From the article, talking about the ‘fans’:
They never call it “bad logic” when it’s something they like.
Or when it’s something that makes them feel good. This reveals everything. Because there are plenty of things I find objectionable in a given film and could apply a logic argument to, but I don’t. Because that’s not the point of storytelling, nor why I’d really find the given issue to be objectionable. It’s all about how characters grow, change and are in conflict in one another.
I feel like a creator should always have the intended audience in mind, so as best to know when they can get away with narrative cheats. For example, if the audience is invested in a familiarly textured story, such as the first third of TFA, you can have one coincidence after another and the audience will buy it because they want to be immersed in this world.
However, if you’re giving the audience something new, something difficult and perhaps uncomfortable to deal with, you want to make sure that your story logic is absolutely sound because the audience will be closely examining the rules of the world to make sure that the movie still ‘works’ for them.
In regards to TLJ, he’s saying there’s no bad logic in the first place, just people projecting it onto situations they don’t personally like. Are you just saying they needed to go the extra mile to make the logic of everything clear? Just seems like unnecessary hand holding to me, and I’m sure you’d still get people criticizing that aspect of the film anyway.
In general, I agree with him. Criticisms about logic and plot holes are some of the basest anyone could come up with. Rarely do they have much to deal with what’s actually important about the movie’s story. Most movies are not logic puzzles, Star Wars especially.
I said that the logic of the scene should be sound, not necessarily hand-holdingly clear. To use Hulk’s example of Holdo not telling Poe the plan, consider the scene where Poe learns that the escape pods are being fueled. He shouts about how they’re simply abandoning ship with no other recourse, and accuses Holdo of cowardice and treason.
Now a competent commander could do at least two things in this situation to solve the problem:
1: Lock Poe in the brig for insubordination. This is the logical choice for someone following a strict military hierarchy, and would have still allowed for him to escape from the brig and stage a mutiny, now with even more drama than before.
2: Tell Poe that there is a plan beyond simply abandoning ship. This would make sense under a Leia-style informal hierarchy, and no more sensitive information would be compromised. After all, he already knows about the cloaked escape craft, dooming the Resistance if he were to blab about it. Holdo also professes to like him somehow, even after his mutiny. So why not clue him in?
Holdo does neither of these things, and knowing she has an insubordinate and potentially mutinous captain on board, she takes no action to ameliorate the situation. To be clear, Poe is in the wrong. But Holdo’s logic is shaky at best, right at the moment when it needs to be absolutely sound for the audience to accept the drama unfolding on the bridge. Otherwise it feels like fake drama, manufactured to have people shout at each other.
Maybe I care too much about the logic of a situation, I don’t know. But to say that a character arc trumps the logic of the universe is to exclude the audience from the movie. We can’t appreciate decisions (like a commander ignoring an insubordinate officer) if we don’t know why they were made, and we can’t anticipate epic actions (like a hyperspace ramming maneuver) if the action throws the established rules of the universe into chaos.