One of the key things to enjoying a movie is the suspension of belief. That is how they get away with huge science gaffes all the time. Armageddon is a good disaster movie with compelling characters in spite of the flawed science of its special effects. We tend to ignore fictional space ships that fly through space like planes through air, but it is harder when the ship is not supposed to be quite so fictional. Many movies get around this though bogus explanations. Lucas manages to do that quite well when needed. In TFA, Abrams didn’t even bother (or he cut key scenes that would have helped). I would assume that the First Order would be tracking their Tie Fighters and would know when they crashed. They would know where the Falcon was and immediately move to intercept. That the Falcon zooms away at sublight means it would be easy to track. And the Star Destroyer is just sitting there not giving chase. And then Han and Chewy just happenng across the ship as it randomly zooms away from Jakku… just a very hard scene make it through without thinking of everything wrong with it. Unlike Luke escaping Hot where, like the other rebel ships, zoomed passed disabled Imperial vessels and went to hyperspace immediately (Lucas frequenly forgets to show the ship in Hyperspace and has normal stars outside such as when the Falcon escapes the Death Star and the dialog even says they are in hyperspace).
The worst offender is when Starkiller fires. My science minded brain can only say “Seriously?” and leave it at that for the single worst instance of voilating physics in the entire saga. When you get taken out of a movie like that, it is hard to get back in. TFA is full of lots of great scenes, but it is marred by some of the worst offenses in story continuity and science violation in the entire saga. But not only is the science bad, but there is no explanation of what is going on. The details are completely skipped. Avoiding info dumps is a good thing in general, but providing no information is just confusing. That is something Lucas never did.
And I have great hope that TLJ will exceed the PT and TFA because Rian Johnson has a good track record, both in writing and directing. From the story leaks I’ve read about (same sources that give fairly good spoilers on TFA) it sounds like it is going to be pretty good. We will know in December. I’m hoping I can put it next to Rogue One as fourth or fifth in my ranking. The bar isn’t very high for it to be fifth. I will be very disappointed if a second ST film fails to exceed the PT in my ranking.
