The Force should go back to sleep permanently

[Lexicus]

I'm just mad that the original Clone Wars cartoon is no longer canon. You know, that series of animated shorts that came out right before Revenge of the Sith and was designed specifically to be a tie-in to that movie? Yeah, Disney says that's not canon anymore.

That's one of my favorite Star Wars things ever. Disney can't take it away from me. They also claim the Yuuzhan Vong stuff isn't canon anymore. They'll take the canonical status of my Extended Universe novels from my cold dead hands.

 

[mrt144]

whoops

 

[Lexicus]

Also just for the sake of being edgy I like Episode I the best out of all the prequels, and I like Episode I better than Episode VII.

 

[Bugfatty300]

Well, that can all be explained away by improving technology. It only makes sense that navigational systems would become more sophisticated over time (especially since space travel is so important). So perhaps by the time of TFA, space travel IS just like a short drive across town because navigational computers have become good enough to do all those calculations precisely and safely with minimal input from the crew.

The technology in stars wars seems pretty s static. Moore's Law was probably maxed out in the Star Wars galaxy millions of years before the movies take place. There's only so many elements and atomic states, so non-magical metulrgy and composites were likely maxed out in the Star Wars galaxy a long, long, time ago as well.

R2-D2 and 3CP0 are the equivalent of our junkier smartphones but they have literally been used for generations. They're no better or worse than a shiny new one. The Milinium Falcon was something like a century old by the time A New Hope takes place. It doesn't seem any more or less capable than ships that were around thousands of years ago in the Old Republic

So if today were were still driving wooden sailing ships instead of cars and jets and stocking them with sextants and mechanical clocks instead of GPS devices, I wouldn't expect much of a ugrade in our life time.

 

[Traitorfish]

There's technology and there's economic development, though. Even if tech plateaus, how far and how much of it people have access to can change over time. Part of the reason we see a lot of junky old tech is because the films tend to linger on the periphery of galactic society, which generally seem to be one gigantic frontier-slash-rust belt. For these regions, the stagnation is economic as much as technological.

 

[Manfred Belheim]

However, you know that Star Wars is a franchise with more than big screen movies. There are comics, shows, and books. It seems illogical to scratch your head when something isn't crystal-clearly described on the movie screen when you know that supplemental information is provided elsewhere.

No no, sorry, but no. I shouldn't be expected to read (and of course buy) a bunch of novels and comics in order to understand what's going on in a big, blockbuster film. Don't make excuses for poor storytelling. That stuff should only ever be supplementary, especially as about 90% of it isn't even "canon" anyway.

 

[Synobun]

No no, sorry, but no. I shouldn't be expected to read (and of course buy) a bunch of novels and comics in order to understand what's going on in a big, blockbuster film. Don't make excuses for poor storytelling. That stuff should only ever be supplementary, especially as about 90% of it isn't even "canon" anyway.

? All of the material published since Disney's acquisition is canon. You're not expected to read anything. You are, however, complaining about lack of nuance when said nuance is available to you should you seek it out.

 

[Manfred Belheim]

No, I'm complaining about it barely making any sense. That's not the same thing as a lack of nuance.

 

[Synobun]

No, I'm complaining about it barely making any sense. That's not the same thing as a lack of nuance.

Makes sense to me. *shrugs* It's likely my simpleton nature at play.

 

[Commodore]

No no, sorry, but no. I shouldn't be expected to read (and of course buy) a bunch of novels and comics in order to understand what's going on in a big, blockbuster film. Don't make excuses for poor storytelling. That stuff should only ever be supplementary, especially as about 90% of it isn't even "canon" anyway.

? All of the material published since Disney's acquisition is canon. You're not expected to read anything. You are, however, complaining about lack of nuance when said nuance is available to you should you seek it out.

I kinda agree with both of these statements. I agree with Manfred that a franchise's main medium for its storytelling shouldn't assume that the audience has read/watched/played any supplementary material. It's one of the things that really keeps me from getting in to the Halo series. The games and setting seem cool, but all the games made after the first one tell their story in a way that assumes you read all the novels and watched all the animated movies so I'm left not knowing what the hell is going on most of the time.

I agree with Vincour though that the information is there if you really do want a better understanding of what's going on. And if you don't want to drop money on all the supplementary material, then just go to the related wiki or any fan forum and read the discussions there. Wikis and forums are like the Cliff Notes version of just about every fictional universe out there and will give you a workable level of understanding relatively quickly.

 

[Lexicus]

I kinda agree with both of these statements. I agree with Manfred that a franchise's main medium for its storytelling shouldn't assume that the audience has read/watched/played any supplementary material. It's one of the things that really keeps me from getting in to the Halo series. The games and setting seem cool, but all the games made after the first one tell their story in a way that assumes you read all the novels and watched all the animated movies so I'm left not knowing what the hell is going on most of the time.

The thing about the Halo games, at least up to Reach (for me) was that the gameplay was enough. You didn't need to make sense of the plot to see that you were playing an awesome, really fun game. Halo 1 is an awesome game that probably, along with Star Wars, sparked my interest in science fiction as a whole (this btw is how seriously you should take my griping in the other thread- one of my favorite games of all time is a console game!).

 

[Manfred Belheim]

I kinda agree with both of these statements. I agree with Manfred that a franchise's main medium for its storytelling shouldn't assume that the audience has read/watched/played any supplementary material. It's one of the things that really keeps me from getting in to the Halo series. The games and setting seem cool, but all the games made after the first one tell their story in a way that assumes you read all the novels and watched all the animated movies so I'm left not knowing what the hell is going on most of the time.

I agree with Vincour though that the information is there if you really do want a better understanding of what's going on. And if you don't want to drop money on all the supplementary material, then just go to the related wiki or any fan forum and read the discussions there. Wikis and forums are like the Cliff Notes version of just about every fictional universe out there and will give you a workable level of understanding relatively quickly.

Well I would agree with it if it really was just supplementary information to give you a "better" understanding, but there really does have to be an acceptable baseline of understanding without it. The only example I can think of with any of the first 6 films where I felt I was actually missing out on something was between episodes 2 and 3. When watching episode 3 my reaction was "oh... so they've just skipped the entire Clone Wars, that's a bit crap. And who/what the hell is General Grievous?". But even then it didn't feel like stuff you really NEEDED to see or know to follow what was, essentially, a personal story about Anakin Skywalker.

But the Force Awakens literally makes no sense. The last thing we saw was the destruction of the mighty Empire by the small Rebellion. And now it's just... exactly the same except they've given them new names. So despite being the losers the "Empire" are seemingly more powerful than ever, while the "Rebellion" are even less powerful than ever. And really all it would have taken would have been a few lines of dialogue to at least acknowledge that weirdness. It wouldn't have been necessary to even explain it, just enough to say to the audience "don't worry, it's meant to be weird, just stuck with it and it'll make sense" or something like that.

But like I said, I'd have to watch it again to be sure I didn't miss anything like that.

 

[Lexicus]

It's definitely a weakness of the film that the Republic shows up on screen for about forty seconds, when it's having its bacon fried by Starkiller base.

 

[aelf]

Bingo! This goes back to the Bloodline novel, and its key context (missing) from the film. The Republic is really tired of war. Leia and The Resistance basically want to meet the First Order head on and stop it, but nobody in the Republic wants to commit the troops and go through the human toll full on war requires given what they just came out of, so they sort of turn a blind eye and hope it goes away while also allowing Leia and her faction's Resistance to exist without explicitly condemning it or supporting it.

Well, yes, that might explain why the New Republic didn't pay much attention to the First Order... if they weren't constructing a massive superweapon capable of wiping out an entire star system at once. The scale of such a project is so mindbogglingly large, that it's impossible for it to go undetected (its footprint, so to speak, would be much, much larger than the fact that the physical weapon is just one planet in a galaxy). And once it's known, it would be extremely implausible for anyone to ignore the weapon. To borrow the North Korea analogy, it would be like if North Korea was known to be constructing a super-MIRV that could destroy multiple American cities, which could not be countered once launched and could be used more than once.

At least the Expanded Universe created the contrivance of the Maw to handwave such an outlandish notion away - and the fact that it did so tells us that the Star Wars universe wasn't always so willing to blithely ignore realism to such a degree. Actually, I think it's still possible to go with the debut of Starkiller base as it is if they had actually indicated that few people in the New Republic believed it would work. That wouldn't even have been that difficult to set up, but the writers didn't think of that?

Not that this problem broke the entire movie, but it really doesn't currently make any sense.

 

[Synobun]

Well, yes, that might explain why the New Republic didn't pay much attention to the First Order... if they weren't constructing a massive superweapon capable of wiping out an entire star system at once. The scale of such a project is so mindbogglingly large, that it's impossible for it to go undetected (its footprint, so to speak, would be much, much larger than the fact that the physical weapon is just one planet in a galaxy). And once it's known, it would be extremely implausible for anyone to ignore the weapon. To borrow the North Korea analogy, it would be like if North Korea was known to be constructing a super-MIRV that could destroy multiple American cities, which could not be countered once launched and could be used more than once.

At least the Expanded Universe created the contrivance of the Maw to handwave such an outlandish notion away - and the fact that it did so tells us that the Star Wars universe wasn't always so willing to blithely ignore realism to such a degree. Actually, I think it's still possible to go with the debut of Starkiller base as it is if they had actually indicated that few people in the New Republic believed it would work. That wouldn't even have been that difficult to set up, but the writers didn't think of that?

Not that this problem broke the entire movie, but it really doesn't currently make any sense.

Why is the assumption being made that people knew about Starkiller Base? Where is everyone getting this from?

If you need a reason for why people didn't know about it, do note that the base was constructed in the Unknown Regions, a section of the galaxy that is rarely traversed by the more commonfolk and is ripe with dangers.

 

[aelf]

There isn't an assumption. I had already explained earlier in the thread that such a project is too massive to go undetected. You don't conjure up a planet-sized weapon from nowhere. You need materials, money, capital and labour to construct it - the flow of which would be detectable. It would take the GDP and production capacity of entire systems to execute, and even if the New Republic was stupid enough not to have a functional intelligence network, there would still inevitably be information leaking out in the decades that it presumably took to construct such a weapon, with the massive amounts of money, materials and people involved in it and moving around. And all this also implies that the Unknown Regions is not such a god-forsaken piece of galactic territory that supply chains and trade routes leading into it couldn't support the construction of the galaxy's biggest weapons project ever in the last few centuries, if not millennia.

It would be more believable if the First Order was in the position of the Empire (i.e. a nigh undisputed hegemon), but even for the Empire info on the Death Star leaked before it could be completed. Assuming that the First Order could plausibly keep it a total secret is at the level of believing that 9/11 was a false flag operation that was successfully covered up by the American government.

 

[warpus]

But the Force Awakens literally makes no sense. The last thing we saw was the destruction of the mighty Empire by the small Rebellion. And now it's just... exactly the same except they've given them new names. So despite being the losers the "Empire" are seemingly more powerful than ever, while the "Rebellion" are even less powerful than ever. And really all it would have taken would have been a few lines of dialogue to at least acknowledge that weirdness. It wouldn't have been necessary to even explain it, just enough to say to the audience "don't worry, it's meant to be weird, just stuck with it and it'll make sense" or something like that.

What if you imagine when the movie starts it says "30 years later..." or something like that?

It's not supposed to be a linear continuation of the story, it seemed to be clear (to me, when watching TFA) that this was a story that takes place a couple decades later, and that many things have happened since then, that we'll have to figure out as we watch the movie and its sequels.

 

[Manfred Belheim]

What if you imagine when the movie starts it says "30 years later..." or something like that?

It's not supposed to be a linear continuation of the story, it seemed to be clear (to me, when watching TFA) that this was a story that takes place a couple decades later, and that many things have happened since then, that we'll have to figure out as we watch the movie and its sequels.

It's a matter of presentation. Like I said, they wouldn't have needed to actually explain any of the political situation at all, so long as they'd written it in a way which makes it clear to the audience that you don't need to understand it all up front and it will be explained later (like I already said). But it's not presented in that sort of way, the tone of the film is as if it should all just make sense. Obviously you can jump around in time when telling a story, tell things in reverse or skip decades and fill in the blanks later, but ultimately you have to remember that you're crafting a story for a reader/viewer who is seeing things in the order you present them and you have to make it work for them. I got no sense that a) the political situation would be explained better as the story unfolded, or that b) how things got to the state they are in is actually a mystery or some sort of hook to keep you watching. I DID get that sense with the whole mystery of Kylo Ren's backstory, or what happened with Luke, but the actual political situation just seemed like no-one cared out it at all.

 

[warpus]

None of that needs to be explained though. The setting is what it is, and a bunch of time has passed. The movie is about the events as they're unfolding to the characters 30 years in the future (or whenever), and the stuff that happened in between the movies isn't of great importance. It's up to you to wonder about the political situation and how it came to be. I mean, this isn't a historical documentary, not everything is going to be presented to us in a year by year format.

Isn't it a pretty common movie making approach to throw the viewer into a slightly unfamiliar setting and let him/her try to figure out the details as the characters make their way through the world on screen? Wouldn't it be boring if it was somehow explained to us exactly how the situation came to be? I mean, a couple decades, that's a lot of political intrigue, stuff happening, people dying, drama, battles, etc. that we would need to be filled in on. If it's not important to the plot, why bother making the movie an hour longer than necessary? Just throw the user into a slightly unfamiliar setting and let him/her figure it out. And some things will remain a mystery.

That's fairly standard movie making methodology, isn't it? Especially since we know that there are going to be a lot of sequels that are going to be filling us in on some of the unanswered questions? I think it'd be boring if we found out about everything step by step in a linear fashion and weren't left with any mysteries once we got to the meat of the story.

 

[Manfred Belheim]

None of that needs to be explained though. The setting is what it is, and a bunch of time has passed. The movie is about the events as they're unfolding to the characters 30 years in the future (or whenever), and the stuff that happened in between the movies isn't of great importance. It's up to you to wonder about the political situation and how it came to be. I mean, this isn't a historical documentary, not everything is going to be presented to us in a year by year format.

In light of the bolded comment I can only presume you didn't actually read what I said. So... never mind I guess.