The light speed collision doesn’t bother me because of the rule of cool. Do something that well on screen, and you can use any half baked explanation or retcon, especially in a non-science-based universe like the Star Wars universe, as far as I’m concerned.
Two other possible reasons why the Holdo Maneuver can’t be SOP:
- It’s an extremely dangerous maneuver. A ship only has a small chance (say 10%) of hitting an enemy vessel, and even if it misses, the stresses of such a short jump would have torn it apart. Holdo was dead before she even hit the enemy flagship.
And/or -
Snoke’s flagship just wasn’t a very good ship. Sure, it was huge, and impressive, but that was it’s main job - to impress. It was an impractical boondoggle designed to stoke a megalomaniac’s ego, and as a result, it simply couldn’t defend itself as well as a standard-issue Star Destroyer. If Holdo had tried to ram one of those, there’s no way it could have worked.
In fact, maybe its problem was that it was so big that its shields were large enough for a ship to come out of hyperspace inside them, like the Falcon did on Starkiller Base. Other Star Destroyers’ shields simply don’t cover enough area, so a ship can’t get through them.
No; the part I’m saying is the supposition is that that was the reason for the success of the ramming tactic.
i.e. You’re saying that the reason we haven’t seen this tactic before is because normally it would be trivially detected / blocked. And the reason it worked this time was because the captain of the flagship was focused on a different task.
Fine. But that’s your fanwank, there is no line in the movie that makes that clear.
Well, no. Because you’re supposed to be paying attention and watching the actions of the people for context. That’s just movie watching.
Yes, it’s so obvious you’re correct that there’s just no need to explain how.
Eh, that’s what watching movies is about. You’re not going to get your hand held and a little man popping up to say “Notice how the Commander is literally saying to ignore the ship; this is relevant to the success of this gambit…”. That’s not fanwanking, that’s just watching movies.
Fanwanking is the suggestion that Rose smashed Finn out of the air because she somehow knew that he wasn’t going to disable the ram-cannon. There is not only nothing in the movie to imply this, she also says the exact opposite: that she did it for love. That’s not the case here where it’s clearly established in the movie that the Supremacy is lazily coasting along out of the* Raddus*'s firing range, and not at all paying attention to the Raddus when it jumps into them. Why do you think they took the time to make that stuff clear if it wasn’t important to the Supremacy’s fate?
I don’t think this is necessarily true either because smaller ships can get close enough to shoot it and cause 'splosions. Not to mention, the Super Star Destroyer was taken out by a lowly A-wing that lost control and crashed into the bridge.
You know my take on this, RT?
Most planets don’t give a damn who’s in charge. They go on with their lives and routines because it doesn’t really matter who’s in charge. Some black clad asshole comes down and says, ‘Fuck you, I’M in charge now!’ and they say, “OK, fine, whatever. Get it out of your system.” and go back to earning a living.
Or, to draw a comparison from a Chinese proverb, “Strong emperor, weak emperor. What difference does it make to us?”
Or, to get more metaphysical, “Before enlightenment, chop wood, draw water. After enlightenment, chop wood, draw water.”
I’d be willing to bet - not that the filmmakers have thought this through, I’d bet - that to most of the galaxy this whole ‘Star Wars’ conflict is irrelevant. We’re invested because we’re seeing it. But to some middle class salaryman on Naboo doesn’t give a damn about who’s in charge. He’s worried about paying his mortgage and making sure his pain in the ass teen stops skipping school.
We didn’t see them get close to Snoke’s SSD.
Watch RotJ again. The A-wing crashed into the bridge *after *the rebels took out the bridge shield generators.
What happened was that he said to ignore the ship because it was just trying to draw their fire from the escape pods. Right.
Then, when they see it turning around to face them he barked something about “Destroy it!!” before it smashed through them at the speed of light.
Now, the question I’m asking is why this tactic has not been used before and/or why it was effective this time.
If the answer is simply that they were focused on something else then this should be an effective tactic all the time. Plenty of times we see grand empire ships focused on bombarding a planet or whatever, while ships are trying to escape at LS. Never before has the idea that ships present a ramming risk to a large empire vessel been a thing.
Possibly we’re talking past each other at this point. Sure, they try to set up the supremacy’s destruction as partly the result of hubris.
But I’m saying why is this a tactic for the first time now? Based on the destruction caused, this should be an ever-present threat.
And yes, I do think it’s a fanwank (and there’s nothing pejorative about that, despite the nomenclature), because it’s not just about what happened in the movie. It’s about trying to explain it in light of everything else we’ve seen in this universe, as it has not been explained in the story.
As an aside…“Snoke”? What’s with that name. I thought the “silly names for characters who are supposed to be intimidating” thing ended with the prequels and “Dooku”.
Who said it was? Hux figured out the danger (albeit too late because he previously said to ignore the ship) so it’s not as though no one could have foreseen it.
We’ve only seen, even among all the movies, a relative handful of space battles. We have no idea if it’s been used before or whether it’s something normally watched out for. We do have the contextual clues that Hux made some stupid decisions in his hubris which directly led to the Supremacy’s destruction. While it might be fair to wonder why it’s not done/attempted more often, it’s not really a problem with the film that no one sits down and has a talk about it. The film very deliberately sets it up as a result of poor leadership.
OK, so overall, I enjoyed the movie, in that I had a good time at the cinema and likely will watch it whenever it comes on and I’ve got nothing better to do. There were many moments I loved, mostly character interactions, and the way certain expectations were raised to be subverted (the killing of Snoke, Rey’s parents being ‘nobody’—although I’m not completely certain they won’t renege on either—and generally questioning the ‘plucky hero saves the day’-trope).
But yes, there were a lot of plot holes, some of which I noticed immediately, some which only became apparent afterwards. The thing is that while few movies hold up unter microscope-level scrutiny, the plot holes here basically undermined the whole story—with, to me, the big one being the setup for the slowest chase ever: there simply is no believable reason that just following the rebel ships until they ran out of fuel was the best course for the First Order.
After all, we’re shown that it’s possible to leave the fleet, and come back to it via hyperspeed jumps—so why didn’t a couple of Star Destroyers do just that? For that matter, we have also seen a couple of small fighter craft take out a capital ship—so why are the First Order’s crafts recalled? It’s not like they, or the Empire, ever seemed to have great qualms about winning battles by just throwing material at the enemy.
And for me at least, after I’ve noticed such glaring inconsistencies—which it’s basically impossible not to—I’ll be primed for looking for more such holes.
Anyway, I’m capable of enjoying a film regardless—there’s more to a film than the overall plot structure, and if the theme, the characters, the acting and cinematography are good enough, I’m willing to forgive quite a bit on that front. And for the most part, I think TLJ did a good job on those—with the notable exception of Rose’s ‘saving’ of Finn, which not only directly undercut the theme of the movie (after all, Finn was doing exactly what Rose gave as her motivation, namely, saving those he loves), but for all she knew should have bought him maybe a grand total of five more minutes in this world, before being torn apart by blaster fire.
Still, it’s a little bit regrettable that apparently nobody was ready to put in the effort of making sure that the basic plot, at least, held together overall.
What annoys me more, however, is the many places in which the movie is just plain careless, as if to say, well, this is gonna make a billion bucks either way, so let’s just call it alright and be done with it. An example here is the sudden availability of cloaking tech to the rebels, which is just as suddenly negated. I’m fine, basically, with there being new tech since the original trilogy, where Han had to camouflage the Falcon among the trash ejected from a Star Destroyer, but the whole thing is clearly just a throwaway line to ‘explain’ why the First Order doesn’t open fire on the transports immediately, which comes at the cost of a further handwave to the effect that they could apparently neutralize this cloak on the bush of a button, it’s just nobody thought of doing so earlier, because surely nobody is going to try and surreptitiously get away from the doomed rebel fleet.
Worse yet, it undercuts the only purpose the jaunt to the casino planet had, since if anybody among the First Order had independently thought about pushing that button, they wouldn’t even have needed the tip off from DJ (who, of course, is himself another example of this carelessness—eh, let’s just have another codebreaker hanging out in the prison cell, that’ll do).
In the end, thus, what I find annoying is not that it’s a bad movie—I don’t think it is—but how much better of a movie it could have been with just a little bit of care.
Somebody asked about OT plot holes:
Ben and Yodas plan makes no sense. Together they almost stopped the Empire in its infancy, so now they’re just gonna give up and sit in exile?? And Ben is just going to let Luke grow up way past the age he should have been trained? And did Ben use the Force to stop Lukes stepdad from letting him leave and join the Academy? Talk about the most thankless, eat shit roles in the Star Wars universe.
"Raise this kid thats not yours, I’m gonna influence your minds, and then you get burned alive. Sucks to be you!!’
We’ve seen hundreds if not thousands of ships blown up, and never heard this come up as a possible tactic. Heck, early in this movie why didn’t they consider ramming the dreadnaught? Doing things the traditional way resulted in the loss of the entire bombing fleet and many fighters.
And you repeat about bad leadership. Once again, I’m not disputing that. Hux hubris = destruction. But I am asking why? What stops a ship from any of the dozens of dogfights we’ve seen just deciding to go to lightspeed and rip 'em a new one?
Yes this.
I too really enjoyed the film and do think it’s one of the best.
To me the killing of snoke (the way it was telegraphed by the characters) is the point which stuck in my craw and then after that I was noticing every little thing.
Every film has problems but ideally you shouldn’t notice them during the movie.
By the way I recently watched a few articles about what a light speed hand-sized meteor would do to the Earth. (Pulverize the Earth and scour clean the closest planets to Earth)
Imagine what would happen if in Star Trek Riker’s aborted attempt to ram the Borg Cube at warp speed had succeeded? Make Omega molecules look like firecrackers. Yes i know wrong universe!!
So when i saw what Admiral Dern was going to do, i was very impressed with the result. We’ll assume she only got up to about .01% of light speed.
I thought it was very clever of Kylo to shield his thoughts from Snoke by pretending what Snoke sensed was about killing Rey.
I will say, I think the writers have really backed themselves into a corner. There’s like 20 people left in the Rebellion?? Will the next film flash forward 30 years?? And there’s no real big baddie. SO far this is Kylo’s story. Rey hasn’t had hardly any arc. In fact she may as well be The Force Personified.
They really need some TV specials or something to set up the next movie.
Just saw it the other night. It will take me a while to catch up with this thread, but I wanted to throw out a few ideas while it’s still fresh in my mind. Sorry if any of this has already been discussed to death.
Overall, it reminded me of an old movie serial, but not always in a good way. The serials used to be shown in ten-minute chapters, once a week, and each one ending on a cliffhanger. But when they edited the whole thing together, it had the same frantic pacing; everybody’s doomed, they’re gonna be fine, everybody’s doomed, they’re gonna be fine. How many times did the rebels survive by the skin of their teeth? We’ve got to evacuate this planet or the rebellion is doomed! We’ve got to take out the surface guns on that dreadnought or the rebellion is doomed! We’ve got to release these bombs or the rebellion is doomed!
I can’t figure out why Vice Admiral Laura Dern kept her escape plan a secret from Poe, leading to his mutiny. I suppose she doesn’t want the First Order to know what she’s planning, but Poe wasn’t going to tell them. And then the plan does get revealed by someone who couldn’t possibly have known it. And all they had to do to defeat it was click on the “include cloaked ships” checkbox in the controls for the tracking system on the star destroyers.
Liked the Hardware Wars reference.
I didn’t mind the casino scene, but the music was clearly a reference to the cantina scene in ANH; so how could they do that and not show the band? It had to be the same guys, right? I figure one of them did some time in prison, but when he got out he put the band back together to raise money for an orphanage back on the musician planet. C’mon, show the damned band!
I havent read it but thought of another reason its not used.
Way too unpredictable. Actually a ship that size at light speed would create a solar system wide scouring event. So she’d have to do some kind of glancing attack or not get quite up to lightspeed. All that is way too hard to do.
So it really was a last ditch effort and explains why she waited until a few ships had been blown up.
I suspect the articles you’ve seen were discussing 99.9% c, or something like that. The maths kinda break down at c itself, but would appear to show an object with rest mass travelling at c would deliver *infinite *energy.
Also, I wouldn’t assume that Dern’s ship accelerated to .01%. Firstly because they did say light speed, but also importantly that the physics of light speed seem very different in star wars to our universe. We’ve never seen time dilation for example.
Actually I agree. It was the dialogue that was horrible. Both Kylo and Snoke using ambiguous pronouns in a way that could only make someone suspect betrayal was coming.