Ruminations on the Star Wars Original Trilogy
Let me say right up front that I
enjoy the
Star Wars movies. I really do. They’re lots of fun to watch, even though they don’t make much sense when you stop to think about them. Certainly, I don’t see anything wrong with mindless popcorn movies – and when it comes to mindless but fun entertainment, the
Star Wars movies immediately leap to mind. Having said that, I don’t feel there’s any contradiction between enjoying a movie and noticing that it has flaws.
When you think about it, it’s amazing that most movies are as good as they are. Movies are almost never filmed in sequence, so scenes that take place only a few seconds apart on screen might have been filmed weeks or even months apart. I would imagine this is quite disorienting for even the most talented of actors. In science-fiction movies, actors have it even worse, because so often they’re supposed to be reacting to things that will be added in by special-effects technicians months or even years later. (I remember reading an interview with Dirk Benedict of
Battlestar Galactica in which he claimed he felt like an idiot standing in front of a blue screen and pretending to be under attack by an enemy he couldn’t see.) Surely, it takes a truly talented actor to convincingly “react” to things that exist only in the imaginations of the people involved.
Fantasy and science-fiction movies typically take place in universes where the laws of physics
clearly function differently than they do in our own universe. That’s fine with me, so long as they’re
consistent about it. I’m much less forgiving of logical inconsistencies and instances of supposedly-intelligent characters behaving stupidly.
So, what am I interested in discussing here? Well, I’m not going to concern myself with such questions as “Is the acting any good?” There are plenty of others who are better-qualified to answer those questions. For the most part, I’m not going to worry too much about whether or not the physics of
Star Wars conforms with the physics of the real world either. (That said, there will inevitably be some things that just can’t be overlooked.) What I thought would be fun for this “review” would be to take a light-hearted look at how
believable the
Star Wars movies are: do they
make sense? Of course, lots of articles and books have been written that “explain” seeming inconsistencies in the
Star Wars movies; some of them are quite good. I’m not concerned with those here; what I’m interested in is whether or not the movies make sense
on their own. If you must go to outside sources to resolve seeming inconsistencies, the film-makers haven’t done their jobs properly, in my opinion.
What follows, then, is a light-hearted examination of the original
Star Wars trilogy. I hope you enjoy it!
Introduction
Linear Mode
