by Doctor Science
The idea behind Jews going to the movies and Chinese food on Christmas Day was that these things were both open, yet mostly empty because the Christmas-celebrators were busy elsewhere. This concept has been breaking down in the past few years, and now we find that the movies are packed and we could only get a table at the good Chinese restaurant because we came at 4:00 — every table was booked and overbooked for the evening. mmmmm, Peking duck.
Like a significant subset of Everybody In The World, we’ve now seen Star Wars: The Force Awakens. I had been avoiding social media for the previous week (for fear of spoilers), but I went in knowing that my e-friends were divided into a large group of ¡Yays!, and a smaller group of Nays. The Nays all say the same thing: “The Force Awakens is too derivative in both plot and characterization.”
Spoilers within!
I’ll say upfront that I am a ¡Yay!, but my reasons for liking The Force Awakens are a lot like the Nays’ reasons for *not* liking it.
From the very beginning, Star Wars was intended to be mythic. George Lucas was influenced by the work of Joseph Campbell, on The Hero With a Thousand Faces and The Power of Myth, by Jungian archetypes and the the Eternal Return.
“The Force Awakens” even calls this out, directly. Rey says, “Luke Skywalker? I thought he was a myth.” Now, there are already arguments about what that means within the Star Wars universe, but I’m certain it’s also intentional meta: a reminder to us, the viewers, that Luke Skywalker was always a myth, that myth is the genre Star Wars is in.
The point of myth is that it is not original: it’s the same story told and re-told, over and over again. Individuals come and go, details change, but the structural core of the myth remains. From this POV, the many similar incidents, tropes, character moments, and camera angles between “The Force Awakens” and “A New Hope” aren’t boring and derivative, they’re resonant and mythic.
You can see this most clearly in the new characters. Finn, Rey, Poe, and Ben (Kylo Ren) are re-mixes of the character traits of Luke, Leia, Han, and Anakin, different combinations of the same basic pile of traits. This is both reasonable and mythically reasonable, because Ben and (I assume) Rey are actual biological re-mixes of the older characters. Sprog the Younger pointed out that Finn is the truly novel character, the one who brings something different and important to the mix: he’s an ex-Stormtrooper, someone who really understands the “other side” of the war.
Which brings me to the big, in-your-face difference in “The Force Awakens”: the faces.
This is not the story of a white boy. For some people, this isn’t a big deal; for others of us, it remakes the world. Laurie Pennie:
The part that had my heart in my teeth, though, wasn’t the part I’m not supposed to tell you about. It came a little bit later. It was when Rey, the techie scavenger girl, picks up the lightsaber to fight the bad guy as an equal.
And the music swells. The same old theme and a new kind of hero on a new kind of journey. The same old story made stunning in its sudden familiarity for every girl who ever dreamed of being more than a princess.
Rey picks up her weapon, and everything changes.
Representation matters. Even if it doesn’t hit you personally, I think everyone can understand that broadening the types of people the myth is about makes it bigger: broader, stronger, wider, deeper.
And for me, I remember that there were originally female pilots in “Return of the Jedi”, but they were all edited out. As a friend of mine says:
in a lot of ways, the new movie seems to have … the best way I can put it is that it redeemed the original trilogy for me, or maybe just made it possible for me to enjoy it wholeheartedly and uncritically again, in a way I’m not quite sure I’d be able to (anymore) if we didn’t have a new movie that is all about a female Luke and is full of nonwhite, international actors. I don’t even feel that put off by the lack of those things in the original trilogy — it is what it is — but I think the new movie made me feel really good about the whole franchise, and the direction it’s moving in. I love the old movies and I love the new movie, and the franchise as a whole is something that I feel very happy to be a fan of right now.
(Okay, I cannot lie: it literally brings tears of happiness to my eyes sometimes when I think about the fact that the leading protagonist in the current trilogy is cut from the cloth of my adolescent self-insert fantasies. I feel included in the new movies, and from the way I’ve seen fandom reacting to Rey, and to Finn and Poe, a lot of other people feel included as well, where the original movies didn’t do that.)
This is how a myth grows up.
It is, perhaps, just another case of the movies following the broader culture. At the time of the first Star Wars, the idea of women in combat roles was pretty radical.
Today, there are still a fair number of fossils who object to the idea. But most of the possible audience doesn’t find the idea of female combatants all that strange.
There are, admittedly, still people bitching (sorry!) about the women who went thru Ranger training, and are sure that the standards were lowered to get them thru. But then, there are still people who think any black who got thru college and Harvard Law School must have done so only thanks to Affirmative Action. They haven’t died out, yet, but their time is visibly passing. (And they know it. And resent it. Cf the Donald Trump campaign.)
Personally, I enjoyed the movie but I think they also missed a huge opportunity by not giving Leia a bit more of the Obi-Wan role from the original movie.
It would have made so much sense (story and character-wise) to insert a scene with Leia giving Rey a few short lessons in The Force and then telling her she needed to find Luke for proper training.
Plus it would have made the haters’ heads explode and that’s a win, too.
An informal poll of my classes last term revealed that fewer than 20% of them had ever seen the first Star Wars. The percentage was lowest amongst my international students. It’s an old movie by their standards. (Hell, so, they inform me, is The Matrix.)
I have no problem with the new series echoing and repeating large swaths of the original trilogy. This movie may seem retro and derivative to those of us who were 10 when one of the original trilogy films was brand new on the big screen, but I suspect this new one will rock the world of any current 10-year-old just fine — and especially the young women in the theater. This is really for the original trilogy’s fans’ kids — a passing of the torch. I wish it much success.
Now if only we can convince the toy industry to give up this stupid idea that all those little dolls they have been making (and euphemistically misnaming for 40 years) are for boys and get them to start making more Rey (and Black Widow) “action figures”, we’ll have a complete win.
Yeah, pretty well what everyone else said.
Though I felt some of the writing was a bit lazy, and character development somewhat lacking.
You call it myth, I call it fan service… ;^)
I’m going to copy more or less what I said over on Slate Star Codex. I don’t think it’s accurate to say that the problems with The Force Awakens are that it copies the original Star Wars. If we regard copying the original as neutral, The Force Awakens still has a bunch of real problems that the original doesn’t. The copying the original is mostly a problem when it does it in a way that doesn’t properly integrate with the rest of the plot or is done sloppily compared to the original. In some cases (especially given that it was copying the original already) it would have been made better by copying the original more closely. (General Hux, for instance, is a poor substitute for Governor Tarkin.)
I think these two reviews, that go into the actual problems with the movie, are pretty good. I mentioned some of my own problems with the movie on my own blog, but let me repeat them here more briefly:
1. The unclear political situation that everyone comments on, so that you have to look up separately what was actually going on. Yes, it was unclear in the original too — but the key parts you needed to understand were clear. Here, they weren’t.
2. The brushing over of gur qrfgehpgvba bs gur Ubfavna flfgrz. For such a big event, surprisingly little of a big deal was made of it. Contrast how the original treats gur qrfgehpgvba bs Nyqrenna — na hacerprqragrq ngebpvgl. It’s not brushed over and it’s integrated into the rest of the plot. This should be a much bigger event, but the movie just kind of brushes it over.
3. Why do we care about finding Luke? Because the movie says so, apparently.
The brushing over of gur qrfgehpgvba bs gur Ubfavna flfgrz. For such a big event, surprisingly little of a big deal was made of it. Contrast how the original treats gur qrfgehpgvba bs Nyqrenna — na hacerprqragrq ngebpvgl…
?
Wookie… or a Klingon subplot I missed ?
🙂
to integrate something from a different thread…
why does so much criticism sound like the product of someone looking for things to be mad about?
An interesting question.
The (un)reasonableness of this depends on the context, I think.
For example, having spent a significant amount of money and time to see a severely disappointing recent production of Henry IV, with the great Anthony Sher delivering a dreadfully misconceived performance as Falstaff, a mixture of disappointment and anger didn’t feel entirely unjustified (particularly as said production had received mostly rave reviews)…
I guess for those to whom the series has some significance, having the expectation of several years, if not decades, dashed by a substandard Star Wars remake is fair grounds for something more than mild irritation ?
I need to see it again before I fully form an opinion, but I thought the movie was good, maybe close to great. It will, of course, never reach the pinnacle in my mind that the original did, as I’m now 10 times older (gulp).
I agree with some of the problems pointed out above, although I thought the reason to find Luke was that the First Order wanted to find him and kill him as the last of the Jedi – e.g., to finish what Vader started in exterminating them.
Agreed that the political situation was entirely unclear. What book(s) do I need to read to catch up?
Overall, I thought the movie would have been better with an additional 5-10 minutes of emotion/reactions/character development. I mean, how about a little more mourning for Han? And I didn’t buy the whole Finn/Poe are inseparable BFFs and then Finn/Rey are too – little emotional development between them would have helped immensely I think.
But it was good fun, and the ending holds out something entirely new for the next two movies (which fortunately we only have to wait under three years to see instead of 6) with different directors – maybe we’ll see an Empire Strikes Back-type change from this one.
I was also surprised at how much of an emotional impact the musical score had on me when hitting old themes at particular points.
Finally, I thought Daisy Ridley was fantastic.
dashed by a substandard Star Wars
but this was a perfectly standard Star Wars. and if you admit the existence of the prequels, TFA is an above average Star Wars.
Overall, I thought the movie would have been better with an additional 5-10 minutes of emotion/reactions/character development.
i think so, too. but it was already over two hours. and i assume they probably cut out a lot of non-explodey stuff in order to squeeze in more explodey stuff.
maybe it’ll turn up in the special director’s cut bonus footage?! we’ll see.
Majorly second Nigel on his query re “gur qrfgehpgvba bs gur Ubfavna flfgrz” WTF?
I have to admit I was disappointed, probably mostly in agreement with Ugh’s
particularly with Leia – her part seemed superficial and negligible to a really weird extent. But then, maybe we have invested this story and universe with way too much depth and significance over the years? The mythic/Campbell-type aspects allowed us to do it, but Lucas proved with the prequels that he had no idea what he had really tapped into, didn’t he?
Anyway, apart from these misgivings, I do agree with Doc Science about the inclusivity aspect, and I will certainly go to see the follow-ups, so I guess I’m still hoping for more and better…
Majorly second Nigel on his query re “gur qrfgehpgvba bs gur Ubfavna flfgrz” WTF?
it’s Rot13’d.
http://www.rot13.com/
Ah Cleek, once more you save the day. Received and (amazingly!) understood. Thanks.
I think I can place some of the blame on lack of emotion/character development of the need to blend the old with the new. Maybe just not enough time to develop the Poe/Finn and Finn/Rey relationship when you have to fit in Han, Leia, Chewbacca, and cameos from R2D2 and C3PO.
Aha, all becomes clear:
ROT13 is used in online forums as a means of hiding spoilers, punchlines, puzzle solutions, and offensive materials from the casual glance…
I’m officially old.
🙂
WRT the fan criticisms of Ren and Hux, I believe part of what’s going on here is that they are intentionally playing up the fact that so much of the Old Guard has died in the interim, leaving the young with a heavy burden of legacy. The galaxy lost a big chunk of a generation and the Empire, especially, lost its senior command staff. It’s like what Napoleon faced, having to raise an army from nothing after getting his previous expeditionary forces in 1812. IIRC, In order to fight the Sixth Coalition Napoleon was forced to graduate an entire class of the Ecole Militaire a year early just to make up the numbers he needed to fight against Germany for the preservation of his Empire. It seems The First Order is facing a similar situation, but absent their Napoleon.
I’m officially old.
rot13 has been around forever. it was well-established on Usenet long before the WWW was born.
(and since it’s just a Caeser cipher, it’s actually been around for millennia)
Another type of criticism I’ve been seeing is the “Rey is a Mary Sue” line, which is partly just sexist criticism of any competent female character as a Mary Sue, but partly a recognition that she does seem high-powered and hypercompetent relative to Luke Skywalker or even the young Anakin Skywalker in the prequels.
It doesn’t bother me so much; I’ve been assuming that her extraordinary level of untrained Force ability has story significance that we haven’t learned yet, and the technical/piloting competence is probably some combination of that and her having learned to survive on her own in a hostile environment without adult supervision. The original movie had us believe that Luke could transition seamlessly from flying the in-universe equivalent of a Piper Cub to being a master space fighter pilot.
Concerning the derivative plot, I think I understand why Abrams did this: for this first movie, at least, he needed to demonstrate to viewers (and not just hardcore Star Wars fans who read the tie-in novels, but general audiences who just liked the original movies) that he understood what they liked about Star Wars and wasn’t going to screw it up. So he played it very, very safe.
It does play as a little weird if you’ve been watching the old movies on video, just because Return of the Jedi was already something of a rehash of major elements of Star Wars to begin with. So if you watch episodes 4, 5, 6 and 7 back to back, you now have three episodes out of four that are sort of telling the same story. (Though TFA does have a teeny bit of The Empire Strikes Back mixed into it as well.)
I have to hand it to the prequels: for all their faults, they’re not telling that same story; they’re doing something different. I suppose there’s sort of a Muppet Babies variant of it folded into The Phantom Menace, but it’s only one thread.
It’s OK, though; I figure Episode 8 might break some new ground, now that the major characters have been introduced and the audience reassured that they’re in good hands.
The original movie had us believe that Luke could transition seamlessly from flying the in-universe equivalent of a Piper Cub to being a master space fighter pilot.
Luke had experience piloting (blasting womp rats!) in a T-16. those are the cool three-winged things you often see shuttling people around. according to wookieepedia, the T-16 and the X-wing had similar controls since they were made by the same company. so, it’s like an equipment upgrade, not a totally new skill set.
bulls-eyeing womp rats no less.
The transition from Piper Cub to a fighter was not quite as unbelievable in 1977 as it us now. It was only 32 years since the end of WWII. During that war, many pilots made their first combat flight only a few months after their first school flight. Some even survived. People with previous flight training might transition from low-powered civilian planes to combat missions with fighters only after a couple of weeks’ training. These were still part of the popular memory.
Having a rookie flying a fighter was much more believable then as it is now, after we’ve been conscious for decades that being a fighter pilot requires a years of training.
Let’s not forget Luke’s abilities using the Force and the Rebels letting him fly an X-wing as a kind of “thank you” for rescuing Leia. He also had Biggs to vouch for him.
Yeah, Luke’s ability to fly an X-wing fighter was the credulity-straining aspect of Star Wars. Otherwise, no suspension of disbelief required.
Huh. My credulity was outraged by bank-to-turn maneuvering in a vacuum.
Or was it the TIE fighters with solar panels that could have provided all of, oh, a few kilowatts of power?
Or was it the fact that things made noise in a vacuum?
Or was it the fact that you could block a stroke from a light saber with another light saber?
Or was it the fact that these light-saber duellists persisted in hitting each other on the blade rather than on the handle?
Or was it that no one ever switched their opponents’ weapon off with the Force?
So many things to choose from.
I don’t remember any vacuums in Star Wars. Maybe a broom or two…
Or was it the fact that things made noise in a vacuum?
for this kind of thing, i always pretend that there’s a camera of some kind out there recording the action. and this camera picks up pressure waves or EMF radiation from whatever’s flying past on a cheap AM radio receiver and a little piezo mic attached to its outer casing – and that’s what we hear.
I always wondered why an orchestra seemed to be following everyone around.
Or was it the TIE fighters with solar panels that could have provided all of, oh, a few kilowatts of power?
Those are solar panels?
Or was it the fact that things made noise in a vacuum?
Wouldn’t you hear the noise if you were inside the spaceship?
Or was it the fact that you could block a stroke from a light saber with another light saber?
Why not?
Or was it the fact that these light-saber duellists persisted in hitting each other on the blade rather than on the handle?
Gotta deal with the other person’s handling of the Force man.
Or was it that no one ever switched their opponents’ weapon off with the Force?
Ditto.
I’ve heard that fine motor control tends to go in a fight, which is why simple moves are better ( I’ve only done a little Tai Chi and wouldn’t know). Probably works this way with the Force– you can toss people and even fighter planes around, but nobody seems to use the Force to peck at a keyboard.
Or that’s how I’d rationalize it.
Those are solar panels?
yep.
solar panels from a long long time ago, which are able to capture energy from starlight! 1977 was super-optimistic about solar panels, i guess.
i think some have tried to retroactively designate them as thrusters of some kind. that makes more sense, IMO.
The droids were way too emotional.
I don’t remember any vacuums in Star Wars. Maybe a broom or two…
Slarti was probably confusing it with Space Balls.
The droids were way too emotional.
Even as a youth, the scene in RotJ where there’s a droid being tortured struck me as silly.
Having a rookie flying a fighter was much more believable then as it is now, after we’ve been conscious for decades that being a fighter pilot requires a years of training.
On the other hand, there is no reason not to think that a lot of the stuff that requires years of training to master won’t be automated in the future. I mean, if you have the technology for autonomous droids, why not use it in a spacecraft? Why would a pilot need to do more than steer and fire?
In some ways, flying a small private plane to day takes more work than an airliner (in-flight emergencies aside). Simply because it doesn’t have the automation that the big jets do.
My credulity was outraged by bank-to-turn maneuvering in a vacuum.
It’s more natural for the pilots.
Where would the noise be coming from? Certainly not from outside, because it’s vacuum, and there’s nothing to form pressure waves.
Because it’s electromagnetic radiation, not matter. Come to think of it, just try to get any kind of light-emitting device to emit a finite-length beam of apparently uniform intensity. I actually thought about this a long time in frequency analysis class before I gave it up as a lost cause.
It’s possible that the energy density is so huge that it warps spacetime locally in odd ways, and that’s what has them not intersect. But that’d be a lot more energy than you could generate in the hilt, given that it takes a kilometers-wide battle source of power to generate only enough energy to explode a planet.
“My credulity was outraged by bank-to-turn maneuvering in a vacuum.”
It’s more natural for the pilots.
Just to expand on Ugh’s comment. Maybe you a) have artificial gravity, and b) it is available for very small craft. But if not, when you turn interia kicks in: Any time you turn, the pilot’s body attempts to continue the way it was going.
It’s just like what happens if you turn your car while going fast. By banking, you keep the pressure from inertia directed down relative to the pilot (i.e. towards his seat). Which makes it easier to concentrate on flying.
Where would the noise be coming from? Certainly not from outside, because it’s vacuum, and there’s nothing to form pressure waves.
Inside?
Because it’s electromagnetic radiation, not matter. Come to think of it, just try to get any kind of light-emitting device to emit a finite-length beam of apparently uniform intensity. I actually thought about this a long time in frequency analysis class before I gave it up as a lost cause.
I always thought of this as there being a telescoping mechanism that you can’t see (because of the light!) that generates the blade. Maybe you need two and the blade is between the two. Then it’s the (super strong) mechanisms that crash.
More broadly – you’re ruining it! Harumph. 🙂
Also, too, it only needs to be believable enough to convince a 10 year old boy, which is, apparently, also the approach of the GOP Presidential Candidates.
Even as a youth,
the scene inRotJwhere there’s a droid being torturedstruck me as silly.The “special” editions only reinforced that impression.
A few months after the original Star Wars movie came out, I read an article in some dead-tree magazine that argued for the moral superiority of The Empire over the Jedi order. The Empire, claimed the article, was a meritocracy while the Jedi were a hereditary nobility. (This was back in the dark ages, so no hope of a link.) What I’d like to know is: are the Jedi remote descendants of the Bundy clan?
–TP
The light sabre is clearly a quantum plasma composed of magnetic monopoles stabilized by a self-induced photonic singularity. Why this isn’t obvious to anyone with even a rudimentary grasp of physics, I don’t know.
there’s nothing to form pressure waves.
explosions would work perfectly well as pressure waves because you can assume they contain a significant amount of expanding gas. listening to it would be the simple matter of getting the microphone into the gas ball before it dissipates enough. likewise, any gas emitted as exhaust or rocket exhaust from a passing ship will work to carry sound – just gotta get the microphone in there!
but really, we don’t even need a medium. we can just ‘listen’ to the vibrations of any nearby object using reflected light
Tony P, this one maybe:
http://www.weeklystandard.com/article/2540
?
If an X-wing fighter crashes in the woods where no one can hear it, does it make a sound?
cleek,
The google-fu is strong in you. That could well be the article I very dimly remember. I was fairly sure I had read it last millennium, but you have reminded me that at one point in the more recent past, and for reasons I can no longer remember, I had a subscription to Kristol’s rag. Gack.
hairshirt,
You’re on a roll, kid. And I do remember playing with photonic singularities in 10th grade. I swear I do.
–TP
Does it not depend on where the thrusters are in the X-Wing? If they are steered in polar coordinates (only using the pitch and roll axis, not the yaw axis) they would have to bank in order to turn vacuum or not. It has been some time since I watched any Star Wars movie but the TIE fighters seem to steer cartesian, i.e. turning round the yaw axis.
I enjoyed the new movie, but I have to admit “suspension of disbelief” is getting harder to maintain, especially regarding the technology.
The narrative isn’t about that, though, it’s more about a seriously dysfunctional family.
Keeping up with the Skywalkers.
BB8 is real, tho.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ABzjUf3E_0c
In space, there’s no air to exert force on the fighter, so what you would do is: rotate your craft so that your axial thrusters point opposite the direction you want to accelerate in, and thrust. If you don’t do that, you need to have another set of thrusters pointed perpendicular to your trajectory. Then you’d just slave spacecraft attitude control so that it defaults to aligning x-axis to the velocity vector.
But if you did that, you couldn’t just turn and shoot the guy that’s on your tail. But you could just have guns that fire backward to solve that problem, right?
But that would make the dogfight thing a bit less familiar. I played X-Wing for many hours. It’d be really a really odd experience without bank-to-turn.
I think that all happens fairly quickly. If you’re watching from kilometers away, the pressure wave is probably going to be extremely attenuated by the time it gets to you.
Actually predicting what that’s going to be like is a very difficult problem that defeated me about 15 years ago. Different context. We had a working model that matched observed phenomena reasonably well, but it took FOREVER to run. I was not successful in coming up with something better and more efficient.
If you’re watching from kilometers away, the pressure wave is probably going to be extremely attenuated by the time it gets to you.
i think we have to assume that microphone technology has advanced along with space travel technology.
Ah, memories. 2D space war and asteroids. Rotate, thrust, shoot, and hyperspace jump. The last was dangerous, sometimes you reappeared in a star.
So, you think a microphone on the inside of a spacecraft is going to record the few atoms that manage to smack into the skin of the craft, seconds or minutes later, at or more than the volume of conversation inside the craft?
I think you and I are talking about two different things, maybe.
The explosions are added by the Foley artist in post-production. There’s this guy who can make sounds just like a battle.
we’re talking about a universe where AI has utterly defeated the Turing test, where interplanetary FTL is commonplace, where an uncountable number of intelligent species across uncountable planets have managed to organize themselves into stable governments, and where a possibly-supernatural force can be use by the brains of myriad creatures to control minds and physical objects at a distance.
i think we can assume they’ve made some improvements to sound-recording technology.
the volume of conversation inside the craft
nobody is talking inside the cameras. they’re droids.
By the way, I just watched Top Hat (1935) and got to wondering about the synchronization of the sound of the taps (amazingly accurate!).
Then I watched the special features. Fred Astaire dubbed in his own dances. Ginger Rogers’ were done by Hermes Pan.
I’m just going to let this one drop. It’s clear that this was not the point I was looking for.
From engineering point of view, audible sounds inside the cockpit are a pretty good way of interpreting sensor data. The sound does not need to be an actual sound taking place outside the craft. It could quite as well be a magnetic field sensor or something like that interpreted as a 3D sound.
This is not really as farfetched as it may sound. I’ve used a military individual combat simulator which interprets close misses as a sound of flying bullets in your headphones, and gives you a stereophonic sound of a simulated artillery strike. (The system consists of real guns with laser pointers that “fire” when you fire a dud bullet, and prism systems that you wear on your body. The arty fire is placed by the trainer, and hit probabilities calculated based on your coordinates and position.) Makes you duck pretty effectively, and requires no additional training for interpreting. There is no reason why you would not utilize the pilot’s hearing as a part of a human-machine interface.
I always thought the David Brin criticism was interesting
http://www.salon.com/1999/06/15/brin_main/
Thanks lurker, very thought provoking. Makes me wonder what other sensory feedback systems might be useful (say haptic feedback in steering for example).
I imagine the designers of real equipment think about such things these days.
All sorts of cars have fake engine noise built into them these days, you have to expect that Sienar Fleet Systems resorted to the same sort of thing when selling their design to the (quite fashion conscious) Galactic Empire.
“Just listen to the roar of those P-S3 twin ion engines, Grand Moff. YOu can’t fake that sort of power.”
From lj’s link to a 1999 Salon article:
No wonder George Lucas publicly yearns for the pomp of mighty kings over the drab accountability of presidents. Many share his belief that things might be a whole lot more vivid without all the endless, dreary argument and negotiating that make up such a large part of modern life.
If only someone would take command. A leader.
Hmmm … what does this remind me of from our current times?
The fake engine noise annoys me to a large degree, too.
At least I have some modicum of consistency going for me.
Stay away from IP telephony systems, Slart. All manner of faux legacy noises are generated.
I always wondered why an orchestra seemed to be following everyone around.
Hey, it’s a gig.
I’ve done some IP telephony, but never from a place with decent bandwidth. Which is, for the foreseeable future, anywhere but where I live.
The original was definitely more fun at the time because…
We were all younger;
More emphasis on the sword & sorcery theme;
The special effects were way more interesting compared to what was then current;
The seventies technology which seems to persist in the new film didn’t look quite as incongruous in the 70s;
Character development doesn’t seem to have occurred to the writers…
The competition does a lot of this better (to take a semi random example, Guardians of the Galaxy…)
Oh, and one more thing, why are the Imperial troops so rubbish ?
FTL travel, and yet a decent squad of 20thC marines could take them out without breaking sweat.
And the only utility of their face masks is now revealed as …. keeping the dust out, and making them sweat profusely.
Or elsee the facemasks are to keep them from being personally embarrassed at how poorly they fight….
Say what you want about the Empire but they paid their fashion designers well.
why are the Imperial troops so rubbish ?
their comfy union jobs give them no incentive to achieve!
Plus common infantry is expendable scum. Why should one waste money on proper training when one could buy more hardware instead?
In hindsight the Empire would have always been better off by not sending infantry in but blasting sites from orbit indiscriminately.
But if you want to sieze and hold gournd (rather than just level it), you gotta have ground pounders to do it.
It’s not really worth it, if one looks at it from a distance. First level. Then level again. Then occupy, at the earliest.
Well, the real benefit to China of occupying Tibet isn’t obvious either. Which didn’t keep them from doing so.
My point being that this kind of decision is often taken on a less that totally rational basis.