Star Wars on Trial

by David Brin

  The problem, simply, is that George Lucas and crew can't handle prequels. For example: In Episode IV, Luke destroys the Death Star by piloting a fighter into the heart of the giant construct. But back in Episode I, young Anakin Skywalker disables the Trade Federation Droid Control Ship in virtually the same way. Why then, wouldn't Vader or, you know, somebody fix the rather obvious design flaw in the Death Star? No reason at all; it's simply that Episode IV came first and the scene in Episode I serves no purpose but to evoke the climax of Episode IV

  Anakin, as a child, builds C-3PO and meets R2-D2. Obi-Wan meets both droids. At the end of Episode III, the droids have their memories wiped. But Obi-Wan doesn't (nor, presumably, could he). In Episode IV, he still fails to recognize the droids, and has no reason to simply be pretending not to recognize them. Again, all that happened is that IV came out first, then Episodes I through III premiered decades later.

  For that matter, how come Owen doesn't remember C-3PO and R2-D2 after meeting the droids in Episode II? If he did remember and didn't want to blow any cover he might have, why purchase C3PO?

  Leia, through Episodes IV-VI, is ignorant of her heritage. This, despite the fact that she is a public figure. Did nobody in the Empire ask the Organas from where they adopted this girl? Biochemical technology is such that in Episode I Qui-Gon can analyze a blood sample and send it over Magic Radio Waves to Obi-Wan on the Queen's ship, where Obi-Wan can check the blood for midichlorians. Leia is certainly awash in those sparkly little Force germs, germs that apparently can be e-mailed to people. That she's down with the Force should be the third or fourth most obvious thing in the universe. R2D2's butt-rocket came in handy in Episodes II and III and could have also come in handy any number of times in Episodes IV through VI. If only someone had thought of the butt-rocket twenty years ago! Uh, I mean twenty years from now! No, wait....

  Even acknowledging that a shift from Republic to Empire could have retarded technological progress, or even caused a reversion, why no mention of midichlorians, no glimpses of all the goofy robots and vehicles exclusive to Episodes I-III, no discussion of how the Empire came to be? They also went from tri-wings in Episode III to X-wings in Episode IV That's the rough equivalent of waking up tomorrow and discovering that every four-tined fork in the United States has been replaced with a three-tined fork.

  This was discussed above, but needs to be brought up again to examine from another angle. Why did Obi-Wan take Luke to Tatooine and send him to live with the Skywalkers? It makes no sense at all. As explained above, it couldn't have been part of a masterstroke to give Vader a weapon against the Emperor, which would have had the useful side effect of rehabilitating Vader and righting the error ObiWan made years ago. At the same time, Luke on Tatooine and the "Ben" Kenobi "disguise" makes no sense as a trap for Vader. Tatooine is too obvious a duck blind for Obi-Wan to snipe at Vader with Luke as a lure. Unfortunately for viewers interested in stories that make sense, there is no third alternative.

  Admiral Motti, the scrub Force-choked to death in Episode IV just to show the audience what a baddy Vader is, taunts Vader with the lines "Don't try and frighten us with your sorcerer's ways, Lord Vader. Your sad devotion to that ancient religion has not helped you conjure up the stolen data tapes, or given you clairvoyance enough to find the Rebel's hidden fort-guk blab duuuh." Too bad Motti looks a bit older than an adolescent in that scene. Clearly, the fellow had to be alive during the time of Episodes I-III, when the galaxy was lousy with Jedi (and their childlings!) doing magic tricks at every Senate session. It's hard to be an atheist when the Force was a near-ubiquitous part of life in the Republic.

  A Short Sampling of Additional Plot Holes in the Star Wars Universe, Provided by Fans during Online Discussions, Since 1997...

  Submitted to the Court by David Brin

  From Episode l: The Phantom Menace

  • Palpatine is concerned about being hunted down by the Jedi, right? Yet he has the Trade Federation persecute Naboo, drawing attention to his home planet! Anyway, why does he send Darth Maul to kill Amidala, when Qui-Gon's bringing her to the Senate to do exactly what he wants her to do? (Wouldn't he send a yacht to fetch her, keeping Maul secret a while longer?)

  • If the Queen is so influential that she can give one speech and topple the Chancellor of the galaxy, why was she unable to get help from these political allies earlier? Not even a news crew, to broadcast atrocities on Naboo? No big planets who are sick of the Trade Federation, hankering to pounce on its mistake? Everybody's a wimp except for two Jedi and some funky amphibian rastafarians? Boy, that sure was a peaceful Republic!

  • What's to keep the shamed, defeated Trade Federation guys from later screaming "It was Palpatine! He made us doo eet!" The fact that the Sith Lord's eyes were in shadow? They really know nothing about a guy they've sworn fealty to and staked everything on? Some savvy traders!

  From Episode II: Attack of the Clones

  • Is there anyone in this universe who could explain the politics of the Republic, what the Separatists are about, or why everybody acts like they have an IQ of maybe four?

  • Is anyone else amazed that the Jedi are sent into a death trap at the very moment that Yoda happens to collect a new clone army?

  From Episode Ill: Revenge of the Sith

  • How did Obi-Wan get Anakin's lightsaber to give to Luke in A New Hope? You can plainly see, when they were fighting on the volcano, both lightsabers were blue. But when Obi-Wan gives Luke "your father's old light saber"- it's green! (This may seem a nitpick, but it's one that shows how little they care about "Campbellian" myth-telling. Dig it. Like in The Lord of the Rings, the ancestral sword is an important "talisman" carrying anointed power between hero generations!) In Revenge of the Sith, I expected a tear-jerking scene when the dying Anakin tells his former master, "Please... give this...to my son...." But instead? The green sword turns out to be just another of Obi-Wan's many lies.

  From Episode IV A New Hope-a biggie

  • Okay, Vader questions Leia by hand, with truth drugs, yet never detects her Force and that she's his daughter. Or maybe he pretends not to? Nor to recognize his droids? It all seems so suspicious... almost as if something's going on that we're never told. Like his role in letting the droids with the plans escape the Senate ship, then helping the kids escape the Death Star, then the contrived theater of his "fight" with Obi-Wan, then doing everything possible to help Luke get his shot at the Death Star's reactor.... All of these could have been foreshadowers to something clever. But instead, they were left as simply glaring holes.

  These examples are just the tip of the veritable iceberg. I'm sure there are a zillion fan sites out there with many more examples of failures of continuity, storytelling logic and narrative drive. Despite the endless novels and action figures and cartoons and comic books and role-playing games and kiddie books and all the other ancillary stuff, the Star Wars movies are ultimately fairly easy to avoid if you put your mind to it. However, while the movies themselves can be avoided, they cannot be ignored, because Star Wars ruined American cinema.

  The first real modern blockbuster was jaws, but jaws was a selflimiting blockbuster. There was a limited amount of ancillary licensing that could be done with a great white shark, as sharks are natural creatures and in the public domain. Spielberg doesn't make any money from the Discovery Channel's endless Shark Weeks, and no eightyear-old wants a Roy Scheider action figure. Star Wars, on the other hand, created endless intellectual properties, all ripe for the licensing, and it made its billions without a lick of narrative sense.

  Prior to Star Wars, the 1970s were shaping up to be a golden age for American cinematic storytelling. Think of The Godfather, Five Easy Pieces, Taxi Driver, Nashville, One Flew Over the Cukoo's Nest, Dog Day Afternoon, Don't Look Now ... the list goes on. Even post-Episode IV, the 1970s squeezed out Midnight Express, Tess and Kramer vs. Kramer, but the good, character-and-narrative-driven movie was fading fast. By the time Episode V was rolled out, Hollywood had forgotten abou
t storytelling. The age of the blockbuster was here, and more than twenty years later, discerning viewers are still suffering for it. The serious flicks are all but gone; they're indie movies destined for the art house circuit, or foreign fare. And sci-fi? Ugh, sci-fi....

  There have been sci-fi movies since the Edison version of Frankenstein, of course, and most of them contained B-level actors, Blevel story lines and B-level effects. George Lucas, who is little more than Roger Corman with a billion-dollar bank account and no passion for the cinema form, turned the B-movie into every studio's Alist. Since the new prized demographic was the teenager, there was hardly any need to spend any effort on scripts. Money? Sure. Effort? Forget about it.

  So today, virtually any science fiction or fantasy film you see will make no sense. Occasionally they'll be funny, like Ghostbusters, and sometimes just so gonzo that they have to be appreciated on their own terms, like Big Trouble in Little China, but for the most part, the genre movie is nothing more than special effects pornography, with dialogue and characters there only to give the (formerly) optical effects and (currently) CGI a workout. Thus, nonsense like Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow, a movie that couldn't be more insulting to the viewer's intelligence if "Insult the viewer's intelligence at every turn" had been some kind of corporate mission statement.

  How about the Batman films, the Matrix movies, or Spider-Man? All of those films are essentially empty experiences, the rough equivalent of watching someone else play a video game. And even the energy and ideas that fuel video games can't be generated for long. Batman Returns was essentially plotless-quick, tell me what the point of any of the actions of Christopher Walken's character wasand Batman Forever and Batman and Robin were utterly unwatchable. Batman Begins was slightly more intelligent than the kiddie flicks of the 1990s, but made up for it by being simply boring.

  The Matrix, like Star Wars before it, attempted to go middlebrow via an appeal to fortune-cookie mysticism, but Reloaded and Revolutions boiled all that gunk away to make room for more cliched kungfu fights, war-movie blocking and CGI explosions. The Spider-Man films, buoyed by Tobey Maguire's charm, are bearable, but already cookie-cutter. Nerd doubts himself, fights man in green, collects a smooch, goes home.

  And these are the truly blockbuster sci-fi flicks. What about the second tier? The Blade franchise, Van Helsing, The Brothers Grimm, Daredevil, Minority Report-if any of these films were written up as a short story and submitted to your five-cent-a-word "professional" science fiction magazine, they'd get a form rejection letter, guaranteed, and regardless of their provenances as well-regarded Marvel Comics, Philip K. Dick stories or whatever. Good sci-fi films, like Dark City and Donnie Darko (or maybe I just have a "dark" fetish?) are essentially accidental creations. Mistakes.

  The sad thing is that movies do not have to be this way. Yes, film is a visual medium, so films can be primarily visual experiences, but that doesn't mean that films can't make sense as a basic narrative. 2001: A Space Odyssey is primarily a visual experience, but it doesn't use its visuals the way a drunk uses a lamppost, like the post-Star Wars movies do. Star Wars and many of the post-Star Wars blockbusters claim to be carrying on "the spirit of the pulps," but what they forget is that the pulps were often better than the hundredmillion-dollar crap Hollywood hands us. The pulps gave us Asimov, Bester, Heinlein, Silverberg and Ellison. The pulps benefited from editors like John W. Campbell, Jr., who knew that his beanie-wearing readers wanted stories that delivered on the action and made sense.

  Even today, any issue of Asimov's Science Fiction or the Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction has stories superior to any Hollywood blockbuster of the past twenty-nine years, and these dying digest magazines manage to score these stories for less than a dime a word. Compare that to the tens of thousands of dollars spent on scripts, and layers of script doctors, that lead to far inferior products. There is no reason that a primarily visual experience has to be full of gaffes, plot holes, nonsensical motivations and dialogue as crappy as these gems from Episode III:

  "My powers have doubled since we last met."

  "Your move."

  "I think you're mistaken."

  "There are too many of them; what should we do?"

  "You're alive."

  "Surprised?"

  "From my point of view, the Jedi are evil."

  "So this is how-choke-liberty dies. To thunderous applause." (And this out of the mouth of a woman who writes queen next to "Occupation" on her tax forms.)

  And how could we forget Vader's first line, "Noooooo!" which instantly reminded me of an episode of Futurama in which Calculon, the soap opera-acting robot, has a similar line and then explains, "In the first take, the line was `Yeeeeeeees!"' That is how indefensible Star Wars is: the parodic TV knockoff actually predated the actual filmic event by several years.

  When I turned to my friend Jody at the end of Episode III and said to her, "So this is how-choke-storytelling dies," all she could do was shrug. There's nothing else out there anymore, except for bad blockbusters. 2005 was an absolute nadir for filmgoing, and yet, from that nadir may emerge-dare I say it?-a new hope. In 2005, America was given a choice: watch The Island or stay home, and we chose to stay home. As Variety noted in October, 11 [S]o far this year, grosses of _link_ $6.84 billion are 7% lower than at the same point in 2004. Given price increases, total admissions are down even more steeply" It was March of the Penguins, a charming French documentary about birds walking across Antarctic ice, that was the year's big hit, while the blockbusters Hollywood rolled out for those of us with more spending money than sense suffered and died like a snotty Jedi childling.

  Take the bacon out of your mouths, boys and girls, and let's show Hollywood that we're not going to be fooled by well-cut trailers and nostalgia for our eight-year-old selves anymore. When you see a movie you think might be okay, but that is probably going to suck as much as Star Wars, just stay home.

  Repeat after me!

  "Just stay home!"

  "Just stay home!"

  `Just stay home!"

  Nick Mamatas is the author of the Lovecraftian Beat road novel Move Under Ground (Night Shade Books, 2004) and the Marxist Civil War ghost story Northern Gothic (Soft Skull Press, 2001), both of which were nominated for the Brain Stoker Award for dark fiction. He's published over 200 articles and essays in the Village Voice, the men's magazine Razor, In These Times, Clamor, Poets & Writers, Silicon Alley Reporter, Artbytes, the UK Guardian, five Disinformation Books anthologies, and many other venues, and over forty short stories and comic strips in magazines including Razor, Strange Horizons, ChiZine, Polyphony and others. Under My Roof.• A Novel of Neighborhood Nuclear Superiority (Soft Skull Press) will be released in late 2006.

  THE COURTROOM

  MATTHEW WOODRING STOVER: (checking his notes) Hmm ... "wheelbarrows of rancid bacon" ... "Eat it, you pigs" ... "gobble it up and crap yourselves in glee"... "When the meat runs out, the show is over."... Hmm. That's some, er, vivid imagery, Mr. Mamatas. Tell me, do you do a lot of drugs?

  DAVID BRIN: Objection!

  DROID JUDGE: Mr. Stover, you've been warned about abusing the witnesses.

  MATTHEW WOODRING STOVER: Come on, Your Honor-this man has testified that he thinks Midnight Express is character-driven drama. And anybody who thought Dark City was a good SF film needs to watch it again while sober.

  DROID JUDGE: (severely) The objection is sustained. Mr. Stover, confine your questions to the witness's testimony.

  MATTHEW WOODRING STOVER: Oh, fine. Let's look at a few of your supposed plot holes, then. You claim that Anakin Skywalker piloting an entire starfighter into the main hangar flight deck-the (let me repeat this for the Court) main hangar flight deck-in the center of a Trade Federation droid carrier is "virtually the same" as Luke Skywalker dropping a single torpedo down one tiny unshielded thermal exhaust port on the surface of the Death Star. I'm sorry? Could you repeat that for the Court? Or would you like to simply admit that you weren't really paying attention
?

  NICK MAMATAS: Oh, of course they were virtually the same. You see Mr. Stover, the Star Wars movies are just that, movies. They are not a memoir of real events. The climactic scene in Episode I is clearly designed to be reminiscent of the climactic scene in Episode IV-despite that Episode I "happened first." They are essen tially the same. It is very unrealistic that two circumstances that are depicted as incredibly unusual would be so incredibly similar to one another.

  And let's not forget the climax of Return of the Jedi, when Lando pilots the Millennium Falcon into the core of Death Star II and blows it up from the inside! Amazing, isn't it? Why even bother with fleets of ships and laser battles; clearly all tactical methodology in the Star Wars universe should be oriented toward getting one ship to fly into a entry port of some sort and and zap the enemy with one shot. You'd think someone would move the super-explodey stuff farther away from the entrances after three giant-ass explosions. Or maybe they'd station a Stormtrooper with a bazooka nearby. A Sith University freshman intern with a baseball bat. Something!

  Geez, if this were the Narnia book you might be asking me, "How can you say that the fate of Asian is similar to that of Christ? Asian is a lion!"

  MATTHEW WOODRING STOVER: As for "recognizing the droids," let me ask you this: If a friend of yours had owned, say, a Ford Escort (feel free to pick the anonymously popular vehicle of your choice) that you'd seen for a couple of weeks in, say, 1987, are you seriously telling me you'd instantly recognize the same car if you saw it again today in 2006-because a nineteen-year span is exactly what we're talking about-and wonder why your buddy's underwear wasn't still in the backseat? Bear in mind, here, that both C3P0 and R2-D2 are standard-model droids, of which billlions had been produced by their respective manufacturers and were in service throughout the Galaxy; even their designations are not individual, but rather model numbers, and they have no external modifications whatsoever. Not even paint jobs. Feel free to twist in the wind here; make up whatever justifications you might feel are appropriate.