching the Star Wars movies, for instance, I’m perfectly content to pretend that light sabers could actually work (they would not); that spaceships would bank and swoop in a vacuum (they would not), and even make sounds (they would not); that laser beams would be visible in a vacuum (they would not), and that they would move slowly enough that you could not only see one coming but dodge or deflect it (they would not!) Plot holes, errors in logic, military incompetence from supposedly highly-trained individuals, continuity errors, and general stupidity from supposedly-intelligent characters are not things I can overlook so easily, however.

So . . .

The Empire Strikes Back

Let’s talk about planetary ecology. How is it that Hoth has a breathable atmosphere? And while we’re on the subject, let’s ask how Tatooine does, too.

Oxygen is a highly reactive element. Here on Earth, living creatures take advantage of that fact and use it to drive their metabolic processes. In any event, 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.

Hoth doesn’t seem to have any plant life to speak of, and neither does Tatooine. So how come they have oxygen-rich atmospheres? It is, to say the least, highly unlikely.

An ecosystem cannot possibly survive if it consists only of heterotrophs (animals, fungi, etc.); there must be autotrophs (plants, algae, certain bacteria) that can harvest energy directly in order to make food. Plants harvest solar energy; some bacteria can harvest geothermal energy. The point is this: the ecosystem depends absolutely on autotrophs harvesting energy and using it to make the food that everything else in the ecosystem depends upon.

So where are the autotrophs on Hoth and Tatooine that 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 do the wampas eat? They’re clearly endotherms, otherwise they wouldn’t be able to function in sub-freezing temperatures, and they’re 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 are the herds of prey animals that the wampas are dining on? And what the heck are they eating, since Hoth doesn’t seem to have any plant life?


Early in The Empire Strikes Back, Han says that he’s leaving the Rebel camp, because he has to pay Jabba the Hut, who has put out a contract on him. Clearly, some time has passed after the events in the original Star Wars, where Han was given lots of money for his role in saving Princess Leia. Since it has been clearly established that you can get from just-about anywhere in the galaxy to anywhere else in the galaxy in just a few hours, why didn’t Han take a few hours’ time to zip over to Tatooine and pay off Jabba right after the award ceremony? How hard could that have been?


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 has an unusually capacious bladder and is a male, a possible solution presents itself, but I think we’ll just move along now.

After Luke disarmed the wampa, he ran from the shelter of 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 might be 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.


Ever noticed those interesting flaps on the snowspeeders? Presumably, they’re maneuvering flaps. Ever noticed that they aren’t raised and lowered consistently with how the speeders actually move?


The Imperial task force: Darth Vader’s command ship, the Executor is 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.


Darth Vader, upon seeing the report about a base on Hoth: “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 occurs to Vader that there might be a connection?


More astounding military incompetence from the Imperials. When the Imperial task force arrives at Hoth and deploys so that “nothing gets off the surface,” the Rebels managed to disable a stardestroyer almost immediately with their ion cannon. Did the idiot in charge of that stardestroyer not have his shields up? Why not? Surely it must have occurred to him that the Rebels would have some sort of 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 have dozens of stardestroyers at hand, and probably thousands of fighters. All they have to do is set up a constant barrage of the shield, directed at two targets – the shield generator and the ion cannon. The Rebels would be unable to lower the shield for any more ships to escape, because the shield generator and ion cannon would be destroyed immediately. Meanwhile, the Imperials are free to put together and launch a ground assault to capture the hapless Rebel base.


The Imperial ground assault is spearheaded by slow, lumbering AT-ATs. That’s supposed to stand for All-Terrain Armoured Transports, if I recall correctly. All-terrain? Are you kidding? How well would those things do in a swamp, or in a dense forest? Never mind that they can 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 are something like 20 meters tall, it seems, and we saw Rebel snowspeeders flying above them. So, the planetary shield must be at least 20+ meters up. 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 about a thousand TIE fighters and bombers in 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 can 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. So, are 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 region.

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 are immune to blaster fire, but I’d bet that a few proton torpedoes would have done the trick!

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.


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 that with all that sophisticated technology, the ships’ computers would automatically sound a collision alert.


The Falcon’s hyperdrive was non-functional, yet the running fight between the Millennium Falcon and the Imperials took them from the Hoth system to the Anoat system. Without hyperdrive, it should have taken centuries if not millennia to travel between star systems!


No asteroid field even remotely that dense could possibly exist! The asteroids would quickly be drawn together by their own gravitational attraction. Yet, many of the asteroids have clearly-visible craters on their surfaces, implying that they’re fairly old, so this asteroid field has evidently existed for some length of time. No way!


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

There are a number of ways to calculate probabilities. One possibility is that C-3PO is 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 makes some sense, but it’s still an almost completely useless “fact.” It’s useless information, because it doesn’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 are 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 that 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.

Why? Because I know very well that rain is more likely to fall at certain times of the year than others. A better way to do it 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. The best way to figure out the likelihood that it will rain tomorrow would be to look at the relevant causative factors. 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 couple dozen stardestroyers entered the asteroid field, and all of them came out again (with one possible exception). If the odds of one ship doing it are only 1 in 3,720, the odds of 10 doing it are less than 1 in 500,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 (!).

So, C-3PO’s full of it.


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



Luke’s not too bright, is he? He lands on this strange planet called “Dagobah,” with instructions to find some guy named “Yoda.” He has a whole planet to search! Does he know what this Yoda looks like? No. Does he know whether this Yoda is anywhere within a 1,000-mile radius? No. So what does he do the first time he encounters a local? He tells him to bugger off! Granted, Luke hasn’t had the best day, but doesn’t it occur to him that it might be a good idea to ask this strange frog-like creature if he has heard of somebody named “Yoda” before telling him to get lost?

Luke really is remarkably slow on the uptake sometimes. Even after this strange green guy starts talking about how powerful a Jedi his (Luke’s) father had been, Luke still doesn’t catch on that this is Yoda!

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



Han, Leia, and Chewbacca were hiding in a cave on an asteroid, waiting for the Imperials to go away. Suddenly, mynocks attack! Oh no! Wait a minute.

How come this asteroid has an atmosphere? It’s not that big. What does that giant space slug live on? You can’t possibly convince me that spacecraft happen by every few days with tasty morsels inside! If the ecologies of Tatooine and Hoth make no sense, the ecology of this asteroid field makes even less! What does that slug eat? How does it breathe? Where did it come from?


Why does Han need C-3PO to interpret what the Millennium Falcon’s computer is saying? Wouldn’t it have made sense to have long-ago programmed the ship’s computer to speak in whatever language he does?


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? I suppose it’s possible that stardestroyers have a “blind spot” in their sensor systems that Han flew into, hoping that they’d assume he went to hyperspace while in their blind spot, instead of attaching to their hull. You’d think Han would have mentioned that, though.



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


Granted, space is big, but is 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 – is it really that much trouble to hang on to your garbage ‘til you can drop it off at a recycling center or jettison it into a sun?


Cloud City must weigh millions of tons. This means that they must expend a vast amount of energy to keep it floating in the clouds. Wouldn’t it make a great deal more sense to just put it into orbit? It’s highly unlikely that a gas giant would have a breathable atmosphere anyway.


The light saber duel: suffice it to say that any remotely competent swordsman would have taken out Luke or Vader in 10 seconds flat. Those big, sweeping moves might look impressive on screen, but they’d get you killed against an actual opponent. (You’ll notice that though Yoda claimed a Jedi uses the Force for defense, not attack, it was Luke, not Vader, who attacked first.)

Come to think of it . . .

Original Star Wars: Vader vs. Kenobi – Kenobi initiates the attack.
The Empire Strikes Back: Vader vs. Luke – Luke initiates the attack.
Return of the Jedi: Vader vs. Luke – Luke attacks the Emperor.

Hmm.

[Johnny Pneumatic]

It's time for me to tear The Matrix a new one.


The whole reason humans exist in the future on the Matrix Earth is to be a power source for the robots. It is true humans produce voltage and heat. In the real future and in an open system we may have small electronic devices that run off our body heat. The problem in The Matrix is a little thing scientists like to call the Second Law of Thermodynamics(Entropy) Creationists like to use this to try to debunk Organic Evolution. This "argument" shows just how hopelessly stupid they are. But it would work to destroy the world of The Matrix because no solar energy to input energy into the system is getting in. Geothermal energy would work; but why don't the robots just use that? Or just the fusion mentioned in the movie? Someone really needs to bitch slap the Wachowski Brothers.

When the good guys get killed when they are in The Matrix their bodies in reality spit up blood. What the hell?! They died a neurological death. Flat lines on an electroencephalograph machine would be realistic though.

[The Lone Ranger]

Geothermal energy would work; but why don't the robots just use that? Or just the fusion mentioned in the movie? Someone really needs to bitch slap the Wachowski Brothers.


I didn't care for the Matrix movies very much, and I may well be remembering wrong, but didn't they claim that they were using humans as their main power source, and fusion as a backup?

That's kind of like saying, "My car is powered by a gerbil running on a wheel -- the 250 horsepower engine is just backup."

Cheers,

Michael

[Dingfod]

I didn't care for the Matrix movies very much, and I may well be remembering wrong, but didn't they claim that they were using humans as their main power source, and fusion as a backup?

That's kind of like saying, "My car is powered by a gerbil running on a wheel -- the 250 horsepower engine is just backup."
My car is like that. Seriously. My "car" is powered by four cylinders and only turns on the other four cylinders when needed. So far, the jury is still out on whether GM really understands what technology is supposed to do aside from creating more horsepower out of increasing amounts of fuel consumed.

As for the Matrix machine-ruled world using humans as a power source, that was just stupid, the amount of energy required to build the infrastructure alone would be more power than they would ever get out of it. It would've made a lot more sense if the purpose of it all was to use all that human brain power in some sort of organic supercomputer, one that does everything from making sure all its components are maintained to making the Matrix real to those connected to it. Lately I'm beginning to think if we humans keep doing what we're doing, gabbing on the internets and playing computer games all the time, we're bound to ask for a direct synaptic connection at some point. When that happens we won't want to be disconnected ever so we'll have to be fed somehow, why just not be immersed in a fluid that would flush away wastes to be recycled into nutritious intravenous feedings?

Any or all of you, do you ever just suspend critical analysis and just sit back and enjoy a picture show without overanalyzing (overtly analizing?) it? Or, do the gaping plot holes, piss poor acting, implausible technology and impossible physics just make it impossible for you to enjoy a movie or TV show like it does for me a lot?

[Dingfod]

You’ll notice that though Yoda claimed a Jedi uses the Force for defense, not attack, it was Luke, not Vader, who attacked first.

Come to think of it . . .

Original Star Wars: Vader vs. Kenobi – Kenobi initiates the attack.
The Empire Strikes Back: Vader vs. Luke – Luke initiates the attack.
Return of the Jedi: Vader vs. Luke – Luke attacks the Emperor.

Hmm.Not true, in each case it was a preemptive attack in defense of their freedom. We all know Vader is evil and possesses weapons of mass destruction. You know, they had to take the fight to them so we don't have to fight them at the homeland planetary system. It was all about defense. Sheesh!

[The Lone Ranger]

Any or all of you, do you ever just suspend critical analysis and just sit back and enjoy a picture show without overanalyzing (overtly analizing?) it? Or, do the gaping plot holes, piss poor acting, implausible technology and impossible physics just make it impossible for you to enjoy a movie or TV show like it does for me a lot?

I can easily ignore implausible/impossible technology and physics, so long as the movie's internally consistent. Gaping plot holes and stupidity on the part of supposedly-smart characters really bug me though.



***

Oh! I've got one! Remember in Gladiator where the senator was assassinated by someone slipping a venomous snake into his bed? That one had me chuckling out loud in the theater.

Okay, killing someone by introducing him or her to a venomous snake has a real historical basis. So far, so good. But what is the snake's motivation? Snakes don't just bite people for the heck of it -- if the snake wasn't being threatened by the senator, it would have no reason to bite him.

But it gets worse -- much worse. The snake that we saw onscreen was apparently supposed to be a coral snake, a snake native to the New World. Coral snakes most-definitely were not available for the Romans to use as assassination devices.

What's even worse though, is that while it might have looked like a venomous coral snake to the untrained eye, anyone who knows snakes would immediately recognize that the snake in question was a perfectly harmless king snake!

I was literally laughing out loud at that scene.


Cheers,

Michael

[Roland98]

Geez, I can never remember this much stuff about movies unless I write it down right after I see them. And while I hated the "science" behind Jurassic park, my biggest beef with the movie is that the little boy was named "Timmy." Can you get any more cliche?

Alas, while I'd love to eviscerate Outbreak, I just can't recall exactly all of the stupid stuff. And technically, I don't think that was supposed to be an Ebola outbreak; it was some made-up virus that was Ebola-like, so they could take liberties with its pathogenesis.

One that really pissed me off was Mission: Impossible 2, but I'll be damned if I can remember the details now, and I have no desire to see that movie again, ever. I think the gist of it was that they were growing up some virus, and were using UV light to somehow help it grow. Too bad that UV light is actually germicidal. Dumbasses.

[Adora]

Shouldn't the xenomorphs require completely different proteins, etc... than what earth people have? It seems no different than if a human tried to live eating only rocks. :chin:
Technically: yes. But theoretically they process these from the body it's implanted in. The Xenomorphs (aliens) are supposedly silicon-based life forms, which explains how they can have acidic blood in their system. They're also supposedly psychic. Woooooo. *wiggles hands*

How this adds up to REAL science, I don't know. But I just read the books. (/Aliens geek)

Oh, yes...

King Arthur

...is shit. I'm not going to waste space explaining why. But I will give you one word: Saddles. *dies*

Pitch Black

OKay, so the spooky life-forms come out every uber-eclipse, which is like every 22 years or something, right? So what the fuck do they live on for all that time inbetween!

I mean, I love this movie to death and all, but that's one glaring pothole there.

Haha, I could be really stupid and introduce something like The Utena Movie into here, but the question "How did she turn into a car?" just defies all possible logic. *sighs* This is why I love animation- you don't have to pretend it's real quite as much.

[Dingfod]

Pitch Black

OKay, so the spooky life-forms come out every uber-eclipse, which is like every 22 years or something, right? So what the fuck do they live on for all that time inbetween!Maybe they have a life-cycle like the periodical cicada (http://insects.ummz.lsa.umich.edu/fauna/michigan_cicadas/Periodical/Index.html), going dormant for a long time.

[Dingfod]

King Arthur

...is shit. I'm not going to waste space explaining why. But I will give you one word: Saddles. *dies*Also, when exactly do you think saddles came into use in merry old England? Wasn't Arthur supposed to be a Roman officer? Romans had saddles that incorporated a wooden tree, probably padded with leather and hides, very likely quite ornate and functional. The Samartian saddle, first used by a tribe in Southern Russia dates to about 350-365 AD and is usually described as the first modern saddle with multiple girths and metal stirrups. The Samartian saddle was further improved by none other than medieval knights. Predating that by 800+ years was the Scythian saddle from the Mongolia steppes, a saddle that was functional as well as ornate with a girth and leather stirrups.

A Scythian vase, 4th century BC, shows a man hobbling a horse with the horse having a padded saddle with girth and very possibly leather stirrups hanging down.
http://ilaria.veltri.tripod.com/bards/sythianpadsaddle.jpg

A four-horned Roman saddle is shown in this carving:
http://ilaria.veltri.tripod.com/bards/steleofsilius.jpg

[Johnny Pneumatic]

I didn't care for the Matrix movies very much, and I may well be remembering wrong, but didn't they claim that they were using humans as their main power source, and fusion as a backup?

Yeah they did say that. My point though is human power without energy input violates a basic physical law. It's one thing to have craft that levitate using antigrav engines(which maybe someday could exist). Quite another to have free energy machines, which basically that's what the humans are. :mocking:

[livius drusus]

The Lone Ranger, I know it's not about science, but if you were to turn your discerning eye on The Last Samurai I'd surely love it.

[The Lone Ranger]

The Lone Ranger, I know it's not about science, but if you were to turn your discerning eye on The Last Samurai I'd surely love it.

By and large, I thought it was okay -- but there were indeed some historical inaccuracies, and some of the sword-training scenes had me chuckling outright. [You know what you call somebody who insists on spinning around while in a swordfight with a remotely competent opponent? That's right -- dead! (It looks "cool" on film though, or so I've been informed.)] The movie also contains some truly astounding "cultural errors," for lack of a better phrase -- did they not bother to consult any Japanese historians in the making of the movie? For example, when Augren and company see the Emperor, they're carrying weapons. Nobody, but nobody was allowed in the Emperor's presence bearing weapons of any sort -- not even his most loyal and trusted retainers! That would have been considered a grave insult, worthy of immediate execution.


If you really want a good laugh (or to have your stomach turned, depending upon how much of it you sit through), watch the "documentaries" on the dvd which consist largely of everyone who had anything to do with the film talking about how Tom Cruise really is a modern-day samurai. Yep. I'm sure he is.

Perhaps my chief complaint with such movies, though, is that so few movie-makers have the slightest understanding of what "honour" means. (Don't get me started on those ridiculous, testosterone-crazed Klingons and their perverted notions of "honour"!)


It'd be fun to take a quick look at it again and jot down a few notes, but I'm afraid I won't have a chance to do so for at least a day or two. Gotta run!

Cheers,

Michael

[livius drusus]

Thank you, Michael. I caught the beginning of the movie on cable last night, and it bugged the hell out of me. Okay, more specifically, Tom Cruise bugged the hell out of me: graceless, talentless oaf. I suspect the DVD extras you mention would drive me to the very edge of seppuku.

[Johnny Pneumatic]

I'm not griping about the pseudoscientific powers of X-Men but in X-Men 2 Magneto flattens out a steel ball with his magnetic power and then stands on the levitating metal disk to fly across a chasm in his plastic prison. Did you spot the flaw? He's picking himself up by his own boot straps. In X-Men 1 Magneto stops a bullet just before it hits a cop in the head. Lead is not magnetic. Magneto holds shot guns up in the air with his power; why aren't the metal cop cars effected by the powerful magnetic field needed to levitate the guns?

[The Lone Ranger]

So, I watched The Last Samurai again last night. Okay, I watched most of it, anyway. I fast-forwarded a few times.

Ah yes, the timeless story of how a white guy comes to an utterly foreign culture and in a few months’ time is out-performing the natives who have dedicated their lives to the perfection of their arts.


Before we delve into the movie itself, there are some things to consider. First of all, to say that the movie over-romanticizes the samurai and their devotion to the concept of bushido is kinda like saying that Hitler wasn’t a very nice guy.

One could easily make the argument that the samurai were the bad guys here. After all, they were fighting to preserve a way of life that included a particularly nasty caste system in which where you happened to have been born determined your lot in life. Life was pretty good if you happened to have been born a samurai (and by no means were all – or even most – samurai selfless servants of the public welfare, but more on that later), but life was pretty rotten if you were one of the great majority unlucky-enough to have been born a peasant. The way of life that the samurai were fighting to preserve was also one in which women were treated more as property than as people.

Sure, the concept of bushido is a very noble one, but it was more of an ideal than a reality. Certainly, some samurai took the notion seriously, but the reality is that most of them were probably little more than thugs. Only samurai could carry weaponry openly in old Japan, and as warriors, they had the power of life and death. A samurai could literally kill somebody just for looking at him wrong without fear of punishment – and they bloody well expected the peasants and merchants to keep that in mind and show proper respect for them.


As the movie quite correctly portrays, by no means was everyone in Japan happy about the mania for “Westernization” that occurred during the Meiji Restoration. Many Japanese felt that they were abandoning their traditions in the process, and that the result would be the destruction of their culture. The samurai (who had long been near the top of the social order) were – naturally – especially displeased, since many of the changes were designed to strip them of their power and influence.

After Japan’s humiliating defeat in World War II, many Japanese looked upon this as proof that fate and/or the gods were punishing them for abandoning their traditional ways. So, in the years right after the war, a lot of “Samurai Films” were produced in Japan. These films tended to portray the samurai as selfless defenders of the poor and downtrodden, and in these films, the peasants and merchants led happy, carefree lives under the benevolent protection of the samurai.

Since Akira Kurosawa is revered today as perhaps the greatest film-maker of all time, it might surprise many people to learn that his Samurai Films were actually made as a reaction against the films in which samurai were portrayed as utterly selfless defenders of All That Is Right And Good™. In his films, pre-Meiji Restoration Japan was not an idyllic and peaceful place, and the samurai were by no means all selfless defenders of goodness. A lot of Japanese people at the time resented Kurosawa for daring to portray things as they were, rather than as they wished them to be.

Bushido was and is a wonderful idea, but few samurai took it as seriously as a lot of people would like to believe. A lot of people resented Kurosawa for pointing this out.

The Last Samurai, it seems to me, is in some ways a throwback to the post-war, pre-Kurosawa Samurai Films. It quite distorts history when it suggests that Japan was a near-paradise of happy people at spiritual peace before the Meiji Restoration.


The Last Samurai:

Early in the movie, the point is made that “Emperor Meiji” (more on that later) is anxious to modernize Japan, and so he’s hiring Western experts – lawyers, industrialists, soldiers, etc. That’s all well and good, but they specifically say that he’s hiring “warriors” from America. True, Japan did hire a lot of “white experts” at this time, including some from the U.S.; it’s also true that American warships under Perry “opened” Japan to the outside, but Japan’s military was not trained by Americans to any significant extent.

Japan’s army and especially its navy was trained and equipped almost exclusively by Europeans, especially Prussians (the army) and the British (the navy). America was still considered rather a backwater country at this point in history, and it didn’t rise to world prominence until the time of the first World War, almost 50 years later.


When Augren and company had their first interview with “Emperor Meiji,” Augren and Colonel Bagley were quite obviously armed. No one was allowed to bear arms in the Emperor’s presence – especially foreigners. Such an offense would have been punishable by death. Mr. Graham should have known this and told them to come unarmed, and even if he hadn’t known it, they would have been disarmed – by force, if necessary – before being allowed into the temple.

By the way, he would not have been referred to as “Emperor Meiji.” Meiji was the title he was given after his death. During his lifetime, he would have been referred to by his given name, Emperor Mutsuhito.


Shortly after their meeting with the Emperor, Sergeant Gant comments that the samurai are “still wearing armour,” and should therefore be easy to defeat. Despite what the movie implies, firearms had been in use in Japan for something like two centuries by this point – including by the samurai themselves, who were by no means averse to using more-effective weapons when they became available. Unsurprisingly then, the samurai had long-ago abandoned the use of body armour. I suppose the makers of The Last Samurai were trying to make a point by having the samurai wear armour, but it doesn’t really make much sense. The armour we see the samurai wearing is from approximately 250 years before the time of this film. Family heirlooms or not, are we really to expect that the samurai have this many 250-year-old suits of armour available – in perfect condition, no less – and that they would wear them just to make a point about how much they dislike modern ways? (Armour is heavy and restricts your movements to some degree, and it takes considerable training just to be able to put it on. Since the samurai were well-aware that bamboo armour is useless against modern guns, why wear it?)


“They’re savages with bows and arrows” and “they don’t have a single rifle,” according to Colonel Bagley. He uses this as evidence that the Japanese conscripts, armed with “modern” muzzle-loading rifles can defeat samurai bowmen. He’s not thinking too clearly, perhaps because of his arrogant assumption that anything newer must be better. Actually, the Japanese longbow, in the hands of a trained archer, had a vastly higher rate of fire than a muzzle-loading rifle, and was probably accurate to a considerably greater range. Early guns replaced bows because they were easier to use, not because they were faster, had greater range or accuracy, or were more powerful. You could train someone to use a rifle reasonably well in a few days’ time, whereas it takes years to master the bow. Given roughly equal numbers of highly trained longbowmen on one side, and conscripts armed with muzzle-loaders on the other, the bowmen would annihilate the gunners, especially from long range.


In the first conflict – between the poorly-trained conscripts under Augren, and the samurai – they’re clearly fighting on ground of the samurai’s choosing. This is evidenced by the fact that the samurai had split into two forces, one of which attacked from in front, and the other of which ambushed the retreating survivors. Furthermore, they were fighting in a forest and in a dense fog – where the conscripts’ guns were all but useless until the samurai were almost on top of them.

Yet, Augren had plenty of time to set his men up in battle formation before the samurai attacked. This implies that they weren’t ambushed by the samurai, but chose to fight there. Did Katsumoto extend them an invitation, saying “I’ll meet you at such-and-such a place at such-and-such a time and we’ll fight”? If so, why were Augren and Colonel Bagley so idiotic as to accept? You never fight the enemy on his terms if you can help it! Had the battle taken place on an open field on a clear day, the outcome would probably have been very different.

If, as Augren had said, there was no need to hunt down Katsumoto’s forces, because Katsumoto would come to them, why on Earth were they foolish enough to choose a battle site that was so ill-suited to them and so well-suited to the samurai? Shouldn’t they have picked a nice, open area and then sent Katsumoto a message daring him to come after them?

We did see in this battle that Augren had some prior sword training, as he used his cavalry saber fairly efficiently. That’s a point worth considering for later.



When Augren was taken to the samurai’s village, there was a mon (gate) at the entrance to the village, with several stones placed on it. It’s common in Japan to place small stones on structures for decorative purposes, but not on a mon – that’s considered improper. Did no one point this out to the producers of the film?


By the way, why does Katsumoto have a shaved head? You can clearly see stubble, so he’s not naturally bald. The only people who shaved their heads at this period were priests. Granted, Katsumoto is portrayed as a spiritual person, but for a samurai to shave his head would have been considered extremely unusual – downright offensive, in fact.


Curiously, there are several points in the movie where characters should have been wearing armour of some point, but aren’t. I’m thinking specifically of the sword training exercises that we see from time to time in the movie. The bogu had been invented by this time, and sword training took one of two forms: 1.) using a wooden sword (bokken) or a longsword (katana) in prearranged practice drills (kata) or in cutting exercises against rolled mats, 2.) partners sparred with bamboo “swords” called shinai while wearing protective armour known as the bogu. In this way, people could learn sword techniques safely.

Oddly, we occasionally saw people wearing parts of a bogu, but no one ever wore a full bogu during the movie, nor did anyone ever spar with shinai. Instead, we saw several instances of people going at each other full-tilt with bokken. That is just plain stupid. A bokken can easily break bones or even kill. No one in their right minds would spar with bokken, not even if they were wearing bogu.


At one point in the movie, Katsumoto expressed his admiration for General Custer, and claimed that he and his men had “good deaths.” This is quite contrary to the philosophy of bushido that he claims to uphold: Custer and his men did not have good deaths because they did not die for a worthy cause! Katsumoto should have felt contempt for Custer for throwing away the lives of his men. Obedience to authority is considered a virtue in Japan, so it’s likely that Katsumoto would admire Custer’s men for their willingness to follow him into a deadly situation, but he should have had nothing but contempt for Custer, because his arrogance and stupidity caused his men to die needlessly.


How does Augren know how to wear the hakama, gi, and obi? When he tries them on for the first time, he gets it perfect, but these garments are tied on, not buttoned or otherwise fastened, and it takes considerable practice (trust me; I know from experience!) to get it right. He may be observant, but I don’t see how he could have figured it out for himself.


Granted, Augren obviously had some previous sword training, and granted, he has been practicing for months, but I simply do not believe that with a few months’ training he could become as proficient a swordsman as Ujio, a swordmaster who has devoted decades to the mastery of the blade. Yet, that seems to be exactly what they’re implying!

During the duel between Augren and Ujio with bokken (again, only idiots would spar with bokken and not even wear armour!), in which Augren actually manages to fight Ujio to a draw, they use the wildly exaggerated moves typical of movie fighting. Such moves get you killed in real combat. Real swordplay is far quicker and subtler than what you see in the movies. And what’s with all the spinning? You never turn your back on your opponent if you can possibly help it! (There are some Korean styles that incorporate spinning attacks to distract the opponent, but only under rather specific circumstances – generally it’s considered suicidal to turn your back on an opponent. It looks “cool” on screen though I suppose, even as it makes trained swordsmen want to pull their hair out every time they see it.)


During the ninja attack, Katsumoto threw a wakizashi (short sword) some 15 feet or so at a ninja, killing him. Neither the katana nor the wakizashi is weighted for throwing. Granted, it’s not impossible to throw one, but it’s danged unlikely that you’ll actually succeed in killing your target that way.

Later in the movie, Augren threw a katana (which, if anything, is even less suited for throwing) an even greater distance and killed Colonel Bagley. Two words: Yeah. Right.


At one point, Augren (who was unarmed at the moment of attack) was set upon by four swordsmen sent by the dastardly Omura. Augren handily defeated all of them, thus demonstrating that he had become a master swordsman himself. (In only a few months’ time?) But wait a minute: haven’t we been beaten over the head throughout the entire movie with the point that Omura has embraced change and disdains the “old ways”? So why on earth would his hand-picked assassins use swords instead of guns to take out an enemy, especially one they know is trained for hand-to-hand combat?

(Again, Augren and his attackers used greatly exaggerated moves – especially when you consider the fact that none of them is wearing armour, so there’s no need to put lots of power behind your attack. Looks good on film though, I suppose. In fairness, the swordplay was nowhere near as objectionable as in some of the Star Wars or Highlander movies, for example.)


Regarding the final battle, I’m wondering why the samurai were so militarily incompetent. Maybe it had something to do with “honour.” That seems to be the standard film-maker’s excuse for why highly-trained warriors insist upon fighting stupidly on screen. Apparently, it’s more “honourable” to charge right at the enemy guns and get slaughtered than to attack from the sides. (Funny, the samurai didn't seem to have any trouble with the tactic of ambushing demoralized and retreating troops earlier in the movie, which strikes me as less than entirely "honourable" if we use such a ridiculously macho definition of "honour.") Okay, granted, Katsumoto clearly didn’t expect to actually win, but he and his samurai might have, had they fought a little more intelligently.

Not that the other side was any better. Didn’t the Imperial Forces notice that the ground they were marching on toward the samurai was soaked in petroleum? Did none of them have a sense of smell? Did none of them think that was just a bit alarming? Did none of them think, “Boy, I sure hope nobody fires a flaming arrow at us; we’d be burned alive” before one of the samurai fired a flaming arrow at them?

The samurai archers were annihilating the first wave of Imperial attackers. So why did Katsumoto insist on rushing in to deal with them hand-to-hand? Oh yeah, “honour,” right? Why not just let the archers finish them off instead of getting a lot of his men needlessly killed by sending a bunch of swordsmen to attack men armed with rifles?


After the first Imperial attack has been repulsed (at considerable and unnecessary loss to his own side), Katsumoto insists on charging right at the Imperial cannon and gatling guns. Why not regroup and attack from the sides, rendering the big guns all but useless? They might actually have won, and at the very least, they would have taken a lot of the Imperial troops with them – sending a very clear message in the process.


I mentioned Highlander above. Are we sure that Augren’s real name isn’t McLeod? He sure survived an awful lot of hits from heavy-caliber firearms, not to mention several stabbing wounds. Shortly thereafter, he had only a bit of a limp when he confronted the Emperor. Evidently, he heals quickly.



Cheers,

Michael

[livius drusus]

That was a thing of beauty, Michael. I can't thank you enough.

Many of the things you mentioned perplexed me as well: the frontal assault in the end, Katsumoto's shaved head vs. everyone else's long locks and his son's screaming when his topknot was cut off, Augren's endless capacity to take hits from a wide range of weaponry, Katsumoto's bizarre pro-Custer comments (particularly coupled with his later Mr. Miyagi only warriors who are ashamed of their past slaughters have nightmares comment), the samurai use swords only anachronism, the museum armour, and of course, the standard pastoral more civilized than thou we think they're savages but we're the real savages trope underlying the whole thing.

It looked pretty, but even that was almost ruined by the presence of Tom Cruise, who at best is reminscent of some kind of dwarf sheep, and at worst actually makes me struggle not to vomit.

Thanks again for willingly sitting through it once again just so I could have the pleasure of your detailed critique. :thankee:

[viscousmemories]

Awesome review, Michael. And since you didn't plug your article, I will:

Read The Lone Rangers Thoughts on the Way of the Sword (http://www.freethought-forum.com/forum/article.php?a=10) for more about bokken, boku and bushido. :)

[The Lone Ranger]

By the way, I saw Anacondas: The Hunt for the Blood Orchid last week. Why? I dunno. Temporary insanity perhaps? I mean, I knew it would be a bad movie, but I figured that maybe it would be a “so bad it’s funny, besides it doesn’t take itself too seriously” kind of movie, like the first one.

There were a few scenes that had me chuckling, but I’m not at all sure that was the film-makers’ intention.


Where to begin? The formulaic plot perhaps? That’s too easy. This is the sort of movie that’s so predictable that 5 minutes in, you’ve got everyone labeled. Let’s see:
“Annoyingly arrogant character who’ll have a change of heart by the end and become sympathetic and who’ll ultimately survive”? Check.


“White man with a shady past who is much better than any of the locals at surviving in this environment; seems unsympathetic at first, but really has a heart of gold, and who will ultimately survive”? Check.


“Greedy white guy who’ll leave everyone else to die the first chance he gets – he’ll ultimately be killed in an ironic fashion”? Check.


“Likable black man who’ll die tragically right after discovering Greedy White Guy’s secret, but before he can inform the others”? Check.


“Annoying comic relief who ultimately survives despite his utter incompetence and the fact that most of the problems they encounter are due to his cowardice and inability to follow instructions”? Check.


“Ethnic sidekick to White Man With A Shady Past who ultimately dies nobly while saving someone else”? Check.


“Beautiful white girl who is inexplicably a leading authority in her field at the age of 25 – she’s invincible, of course”? Check.


“Sexist Guy who really has the hots for Beautiful White Girl, and who gets killed shortly after she turns him down”? Check.

Okay, we’re all set then.



Did the film-makers think that “Anacondas” was simply too good a movie title to pass up? Is that it? Or are they so incredibly lazy that they couldn’t be bothered to look up what friggin’ continent anacondas are native to? Would it have been that difficult to either a.) set it in South America, where anacondas actually live, or b.) call it “Pythons” instead?

This movie is set in Borneo, fercryinoutloud! The nearest anacondas are thousands of miles away from Borneo. Did no one find it unusual that they were running into friggin’ anacondas in the jungles of Borneo? The fact that they were calling them anacondas (as opposed to “Bloody Big Snakes” for instance) suggests that they knew what anacondas are, so the characters don’t get any points for being ignorant of the glaring inconsistency that the snakes are wandering around Borneo instead of South America.

But anacondas aren’t the only critters we encounter in this movie that’re thousands of miles from their homelands. I saw macaws and howler monkeys wandering around Borneo during the course of this movie too. Again, these are South American species! If you’re so determined to include South American fauna, why not just set the movie in South America? Huh?


Okay, so the basic premise is that cells can divide only 56 times before they die of their accumulated wastes, and that’s why we age and die. (Apparently, I missed that little item in all those biology courses I took and taught.) However, these guys just happen to know of a rare orchid that contains substances that somehow allow users to overcome this 56 cell divisions barrier and apparently live forever. (How they know that the flower has these magical properties wasn’t made very clear, as I recall.) Unfortunately, the flowers bloom only every seven years, and apparently all at the same time. Most unusual flowers they are, to be sure. So, they’ve got to get an expedition out to collect some of these magical flowers while they’re in bloom, so that they can collect the funky chemicals that will make people immortal. (Do the flowers produce these chemicals only when they’re in bloom for some odd reason; if not, why the big rush to get there before they stop blooming?)

In fairness, cells have extensions at the ends of their chromosomes called telomeres. Each time a cell divides, a bit of the telomere gets snipped off. In most cases, once the telomere is gone, the cell stops dividing. Still, it’s not like cells are fated to divide exactly 56 times and then stop, and besides, the “explanation” the movie provides for this supposed 56-division limit is beyond ludicrous.


So anyway, our intrepid crew is off to Borneo to harvest some of these magical orchids.


They arrive to find that it’s the middle of the rainy season, and no one wants to take them on a boat trip up the rain-swollen river to get to the orchids. This means they’re forced to hire the services of White Man With A Shady Past, who, being Caucasian and all, is obviously much better-equipped to deal with the local conditions than are the natives.

Since they clearly have more or less unlimited funds at their disposal, why they don’t simply fly to their destination in a couple of helicopters is unclear. It sure would have saved them a lot of time and trouble, though!


Things become rather more dangerous when their boat sinks after somehow going over a waterfall while traveling upstream. That’s a pretty neat trick!


Everyone survives the boat wreck, but Sexist Guy Who Really Has The Hots For Beautiful White Girl is soon gobbled up by a great big snake while everyone else watches in horror. No one seems to find it unusual that there are anacondas in Borneo, however. Nor does anyone seem overly surprised that the anaconda is three times the size of any previously-seen anaconda. Nor, for that matter, does anyone express surprise that the anacondas can defy physical laws to move much faster than any real snake could possibly move.


These anacondas sure do behave strangely. Apparently, they’re bulimic. They have the strange habit of regurgitating their last victim so as to make room for any fresh victims that should happen by. Most peculiar behavior, that.


One of the characters points out that anacondas continue to grow until they die (just about the only factually-correct statement anyone utters during the course of the movie). He speculates that because they’re eating critters that have been eating the orchids, they’re living for very long times, and that’s why they’re so big. That almost makes sense as an explanation for the Snakes Of Unusual Size, if you can buy the whole bit about the magic mushro—orchids, that is.



At one point, Greedy White Guy has managed to get the upper hand and is holding a gun on Beautiful White Girl, forcing her to cross a slippery log in a driving rain – a log that just happens to lie over a pit full of mating anacondas. He wants her to collect some of the orchids for him, you see – that’s why he forces her on this dangerous mission. Since, moments before, we had clearly seen that he was standing just a few feet away from plenty of the orchids, it’s unclear why he felt compelled to force her to do this.



Did I mention that the reason for the unusual density of hungry anacondas in the area is that it’s mating season? While it’s true that many snake species do have this sort of mating behavior, in which dozens if not hundreds of snakes congregate in a “mating ball,” they tend to be uninterested in anything else during this time. Heck, you can walk right up to a “mating ball” of snakes and pick them up – they’re pretty-much oblivious to everything around them. So, when Greedy White Guy falls into the snake pit and is messily devoured (as we all knew would eventually happen about 30 seconds after the movie began), we’re left to wonder why the snakes were so annoyed at being intruded upon.


After Beautiful White Girl and Greedy White Guy fall into the pit and Greedy White Guy was messily devoured (for some reason, the snakes ignored Beautiful White Girl at the time), Beautiful White Girl managed to climb out of the pit. Of course, one of the snakes decided to follow her, and menaced our intrepid gang. The snake bit into a can of gasoline, then somebody shot a flare into its mouth, setting it ablaze. Ooookay. The snake then fell back into the pit, and for some mysterious reason, exploded when it hit the water, apparently killing all the remaining snakes (and destroying all the orchids too, but them’s the breaks). I mean, I can almost understand the mysterious tendency of movie automobiles to explode when they go over a cliff, but in my experience, snakes rarely explode.




Shockingly, the movie departed from its established formula at the end by not showing us proof that at least one snake had survived the devastation.


Cheers,

Michael

[Ensign Steve]

Oh, c'mon! Who saw The Day After Tomorrow? Hehehe! It was the feel good comedy of the year. Serously, what was with the wolves?

[Darren]

My least favourite hated film is Saving Private Ryan. For lots of reasons. However this thread is about accuracy, and while some might question the liklihood of the central theme, which is already stretched to screaming point, lets look at the minbogglingly nonsensical wholesale rubbish sub-plot involving the German soldier that the group captures and who is subsequently spared and set free by the interpreter.

This guy (the German) then wanders off around the battlefield without a gun or headgear and separated from his unit. Somehow, off scene, he manages to avoid getting arrested and/or shot for desertion by the German Military Police.
He also avoids getting sent back for a debriefing session with the German military authorities i.e. who are you?, how did you escape? Oh so they just let you go did they? Well, come along now, we've got a prison cell/interrogation session/firing squad ready just for you .... etc. - no, none of that!
He is straightaway integrated into another battle formation and immediately sent back into the field where he miraculously encounters and fights with the very men who spared his life.
As if we have not been fed enough rubbish already, he is then taken prisoner by the very man who saved his life earlier, the interpreter, who proceeds to redeem himself (in the abominable context of the film) by cold bloodedly murdering the German soldier.
What a load of crap!

[Johnny Pneumatic]

This flaw isn't nearly as big as some of the stuff mentioned but in the movie X2 Wolverine is shot in the head and his adimantium metal skull stops the bullet. Fine I accept an invincible material for a pseudoscientific movie that is about action and ethics but the bullet he was shot with was lead. Lead is a real material and thus has known and explained properties. When a lead bullet hits a metal wall the bullet spats into a blob; yet the bullet Wolverine's body pushes back out the hole it came in isn't deformed at all. Hmmmmm.

[maddog]

Just saw "Flight of the Phoenix" (new version) last night. It wasn't the worst waste of a couple of hours I've ever had, but it was not a great movie by any stretch of the imagination.

I can't critique the science or engineering or anything with knowledge or precision, but I hate being confused by a movie. First off, there's the storm that takes the plane down. Wow, that was really real-looking . . . not! Then there's the long, drawn-out crash, including the guy who gets sucked out of the broken tail, while another guy (the co-pilot) is also loose and unconscious in the cabin, there, but he stays put.

Then they all figure out, once they've come to rest, that they are all OK, except that "Doc so-and-so" is intact in the plane, but has died. In the next scene there are TWO graves. Who's the second guy?

Then Davis, the guy who's afraid he put the jinx on everyone, is feeling guilty and wanders away from the plane that night for a piss, hits his foot on a rock, tumbles down an embankment, finds himself in a sand valley and, being disoriented, doesn't know which way he fell down and can't figure out which way to climb up to get back to the plane. Oh, yeah, there's also another storm that night brewing before he gets up and goes out to take a leak. The wind and blowing sand are so fierce that he ends up dying half-buried upright in the sand in his little lost valley. Apparently nobody finds him, because they don't have a THIRD grave in their little graveyard. And, oh, yeah, the sandstorm is so severe it buries Davis (who is really only supposedly a short distance away from the plane), but the little graveyard is still pristine, and untouched. The little grave mounds are still completely intact, neither being blown away and uncovered, nor creating a new, much higher dune (I don't know which would be more likely, serving as an obstacle, because of the mounds plus the little pipe crosses, to catch and pile up sand, or whether, because it is all newly disturbed and spaded, that it would blow away). Even though Davis got lost such a small distance away, they apparently never find him.

The nerdy mysterious engineer type (Giovanni Ribisi) says they can take part of the plane and build an entirely new one. The pilot doesn't want to for some reason, so nothing gets done. Then one of them decides he isn't going to sit around and wait to die, he's going to try to walk out. The pilot goes after him. They finally catch up to one another in a space of harder ground, near some small mountains, where all the stuff that spilled out of the fuselage (including the guy that got sucked out) are strewn in a debris field. I don't know how many days have passed since the crash, but the body of the dead guy is (1) pretty intact instead of smashed, and (2) littered about with shells, showing the body has been shot up. I suppose this is just a plot device to introduce the possibility that there are "nomads" or brigands around here, but the bullet holes in the dead guy's body show blood, and not very much deterioration. The pilot and the other guy have a pep talk and the pilot decides, OK, he'll go along and they CAN build the plane, so they both go back. They don't appear to bring back much from the debris field with them.

So they start working on the plane. There's this scene where the second wing is being attached and one guy has to sit in a hole on the low side. He has some kind of canister or something in his hand and the operation is extremely critical; they only have one shot at it. I cannot for the life of me figure out what the guy's task is, however, or how they are managing to get the wing fixed so that it will stay on. Beats me.

Then there's the electrical storm. The one that will blow up the plane because, if lightning strikes it, it's not "grounded." The pilot complains that the engineer guy should have been aware that the plane needed to be grounded. (1) if I assumed the guy was an engineer, I would have assumed that he knew that AND HAD TAKEN CARE OF IT. I wouldn't "suddenly" realize during an electrical storm that it hadn't. OR (2) if I knew that the plane needed to be grounded, then I would have taken care of it myself long before. I wouldn't "just" be realizing this when an electrical storm happens along. Don't these people talk to each other? What the hell else are they doing all day long?

Then there's the scene with the nomad/brigands. There they are, camped just over the hill. A party of three goes to parley with the brigands. The brigands are going to help. Although . . . just at the last second, one of the two "backup" guys sees that one of the brigands is wearing his watch. "Hey," he says, "that's my watch!" That's when the shooting starts. For some reason, his having the watch means he's bad or something. (1) how'd the guy get the watch? That's not explained. I assume it's something I missed in the earlier part of the movie, and he had taken off his watch inside the plane and it's one of the items that got swept out of the plane during the crash, and picked up from the debris field. I assume this, but don't know it. (2) Even if the brigand picked up the watch from the debris field, why does this make him a bad guy? Finders keepers in the middle of nowhere. Yeah, maybe they used the dead guy for target practice, but he was already dead. I don't get it. I don't get what's so terrible or significant about this brigand having a watch. Anyway, all the shooting starts. As usual, the bad guy with the machine gun can't kill anyone, and our hero (the pilot) with a hand gun can kill all the other guys. One brigand gets away on a horse. All the others are killed. Our fearless group takes their wounded comrade back to the plane where they don't have enough medical supplies or water to do much for him and he dies. (Now there are three graves at the site. Through all the storms, the gravesite never changes.) (1) the one brigand gets away on a horse. OK, what happened to all the other horses? and the camels? and the brigands' tents? and supplies?

Then they finally get the plane ready. Then they find out that the engineer guy had only ever designed model planes before, not real ones with passengers. Everybody's mad and thinks he's a crackpot (which he is -- he murders a surviving brigand) but the little plane starts to lift in the wind that's beginning to kick up. Geez, maybe the thing really WILL fly after all! Well, that wind kicking up turns into a huge sandstorm. It blows hard enough to roll over the main fuselage they've been using as a shelter, but it doesn't blow the little light plane away. Oh, no. Not even though they don't bother to tie it down any more securely once it shows some lift. No, they just go take shelter in the fuselage and leave the little plane out there in the wind on its own. It doesn't blow away, it just gets more-than-half buried in a huge mountain of sand. After the storm is over, they are all discouraged, looking at their little buried plane. Well, our fearless crew decides they just have to dig it out. Immediate next scene, they are all hauling the plane (on completely level (rocky, not sandy) ground) with harnesses. They never show how they dug the plane clear of all the sand, to be ABLE to haul it over the level ground.

Then they drop their hauling straps on the ground and wait for the pilot to fire up the engine. As far as I can see, they never clear the hauling straps from the wings or fuselage, but just leave them dragging on the ground. The engine finally gets going and everybody gets "on board." The "passenger" positions consist of little handholds on the wings, behind flaps; IOW, you lie flat on the wing and hold on. that's it. no straps, no nothing. So they're getting ready to get going; here come the bad guys -- a BIG tribe of brigands -- over the hill, going to chase them down and shoot them. OK, we gotta get this baby in the air! pronto! Then, all of a sudden! the rudder cable comes apart! Oh no! the nerdy engineer has to crawl out on the fuselage, while the plane is screaming down the runway, picking up speed, to get away from the brigands and take off, and snap the rudder cable back together! Oh yeah! THAT was believable!

So the plane takes off over the cliff, heads down, and only has a short way before it has to climb up to clear the cliff on the other side of the gorge! Zoom! it climbs, banks and turns all at once! Hooray! and not one of the guys on the wing (without being tied down) slips off! hooray! That was so believable, too! So away the survivors fly to rescue, fame, fortune, and happiness. Yeah!

I never saw the original (James Stewart) movie. I hope it isn't as lame as this, but I'm not really tempted to find out.
#171

[The Lone Ranger]

It’s back! :undead:

Just for fun, I popped The Return of the Jedi into the dvd player while having supper last night. Here are some thoughts.


The Return of the Jedi:

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

It can’t 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 clearly see it moving from the moon’s surface. Yet it’s clear from the movie that the Death Star is not in orbit, but is hovering directly over the surface installation that generates its shield. Presumably then, either the installation or the Death Star itself (or both) is generating some sort of repulsion force to hold the Death Star up and prevent it from falling to the moon’s surface – all those trillions of tons of metal. 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 is the same size and mass as Earth, that would be at about 36,000 kilometers’ altitude.)

“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 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.


One thought that occurs to me upon watching The Return of the Jedi is 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 series?

Bad Guy: “My fiendish plan/device will utterly destroy all opposition! It cannot fail!”
Good Guy: “Actually, that would 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. Well, back to the drawing board.”

Why is it that movie villains almost never seem to think of the obvious thing to do, which is correct the flaw in your foolproof scheme and try again? The original Death Star had a huge flaw which 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 design flaws of the original would have been corrected.)


When Vader arrived, the Death Star’s commander complained that his men were already overworked, and couldn’t complete the station on the schedule that Vader demanded. Vader insisted that they 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’s so important to complete the Death Star on this schedule, bringing in more workers would be a really good idea!



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


I’ve asked this before, so I won’t dwell on it, but how is it that Tatooine has a breathable atmosphere, given that it doesn’t appear to have any large bodies of water (most of the Earth’s atmospheric oxygen is produced by oceanic algae) or for that matter any plant life at all?

As C-3PO and R2D2 approach Jabba’s palace, C-3PO comments that Lando and Chewbacca “never came back” from there. But we see later in the movie that Chewbacca (with Leia) arrives at Jabba’s palace after R2 and 3PO do. Was this a mistake on the film-makers’ parts, or is 3PO deluded somehow?


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


How does Jabba move? He has no legs, after all. I suppose he’s supposed to move like a large snake, but he’s definitely not built for it. Small snakes 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 for big ones. Big snakes like pythons typically use rectilinear motion – they have large scales on their bellies called “scutes” to which muscles are attached. They can move these scutes forward individually, anchor them on surface irregularities, and so drag their bodies forward. This is a very slow form of movement.

Jabba’s body is 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 has scutes, so how does he move?



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 looks so much like a terrestrial amphibian.


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


When Luke 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, he really didn’t think he could win, did he, with only Lando to help out? (R2 was nowhere nearby, so couldn’t have tossed him his lightsaber.) Was falling into the Rancor Pit part of his 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 is quite loyal and trustworthy, was he 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 Luke needed him?


Back to the Rancor: why does it eat so much? We saw it scarf down an unfortunate dancer just a few hours earlier, 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 has no particular reason to go after Luke – certainly not hunger, anyway. This is especially true because the creature appears to be an ectotherm, given how slowly it moves. 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’s territorial and dislikes intruders in its lair, but that doesn’t explain why it tries to eat them.

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 it didn't need that hand free to clear its mouth.

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.


Jabba claimed that Luke and Company 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 has 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 will have mostly rotted by then anyway!

As Luke and his companions are being taken to the Sarlaac Pit, they pass by a herd of banthas. How does Tatooine support so many large animals, given that it seems to have almost no water, and doesn’t appear to have any plants at all? What do those banthas eat? While we’re on the subject, what does the Sarlaac eat? Something that size would require a considerable amount of food – does Jabba really provide it with enough victims to keep it going? What about “wild” sarlaacs? Are 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?


How is it that Luke’s lightsaber effortlessly slices through metal, yet doesn’t even singe the clothing of Jabba’s henchmen when Luke hits them with it?

Leia strangled Jabba – in only a few seconds’ time? I call “No Way!” If Jabba is a tidal breather like terrestrial mammals, he’d have 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 is a flow-through system like that of terrestrial birds, he’d probably have even greater oxygen reserves in his system. Either way, an animal that size should have several minutes’ worth of oxygen in his system. Leia may be strong, but it hardly seems likely that she was strong enough to crush Jabba’s trachea through all that protective blubber, and that she was stronger than he was, considering that he was trying to pull the chain off his neck – and that she could have kept up the necessary pressure for several minutes.

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



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 takes 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 be a fast learner indeed!


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


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



So, now we’re with the Rebel Fleet as they plan their attack on the Death Star. No offense to Lando, but surely the Rebels had more experienced flight leaders. Why did they choose him – whom they hardly knew – over well-known and experienced pilots like Wedge to lead the attack?


Why would the leaders of the Rebel Alliance allow Leia to go on a ground mission like that? She is an important political leader of the Rebel Alliance, and it hardly seems likely that she’d be allowed to go off on dangerous ground assignments like that. For that matter, Luke is 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.


Anyway, off to Endor. Where is Endor, anyway? It’s claimed that the “Forest Moon” is a moon of Endor, but even when we see the Rebel Fleet approaching the Forest Moon from a distance of at least thousands of kilometers away, Endor is not visible. So why do they keep referring to the Ewoks’ home as a moon?

From space, we can see that the Forest Moon has some large bodies of water, and extensive cloud formations. It doesn’t appear to have any polar icecaps, however. Its ecosystem seems reasonably plausible, particularly if the Forest Moon has little or no axial tilt, and so doesn’t have any seasons. (The graphics at the Rebel briefing showed that the Death Star “orbits” at or near the Forest Moon’s equator. Therefore, as best we could tell, 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 marked seasons and we’d expect to have seen ice caps at one or both poles, given that it’s clearly not receiving quite so much solar radiation as the Earth does – otherwise, it’d be warmer at the equator.)


So, as Luke and his companions approach the Forest Moon in their shuttle, Vader, aboard the Executor, detects Luke’s presence. Why does 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 and he would have gotten Leia as a nice bonus (a prominent leader in the Rebel Alliance, and sooner or later they’d have figured out that she’s Luke’s sister) and Han Solo (who’s presumably a wanted criminal in Imperial Space). All of this without endangering the shield generator.



Anyway, Vader let them land. Not long afterward, 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 shoot projectiles (e.g. bullets), the projectiles would be expected to follow parabolic (not flat) trajectories in a gravity field. If the guns fire plasma, the plasma would begin to expand rapidly the moment it left the gun’s barrel (this would mean that the guns would have extremely limited effective ranges).



Up until this moment, I’d been operating under the assumption that Chewbacca was an intelligent being. The fact that he trips what has to be the most obvious trap in the universe calls that into question, though.

So, after they’re captured, Luke and his companions are taken to the Ewok village, where they’re reunited with Leia, who – inexplicably – has a new change of clothes and a new hairdo. (Did the Ewoks happen to have a dress handy in her size?) Why is it that the Ewoks viewed 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 thereafter! Where did it vanish to?



Luke’s compassion for Vader is laudable, I suppose, but why should he throw away his life on the slim chance that he could turn Vader away from the Dark Side? By taking Leia’s advice and running away, he might have served a very useful purpose and distracted Vader from the coming Rebel assault. Allowing himself to be captured serves no real purpose, and can be regarded as not just foolish but immoral. He has a duty to help train Leia (who else is going to do it, if not him?) and to restore the Jedi! For that reason alone, he should not have gone on the mission.


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

The Emperor referred to the Forest Moon as the “Sanctuary Moon.” Is the moon designated a wildlife sanctuary? That’s quite interesting, since I’d not think the Empire would be so environmentally conscious. Maybe it was designated so during the time of the Republic, and the Emperor 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). The fact that C-3PO speaks Ewokese implies that the Sanctuary Moon has been surveyed at some point in the past. (It’s curious that anybody bothered to program such an obscure language into a protocol droid though.)



Okay, 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’s the case, considering that the Emperor manipulated the Rebels into attacking at a time of his choosing, you’d think they 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 are there shafts extending from the surface all the way to the reactor core that are large-enough for fighters and even the Millennium Falcon to fly through? That there are lots of twists and turns in these shafts is apparently a response to the ability of the Rebels to destroy the original by firing torpedoes down a shaft that led straight to the reactor core. So, the Imperials are at least capable of learning – to a limited extent. Especially since they expected the new DS to come under attack before it was completed, you’d expect the builders to have put baffle plates in the shafts, to ensure that neither fighters nor torpedoes could penetrate into the Death Star’s interior.


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! (Luke has killed lots of people by now, and shown not the slightest qualms about it.) There need be no anger involved – killing this ruthless tyrant would be doing the galaxy a big favor!


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 energy into one end of a lever, the lever turns around the fulcrum, and you get the same amount of energy out the other end of the lever, assuming the lever is rigid. The energy on both sides of the fulcrum is the same – the question is: how does the energy 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 energy 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 force 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 short, allowing the forelimbs to generate a lot of speed for running, but not much power. For creatures like aardvarks, the olecranon process is long, allowing them to generate lots of power for digging, but not much speed. The same joint cannot produce both high speed and high power.

Given their short arms and legs, there’s simply no way that Ewoks can generate lots of speed. So, they’re going to be relatively slow runners, and they’re not going to be able to swing their arms fast-enough to hurt somebody wearing body armour. (This assumes that their muscles are not much stronger than those of humans.) Since we can see how fast their arms and legs move in the movie, it’s abundantly clear that they’re not 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 carry, they shouldn’t be able to hurt armoured Stormtroopers!

It’s possible, if they have relatively long olecranon processes on those stubby arms, that Ewoks are quite powerful. If so, they might be able to pull the Stormtroopers’ armour off, and maybe even pull off limbs, but we never see them attempt any such things. (Besides, their arms would look quite different if they were so powerfully-built.)


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! (Assuming the Forest Moon has an atmosphere and surface gravity similar to Earth’s, which certainly seemed to be the case!)



Why do the Imperial ships have exposed bridges that can 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 suicidal A-wing pilots!


Why couldn’t the Rebel ships evade the Death Star’s superlaser? The thing apparently has to be pointed right at its target, after all. How fast can the Death Star turn to track an enemy ship?


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

Speaking of which, why do Imperial speeder bikes and walkers explode when they hit something or something hits them?


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, but they still had a large fleet available that greatly outclassed the Rebel fleet. Did the surviving Imperials turn and run? 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 portray Imperial officers as highly motivated and seemingly sure of the rightness of their cause. It seems they’d likely be motivated to avenge their leaders’ deaths and annihilate the surviving Rebel ships. Why not try to salvage a partial victory?


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. For the Ewoks, the Rebels’ victory wouldn’t 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 been aware of the consequences of the Death Star’s destruction to their world?)


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. If anything, you’d think most Imperial citizens would have found the thought of the inevitable political chaos that would follow the deaths of Vader and the Emperor to be rather unsettling. In either event, it seems highly unlikely that there’d be dancing in the streets. Most Imperial citizens (especially on Coruscant) probably regarded the Rebels as little better than terrorists.

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

Cheers,

Michael

[livius drusus]

Oh, Michael... That was just so rivetingly wonderful. You should submit your movie reviews as articles. We could have a whole Masked Man on the Movies series. :wriggle:

[Ymir's blood]

A few minor points:

but why did he throw a skull
They're cool. :skull:

Timothy Zahn explored the reason for the Imperial's abandonment of the struggle after the Emperor's death. In his stories, the Imperial military relied (unknowingly) on Palpatine's use of the force to coordinate them. While it was useful during his life, without it, the fleet was unable to continue. In the Expanded Universe timeline, the Imperials were able to regroup after the battle and continue their grip on large parts of the Galaxy.

The celebrations on the other planets were added as part of Lucas's inane special editions. Strangely enough, Lucas used several ideas of Zahn's, such as the planet of Coruscant and also Kashykk the wookie homeworld. It is a pity that he didn't keep Zahn's ideas about the Clone Wars and Jedi, as they struck me as being superior to what ended up getting used in the prequels. Lucas had some good ideas with Star Wars, but seems to have mined them out with the original concept. Left to other hands, as has often been pointed out about Empire Strikes Back, the results are much better.

I can only add my disgust for the Ewoks. :whup:

[wei yau]

It is a pity that he didn't keep Zahn's ideas about the Clone Wars and Jedi, as they struck me as being superior to what ended up getting used in the prequels.

Would you mind providing some details on Zahn's ideas about the Clone Wars and the Jedi? I'm not familiar with these ideas and am all too familiar with Lucas'...much to my regret.

[Ymir's blood]

In Zahn's Heir to the Empire trilogy, the Clone Wars were fought between The Old Republic* and a group called the Clonemasters. The Clonemasters were using cloning technology to create vast armies. However the clones went crazy a lot due to a Force link with their original.

*Not totally sure about this, as the novels were set after the movies and didn't go into great details about the war. It could have been the Empire.

Zahn's take on the Jedi didn't have all the junk about not being allowed to see their families/fall in love etc... that got added in the current films. The new way really doesn't seem to be very realistic. Repressing such things seems to me a surer path to the Dark Side, actually.

http://www.starwars.com/eu/ might have more info, but it is so slow today (due to the release of the film, most likely) that I can't get anything beyond the main page. I'm not sure if the Zahn stuff is there anymore, since so much of it doesn't fit with the new movies.

[wei yau]

Thanks for the info. Your description triggered memories of the Dark Horse Comics version of "Dark Empire", which I believe was based on Zahn's work.

I recall your description of the clones and agree that it's definitely better than what we've seen in the Prequels.