Wednesday, June 06, 2007

Star Wars Logic

I'm reading a book right now about Lucas's actual logic used in Star Wars. The story going on between the frames and what it implies if you follow it to its logical conclusion.

Alright you have Darth Vader, bad guy responsible for the deaths of literally billions of people in the galaxy. A lot of them on Alderaan alone when Tarkin and he blew it up. Then Vader of course kills the Emperor while saving his son and dies a good guy and then there is a huge Ewokian celebration!

So lets find a comparable person here on Earth and probably the most popular bad guy for showing how evil the human race can be is Hitler. Responsible for the deaths of millions and then committed suicide in his bunker. So let's alter history just a little bit and throw in this bit to see how George Lucas's logic would play out today.

Say the Allies capture Hitler and put him on trial at Nuremberg. The prosecution reads the rather long list of war crimes when the defense jumps up and says, "But he saved his own son and killed Himmler!"

Do you think that Hitler would be getting an Ewok parade down the streets of Berlin???? Redemption is a fine and upstanding motivation for a story but isn't that a stretch?

Another of the tragic logic flaws is the moral quandary that if you could go back in time to find Hitler as a young and innocent boy would you kill him? I think you would after rationalizing that you would eventually be saving millions of lives but you probably wouldn't like it much.

Now to Lucas Logic 101, we are pretty much hammered over the head with how brave, cute, and special Anakin Skywalker is only to later learn he becomes the scourge of the galaxy. So if Qui Gon Jin (one of my favorite characters in the whole saga) could detect that The Force was not in balance somehow, which also really didn't make sense, then couldn't Qui Gon maybe have used his midichlorians to pinpoint that Anakin might someday turn into the most evil person alive????

And how powerful are these midichorians anyway? You are asked to believe that you can lift an X-Wing fighter out of a swamp but you can't even detect that your OWN DAUGHTER WHO YOU ARE INTERROGATING WITH TRUTH SERUM doesn't have The Force and YET you know she is on a "diplomatic mission" with the stolen plans for The Death Star.

I'm just asking for a little bit of continuity and logic. Anyway yeah this is one of my top ten films of all time STILL after being asked to jump over logic gaps the size of the Millennium Falcon.

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