The dialog in the film directly contradicts this. This new magic technology was not based on a homing beacon which was why they needed to break into the ship as opposed to simply searching the ship.
Very good point.
Thanks for the tip! I was finally able to see the whole Caravan episode. Really cute!
We know ; however, many viewers actually thought it made sense that there might have been a tracker placed aboard the big Rebel ship. The movie asks the audience to accept an entirely new technology that, well, basically comes out of nowhere and has a lot of implications. Also the way it’s described does not make much sense and the protagonists instantly come up with an improbable number of details about it.
I dont think we are disagreeing, the new fangled ’ hyperspace tracking ’ is stupid but almost irrelevantly stupid. As far as tracking goes, if you are a causal viewer and you didn’t know or care about hyperspace tracking then its just plot point that they can’t run away and need to face the danger.
if you have seen the prior movies and were aware of hyperspace tracking from IV then without digging into the details at a high level you can hand wave it away and plot wise , it’s a known thing, and the tracking has shut down the usual ‘just get to hyperspace and we will be fine’ escape path so our heroes have to face the danger
And finally if you are into the lore and want it to be consistent there are probably many ways they could have worked that out and solved the problem as to how the NO can track the rebels in a cannon consistent way and our heroes need to get to the NO battleship to shut down the tractor beam err sorry wrong movie, the tracking device, with just a couple of lines of dialog ‘the reciever is the important thing’
But as they couldn’t even figure out a coherent story arc about 3 widely anticipated movies with a massively enthusiastic fan base , it is very unlikely they would have given two hoots about a consistency on hyperspace tracking.
Again, I heard hyperspace tracking and thought’yeah that’s a thing we have seen before’ and rolled with it.
I looked at your link, how much of that was actually in the movie? All I remember was Hux saying we can track them, and princess Danish hairdo saying 'they must have a tracking thing’s
I’ll just toss a few things out here:
Screen crawl for The Empire Strikes Back (1980)
(feel free to compare to the screen crawl in the 1981 re-release of the original movie)
Posters for the original 1977 release and the re-releases through 1997
Packaging of the freakin’ VHS releases
#/media/File:Opening_crawl.jpg){kind=link}
I’ll let all that speak for itself.
At this point in my life, I honestly can’t give two shits about what people thought the name of the movie was 45 years ago, or whether the title crawl was changed 41 years ago, or what George Lucas had in his mind during his sophomore year while he jerked off over a Flash Gordon Goes To Ganymede film reel from 1938.
It’s A New Hope for all intents and purposes today, because that’s what the studio calls it and that’s the easiest way to refer to it without inviting confusion.
Y’all boomers seriously need to quit relitigating the '70s.
Actually, nobody’s arguing over the '70s. The 1990s, yeah. The 1970s, nope.
One of the unique things about the renaming (besides just how pointlessly invested people are in it) is that it was never consistent. I can’t think of a single item that had the “A New Hope” branding on it other than the subtitle of the crawl before 1994, when they started putting it on new editions of the comic book and novel adaptations. It was definitely also on hats and T-shirts at this time, almost as if there was a concerted push to get the “new” title out there. Then, when the Special Editions came out, the first one was just the “Star Wars Special Edition” and things went back to just using the “Star Wars” title for a few years. In 2000 they switched it again and all subsequent VHS and DVD releases used both “Episode IV” and “A New Hope” until the currently in-print 4K editions that use “A New Hope” but not the episode number. I guess the actual release of the first prequel movie made it more imperative to clear up what was what.
Of course, real adherents of the “the original name is the original name” position will only refer to something called Star Wars: From the Adventures of Luke Skywalker, since the novel adaptation with that title came out six months before the movie.
I’m sure some people would agree with that. But in fantasy stories like this one of the most essential things is world building. It’s fantasy therefore the rules of the real world don’t apply, you need to inform the viewers of the new rules that apply in this new world. Fantasy stories spend a huge amount of the screen time fleshing this out, Star Wars did it better than most. These rules are what the drama and story are built upon.
The problem is partly that this McGuffin is stupid but the bigger problem is that it contradicts previous rules laid out when the world was built. And even if you allow that, the change basically screws up any future possibilities because of the implications.
I don’t think most people want to live in a world where “just because I said so” is the premise for the conflict in these kinds of stories.
I’m not sure I understand the problem with this. Why does everything have to be previously established in another place? Don’t they even behave like it’s new and previously thought impossible? I know all the spaceships just looked like they had new paint jobs, but technologies do evolve.
See also the fan disgust of the Holdo Manoeuvre that as it had never been done before, it therefore shouldn’t be done at all. Nonsense. There’s nothing wrong with introducing something new to raise the stakes.
I personally don’t think “disgust” is quite the right word, but I also don’t think criticizing the Holdo Maneuver is “nonsense”. I have absolutely no problem with introducing new elements to the canon. But, as discussed in another current thread, it violates my suspension of disbelief if it’s not consistent with previously established rules. We’ve seen ramming maneuvers before in Star Wars, so there’s nothing new about that. What’s new is that apparently Admiral Holdo is the first person the entire history of the Galaxy that ever thought of ramming another ship really fast. That is “nonsense”. It violated my suspension of disbelief that if a hyperspace ram is possible, and is as devastatingly effective as we see, it somehow never occurred to anyone ever in the history of the Galaxy to try it.
The crew of the Rebel ship could obviously tell that they were being tracked. But how could they tell that they were not being tracked by a beacon having been planted on their ship? Either there’s a hidden beacon that they just haven’t managed to find yet, or they’re being tracked without a beacon, something which to the best of their knowledge is impossible. Which one of these should they have considered the simpler hypothesis?
You KNOW what would have happened? The same thing predicted that people would be wondering where The Madness of King George 1-2 went.
Would that be episode 4 with Greedo shooting first, simultaneously, or not at all? Episode 6 with Sebastian Shaw or Hayden Christensen at the end?
If the Taliban or the VC could destroy tanks with trees suspended from vines, you mighty have a point. Jubjub!
For the record, I hated the Ewoks the second they appreard on screen. I yelled at the screen, “Who is responsible for these teddy bears?!” It was obvious to this then-22 year old that they were there primarily for the toy money. Exactly like the pod race 15 years later.
So, understand that I’m not looking at this from a fan perspective, but more from the structure of the story and, well, what makes for a good, compelling story.
Can you do a story about new technology? Yes.
Can you do a story about new technology in Star Wars? Also yes.
Can you do a story about new technology where it is sort of just dropped into the plot and drives everything but it ultimately treated as a minor secondary concern and forgotten later on? No. God, no.
In The Last Jedi, this tracking technology comes from nowhere; that’s not ideal, but alright, the audience can work with that. If you wanted to be simulationist, a good world-builder would seriously consider the impact this would have on space warfare. However, that’s not necessarily required here, because Star Wars was more about dramatic confrontations from the beginning.
Now, the introduction of this new technology was… not ideal. Characters, including one we just met, postulate the limits of a technology they don’t understand and may have never seen (no, I don’t count somebody who mopped the room it happened to be in, and even for Star Wars THAT is one absurd coincidence). And they get everything completely correct. This also launches an entire extraneous and bizarre plotline to deal with said technology, but that’s another issue entirely.
And then, it doesn’t matter and the story just moves on past it without caring. It’s completely dropped at the end of the movie. Because it was a one-use plot device and was never intended to matter. In other words, it’s not actually part of the world. It was less than Macguffin. The only true importance of the whole thing was to shove a few characters onto another place there had no reason to be so some more plot could happen.
This is a MASSIVE waste of screen time and storytelling possibilities. We can go on and discuss that, but it’s something like trying to unravel the Gordian Knot. The winning move is to simply cut the damn thing and walk away.
That would be fine except for the fact that you’re wrong. It was called Star Wars—not A New Hope—when it came out and for many years afterward. No need for a retcon here.
Well, you do have to sacrifice your own life and your own ship to accomplish that manoeuvre. Most people/creatures are maybe not quite that self-sacrificing. We’re there any American kamikaze pilots in WWII or only on the Japanese side?
Allied pilots who sacrificed themselves by flying into targets did exist, but it was a “case by case” decision, not a cultural thing. More likely a “I’m going to die anyway, let’s make it spectacular!” as opposed to “I must die for the Emperor, even if it makes no tactical sense.”
So use a droid. Or a just program the navcomp on a hyperdrive dumb ram and aim it at the enemy. Or, sure, use kamikaze tactics. We’ve already seen Rebels using suicidal maneuvers as last ditch tactics in other situations. Heck, in Rogue One, half the Rebel fleet sacrifices itself (some of them using sublight ramming tactics!) in a hopeless battle to cover the escape of the Tantive IV.
And, again, no one, in the entire history of the Galaxy has ever been that desperate before?
There was nothing established within TLJ that demonstrated that the Holdo maneuver was particularly difficult to set up or calculate, it didn’t seem to require any guile/subterfuge on Holdo’s part to employ, and seemingly wasn’t more complicated than “point nose of ship towards center-mass of larger enemy fleet, and press button to go to hyperspace. Declare victory.” . Presumably a droid could have done the same thing.
Given the size/quantity of ships involved in the trade (sacrifice one cruiser, instantaneously destroy enemy flagship + multiple enemy destroyers), and the ease in which it was accomplished, it’s a complete mystery as to why combat in StarWars didn’t revolve around “strapping mass to a hyperspace drive and fire at enemy fleet” hundreds of years prior to TLJ.
I don’t think the kamikaze metaphor is really apt. For WW2 japan, there was a reason for needing a pilot to provide terminal guidance, and it still required a whole lot of luck/skill to do much better than a fireball and some surface damage to one ship.