Also I disagree that ANH, or any SW film for that matter, follow it’s own rules. I’d barely say that is has any form of rules. It doesn’t need any “rules”, because unlike something like Star Trek it doesn’t have to obey the laws of physics. It’s a fantasy, and you don’t have to explain it any more than you need to explain magic in a fantasy film.
Yeah, this is a hard concept for me to put into words. When I say a fantasy has to obey its own rules, I’m not saying it has to obey the laws of physics. I’m saying it has to, well, obey its own rules.
For example, if you and I made a movie about vampires, and we establish that the only way to kill these vampires is to drive a wooden stake through the vampire’s heart, if, at the end of the movie, the hero kills the main vampire by shooting it with a pistol, you’d conclude that was stupid, correct?
Indeed, vampires are fantasy. There’s no such thing. And they certainly don’t have to obey the laws of physics, but if you establish in your vampire universe that the only way to kill them is with the wooden stake, killing one with a pistol would be absurd. It would be a contradiction, a logic trap. But the problem is, often times when critics point out these logic traps, these absurdities, the defenders of the film are quick to say things like, “It’s a fantasy! It doesn’t have to obey the laws of physics!” and, “It’s just a movie!” and, “It’s a vampire movie! You’re trying to inject logic into a vampire movie?! News flash! VAMPIRES AREN’T REAL!”
Right, well I’ve somewhat misunderstood what you were saying because I completely agree with what you just said.
All fiction definitely needs to be consistent with it’s own “fake-logic”, what I was trying to say earlier however was that sci-fi rules never applied to SW in the first place so it was never really a part of it’s “rules.”
The big confusion here I think comes from the fact that SW borrows from so much sci-fi that it does give the impression that it actually does make some scientific sense at times, but then all of a sudden there’s a space-slug with it’s own ‘gravitational pull’.
ZkinandBonez said:
Take the space-slug scene from ESB as an example…Agreed. The space slug was stupid. Lucas just loves to have big monsters attempt to eat things in his movies. It’s ironic when I saw TESB at the age of 11, I attempted to explain why the space slug was stupid and I got the very same, “It’s a movie!” and “It’s science fiction, not science science!” defenses.
It’s just one of those things you’ve got to give a pass.
However, I wouldn’t say that the space-slug scene is “stupid” because it works well within the narrative, as well as within it’s fantasy logic. In a lot of interviews with Irvin Kershner you hear him talk about how he completely ignored any attempt at sci-fi logic because Lucas had told him that it was all fantasy anyway. And in that sense you can always look at the space-slug as some kind of mythological beast.
Here a quote from Kershner on why he agreed to make ESB;
"I accepted to do the film because I loved the idea of doing a fairy tale, of doing something imaginative, doing something that children would love, and that gives me great pleasure. Some people call it Science Fiction- I don’t even consider it science fiction, I consider it a fairy tale. In Science Fiction you’re very concerned about leaving a spaceship on a planet because there may not be oxygen or the gravitational force is not the same as on earth or what your body’s adjusted to and so you must take all that into consideration or it’s considered very poor Science Fiction. It’s fairy tale, that’s the environment. That’s the context. That you can literally do anything. And if I believe it, while I’m doing it, the audience tends to believe it too. So that’s a fairy tale."
And one from Lucas;
"We look at it as a different dimension. The laws of physics are different here. Star Wars is not Science Fiction at all. It’s much more attuned to mythology, to psychology, to history than it is to science. It’s more of a parable about the way we are, rather than the way we’re going to be. That’s why it starts out as a fairytale - a long time ago in a galaxy far away - once upon a time. It deals with princesses. It’s purposely designed not to be about where we’re going. It’s about where we’ve been and what we can learn from the past in the present."
So I’d argue that the space-slug is anything but stupid, I’d say it’s pretty brilliant.