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Funny, it never occured to me that the equatorial trench could be the trench. Perhaps when I watched the films at release and later I didn't have people to talk about it (no one was interested, my growing up in the 70s and 80s seems totally different from kids in the US), so there was no group think? Not sure. To me the equatorial trench and the trench run trench always were two seperate things. Also like, the trench run trench ends in the exhaust vent (?) while the equatorial trench seems to go all around without end?
I had the same thoughts.
In fact, by showing the picture of the death star with the equatorial trench displayed so prominently the essay itself sort of primes you to make an error you might not have otherwise made.
But the whole thing was explained in the movie as the essay points out. The animation rotating as is pointed out kind of emphasized that the trench was not the equatorial trench. That's how I remembered it.
It was always in my head as a sort of Achilles heel or the culvert in Helms Deep, an important but easily overlooked topological detail.
The sizes are so different. It's like showing Earth from space and getting the Amazon River confused with a canal.
Not quite Amazon and a canal but...
I was once asked by a tourist near where I lived if the bridge they had just driven across was the 2500m long Forth Road Bridge across what is, I believe, geographically a fjord - it was actually Dean Bridge which is 134m long across a gorge of a fairly small river.
Yeah, disparate sizes are hard to understand.
Another example: when the Ever Given ship was stuck in the Suez Canal, all the internet wags were saying "why can't they just excavate the dirt?" Well, this pic shows the scale difference involved: https://i.redd.it/5g9jvoecj6p61.jpg
A bagger would be about the right relative proportions. We just need a couple on permanent standby near every major waterway.
Growing up in southern California I had some relatives visit and we spent a day at Newport Beach. When the morning marine layer broke and Catalina Island became visible, they asked, "is that Hawaii?"
I heard of some European visitors to New York thinking they would drive to Chicago for the day. It's about 800 miles. Countries in Europe are similar to average or small states in the U.S.
About 20 years ago I had a couple of people from the US ask me if they could drive to Rome for the day - we were in Edinburgh at the time. Rome is about 1,600 miles away from here.
"Also like, the trench run trench ends in the exhaust vent (?) while the equatorial trench seems to go all around without end?"
That probably explains my understanding that it wasn't the equatorial trench...
Doesn't the holographic map they show in the briefing show the trench they go down to bomb it running north/south? It's been a while since I watched the film.
Oh nevermind it says that in the article.
Sure, but it also shows the dish in the totally wrong location. So it doesn't seem like an especially trustworthy source of information to begin with.
Seems pretty apropros for a mission pre-brief. Ask pretty much any military type sitting in one of these meetings how well the "intelligence" held up in the field.
Indeed, the hologram in the meeting was just the "powerpoint slide", abstract to convey the idea: death star, trench, boom. Noone stood up and went studying it like a map, that was not its purpose at all.
most of the people look as enthused by that hologram as I feel about seeing someone's slide deck. most fighter jocks tend to have the attitude best expressed in Aliens, "I only need to know one thing...where they are".
>Doesn't the holographic map they show in the briefing show the trench they go down to bomb it running north/south?
Does it matter when approaching from space?
They could just as well meant an equatorial run as far as a spaceship pilot is concerned.
Would the Death Star even keep a consistent orientation while travelling in space?
My recollection is that the briefing map shows the equatorial trench (let's call that running west-east although it's arbitrary I agree) and the trench they go down being perpendicular to that. check out https://youtu.be/TOgtj00Rp8s?si=2E5SieRc8-XMzUU5&t=20
(you may have to scrub back and forward a bit to convince yourself either way). The sphere rotates and you see the big equatorial trench and highlights a smaller trench perpendicular to that that doesn't extend the whole way around. The briefing zooms in to show more detail. That's the one they are going to go down.
It’s always depicted as traveling with the equator “level” relative to the camera’s arbitrary axis. The hyperdrive and sublights must enforce that. We actually never see any kind of exhaust like a star destroyer, no clue how it ominously hovers around. That adds to the menace.
At Yavin 4, it approaches gun-first since it is calibrating to fire. But the equator is still level with the center of the planet it’s orbiting, or perhaps the moons orbit plane.
I think it does matter as the Death Star spins and its equatorial trench appears to be it's equator.
Yeah I'm in the same boat here I never even considered it taking place in the equatorial trench, the size established early on was huge and it was very clean compared to the cramped and chaotic trench featured in the trench run.
I'm exactly the same. I can't understand how one can confuse the two...
For the same reason most people think Vader said "Luke, I am your father."
Because that's exactly what he says?
Not sure if that's fake or what, but it's pretty well established that the actual line is "No, I am your father". Even Lucasfilm acknowledge this, so if you want to argue that everybody else is wrong, I hope you have some serious evidence to back that up.
But ironically, the line is often misquoted: “Luke, I am your father.” In fact, Vader responds to Luke’s claim that he’d killed the young man’s father. “No,” the villain says, “I am your father.”
https://www.lucasfilm.com/news/defining-moments-i-am-your-fa...
Reminds me of a similar misunderstanding in Casablanca, where most people quote the line as "Play it again, Sam". In actual fact, the lines in the film are "Play it once Sam, for old times sake." "Play it, Sam." and "Play it again" (without Sam).
Another very well known misquote is "Beam me up, Scotty".
The sound in that clip was doctored. One of the comments mentions from which other part of the film the word Luke is clipped from.
No, I am your daddy.
Hola Papi!!
Easily? It's a minor detail, extremely easy to miss the point in the briefing animation, and extremely easy to not remember the size of the equatorial trench hangars.
Both the equatorial one and the actual one being trenches, and the equatorial one being more prominent makes it even easier...
It's more something a BBC Sherlock-type would notice, than a regular viewer...
It also follows ordinary narrative convention more closely. We can tell from distant shots of the Death Star that there’s an equatorial trench, but not other trenches. If you’ve already introduced a trench, conventionally you’d just use that if you need a trench. The difference between a narrative and just a bunch of stuff happening is precisely that kind of re-use and tying-together of elements.
Agreed 100%: see also Checkov's Gun and Keith Johnstone's "Impro".
Exactly. And, to be clear, this is a pretty minor violation of that principle of favoring re-use of elements, and it’s also not the case that violating it’s always a mistake. I just think it’s (along with some other cues) why a lot of people assumed it was the equatorial trench. We knew of one trench, and it hadn’t really served any trench-related purpose yet, so… why wouldn’t it be that one?
Idk, they do clearly fly into the equatorial trench the first time we see the Death Star, and it is clearly very, very wide.
I never paid attention to the briefing graphic which showed it was a longitudinal trench, so in my head canon it was always lateral. But not the equatorial trench. I'm also a bit dumbfounded that misunderstanding is/was so common.
There is also that Star Wars is quite loose in its narrative, requiring a significant amount of suspension of disbelief.
Star Wars, if you look at it closely, has many inconsistencies, and it is rather shallow. But it does a great job at letting our minds fill in the gaps. The trench run is, I think, an unwanted result of that. It is almost set up as if they want us to believe that the final trench run happens at the equator, so that's what we believe, because we have been trained for the entire movie to ignore small details and think big.
This is in contrast to films like, for example, Inception, that clearly encourages the audience to look at every little detail.
> Star Wars is quite loose in its narrative, requiring a significant amount of suspension of disbelief. Star Wars, if you look at it closely, has many inconsistencies, and it is rather shallow
This is the duality of the original trilogy.
(Since we're talking about the trench run: if you've not seen it, please enjoy the audio of the trench run played over the corresponding sequence from 633 Squadron, itself based on true events.
633 isn’t as based-on-true-events as Dambusters. AFAIK there was no actual collapse-a-cliff mission, though various sub pen destruction bombing attacks were carried out.
It’s true that the action in 633 is closer to Star Wars, though. Dambusters is what Lucas cribbed some lines and the cutting between the action and the control room thing from, but the action itself is more from 633. It’s also a better movie. The action in Dambusters is remarkably ugly and hard to follow even by the standards of contemporary (and much older!) air combat movies.
[edit] oh, and talk about ripping off 633—the new Top Gun! Complete with all the mocked-up training runs! Hahaha.
This side-by-side treatment of Dambusters is good fun too https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lNdb03Hw18M
No trench at all! They just had to skip the bomb off the surface of the water...
> Star Wars is quite loose in its narrative, requiring a significant amount of suspension of disbelief
"Hey, kid, it ain't that kind of movie"
The maddening thing is that it is that kind of movie in many places.
It has rules, it has structure, it has proposed reasons that things work the way they do.
People wouldn't be nearly as obsessed about Star Wars if it were all just handwavey reasoning.
One reason, for all it's flaws, Last Jedi is my favorite new film. It simultaneously admits (through character dialog) that "there are rules" and "there are egregiously no rules".
There are a lot of things I really loved about Last Jedi and a lot of things I really hated about Last Jedi. It was such a mixed bag.
I hate the way it threw out the Star Wars universe's physics - because it took me right out of the universe. Yes, the Star Wars universe never had realistic physics, but it did have reasonably self-consistent physics and Last Jedi threw them away. It had bombs falling in space (as opposed to being projected as missiles), it had turbolasers arcing (not something it ever had before), it introduced hyperspace fuel in order to make the finale escape make sense (they could have just used an interdictor instead). It was maddening.
But they almost did something really cool with the force, throwing out the dark/light dichotomy and replacing it with balance. They could have had Rey and Ben actually see eye to eye and both become grey Jedi after dispatching Snoke and finally obtaining the prophesied balance in the force. That would have opened up all kinds of interesting new places to take Star Wars and new stories to explore. But they chickened out at the last second.
And then yeah, the whole last half of the movie with the slow space chase, escape plan, side quest... none of that made any sense in terms of its writing.
I strongly agree on all counts. Overall, the bad outweighed the good for me; but at least it tried and I give it points for that. The other two sequels were just lazy.
The best modern Star Wars movie by far was Rogue One. In some ways Rogue One had an easier job because it was explicitly an exercise in elaborating on the original movies, rather than trying to expand in a brand new direction. But it did its job tremendously well. (And the TV show Andor is taking things in cool new directions.)
Rogue One was great. The moment I saw Jyn being transported in Jaggurnought, I was sold. The Star Wars universe, from the original triology over the Clone Wars to the extended universe from the days of Westend Games, has so much stuff to work with. Stuff, that is now free to use since it is not canon anymore. The sequel triology did nothing of the sort, insetad it took the idea of a reborn Emperor, IMHO among the worst ideas of the Legebds EU, and made somehow even worse.
When the hinted at a fleet of hidden star destroyers in Rise of Skywalker, I so hoped they would steal some elements of the Katana-fleet story arch. But nope. Funny how all the series set after Endor do their utmost to ignore the sequel movies, at least it feels like that to me.
Fo rTgrawn so, they could have skippes the zombie stormtrooper part. Star Wars zombies were a bad idea when introduced in that book about an infested star destroyer, written at the hight of the pop culture zombie craze, and are an element the new canon could have well lived without. After all, Thrawns thing in Timothy Zahns book triology was cloned soldiers. But we will see how that story goes, Thrawn is bavk, and I'm all for it!
At this point with movies, especially franchise movies, I'm more interested in how high the highest points of a film hit than the average level.
If you do 1 really cool thing and 99 shitty things? Still into it! And TLJ does better than that.
There's far too much average pablum out there. Or almost worse, a movie that's entirely just slightly better than average... but never exceed slightly better.
Most egregiously, IMO, was the Holdo Maneuver (jumping the rebel cruiser into the pursuing First Order ship). If that's a thing, why didn't they use that on the Death Star, the Executor, etc. Why weren't people building massive objects with no guns or shields, just a hyperdrive? It just wrecks the internal consistency for an admittedly awe-inspiring moment in theaters.
Interaction between hyperspace and non-hyperspace is (unintentionally) telegraphed in episode IV when Han says "Without precise calculations we could fly right through a star or bounce too close to a supernova, and that’d end your trip real quick, wouldn’t it?”
That being said Star Wars script-writing has been totally winging it on surprisingly big plot points from the start. It's frankly astonishing that it's even as consistent as it is.
They specifically had a line about the pursuers rushing to catch up and dumping all power into that effort. Diverting from shielding and anything that would protect them. After all they had a much larger more powerful force, hubrus lead them to believe that they were safe enough to do so.
As for the "why not just build a hyperdrive shell that you can use to javelin a planet into dust" this is a problem that is ignored in MUCH more serious science fiction than star wars. Because it's a pain I nthe ass to explain away.
Gravity well. You would exit hyperspace before hitting the planet. Same concept as how the Interdictor class Star Destroyers prevent hyperspace/pull ships out of hyperspace.
We never see Star Wars ships moving at relativistic speeds. Jumping to lightspeed takes you into hyper, it doesn't let you engage in a ramming attack.
Besides, we don't know that shields won't stop a ramming attack. The only time it was done it appears the shields weren't being used.
We see a few collisions major in the original trilogy. I don't think it necessarily clears anything up. I haven't watched in some years so the details are a little hazy and might be wrong:
In ESB:
- An asteroid collides with a Star Destroyer. Communications with the Star Destroyer are lost, but nothing past the hit is shown on screen. (Presumably shields are active since they're putting these ships in the asteroid field.) [Just to speculate, the asteroid itself might have been pulverized and its materials interfering with communications, or some other shield/asteroid interaction causing loss of communications.]
In ROTJ:
- The Executor loses its shields and the A-wing crashes into the bridge. (No shields.)
- The Executor subsequently loses control and crashes into the Death Star. (No shields.)
And in Rogue One:
- The corvette pushes the two Star Destroyers together and they take major damage. (Unknown shield status.)
They could have bought themselves some points by saying "...and that's how the Death Star works, you need a massive space station as a power source if you want to do it more than once."
But no, lasers.
Even within the SW universe there were limitations on the practicality of this strategy: (1) a large enough mass relative to the target so as to cause enough damage, (2) enough armor or shielding for the sacrificial mass to get within hyperspace jump range of the target, (3) a very limited window of space in which to actually hit the target while making the jump to hyperspace, and (4) a crew willing to sacrifice itself in such a manner (because droids and others couldn't simply be ordered to do something like this within the cannon of the SW universe).
But more to the point: we don't know if the Holdo Maneuver became more common in the SW universe because the only subsequent film decided to try and ignore everything that happened in the previous movie in favor of having space horses galloping on the exterior of a starship.
This is my complaint about approximately every sci-fi that has both "shield" and "warp" technology. Just warp a large mass into the bridge, or a bomb if you're feeling nasty. Add instantaneous "subspace" communication a la Star Trek, and you can call in the equivalent of an air strike from the nearest hub. Warp core goes boom.
"Any interesting space drive is a weapon of mass destruction. It only matters how long you want to wait for maximum damage."
-- Jon Souza
https://projectrho.com/public_html/rocket/prelimnotes.php#jo...
> One reason, for all it's flaws, Last Jedi is my favorite new film. It simultaneously admits (through character dialog) that "there are rules" and "there are egregiously no rules".
To each of their own, the meta in the Last Jedi is precisely why I hated that movie. Too many times it was the director speaking directly to the audience, in particular "the fans". This is simply not why I watch Star Wars. It also plagiarized a Battle Star Galactica episode a bit too much, and who the hell puts an epilogue in the middle of trilogy? Clearly Rian Johnson didn't care about what was going to be next.
I can't stand that guy. In Johnson's last three movies, the only skill as a storyteller he demonstrates is castigation of the audience for their provincial admiration of "traditional" values like strength, heroism, stoicism, self-sacrifice, elitism, narrative predictability, etc. Oscar Isaac's mistrust of Laura Dern's brilliant plan to mock him in front of the soldiers and then take no action against the pursuers, Mark Hamill's apathy and cowardice in the face of renewed galactic domination, Chris Evans's deception and murderous intent to acquire his inheritance defend "his birthright" (which was actually built by a foreigner in 1980.)
I've heard he's making a third Knives Out sequel. To save time, here's the twist: whichever character(s) Johnson has picked to represent "Norman Rockwell America" did the crime, and they did it for a stupid reason they didn't think through. Whichever characters Johnson picked to represent the antithesis of tradition will come through and expose the villainy and stupidity of the old guard, while remaining morally pure of heart.
The Last Jedi was an abomination, filled with misdirection for misdirection’s sake, at the cost of a coherent or entertaining narrative. It’s also filled with awful postmodern tropes that it conjures out of nowhere. “Hey, it turns out there are ancient Jedi texts” But their whole purpose in the film is so that they can be burned and discarded. “Oh, they were never all that important anyhow, just make your own rules.”
I dunno, compare that to any holy book. It's incredibly important, but also it never really mattered anyhow. Of course it matters because of its impact on society, but the lessons are universal with or without the sacred text.
But what if you’re 15 books into your fictional universe, and during one chapter, it turns out a major faction has extremely important ancient texts. And then as soon as those texts are discovered, they’re flippantly burned because actually they’re not important at all! The most important thing is to just be yourself.
It’s bad writing. If they wanted to discard something sacred, they could have taken something which was actually in the series and discarded _that_. They sort of did this by ruining Luke’s character, only to reverse it at the end and have him save the day anyway. Really, Luke’s characterization really follows the same pattern. He was strongly characterized in all the other Star Wars films. Then Last Jedi throws this out the window for no reason whatsoever. Then by the time you’ve accepted that he’s a loser now, he steps up and saves the day. All more or less within the blink of an eye.
They’re just setting up a subverting expectations for the sake of doing so. It’s terrible writing, and terrible storytelling.
> They sort of did this by ruining Luke’s character, only to reverse it at the end and have him save the day anyway. Really, Luke’s characterization really follows the same pattern. He was strongly characterized in all the other Star Wars films. This was thrown out the window for no reason whatsoever.
This complaint about TLJ resonates the least with me, as a (super, at one time) fan from well before the prequels. The seeds of this later Luke and of the situation of the Jedi are there in the OT, and I’m not sure what else you do with hermit-Luke in the setting established for the new trilogy. Sticking with “he’s still a gung-ho hero” doesn’t break “routine” (Johnstone’s terminology) and wouldn’t be good storytelling, and the way in which the routine will be broken has already been hemmed in by choices in VII (he’s withdrawn from taking an active role in galactic politics). At least with this direction, there’s somewhere to go with the character, and conflict for his scenes that’s not a straight repeat of him and Yoda in Empire.
Comment was deleted :(
The books weren't actually destroyed, there is a shot of Rey with them on Millenium Falcon at the end of the movie when they pick up all the survivors. I was actually really excited about this foreshadowing a Jedi reformation - a rediscovery of true orthodoxy a la Luther and a rejection of the corrupt ediface of the Jedi Order, as seen by its fruits. This was further paralleled by the stable boy at the end using the force to summon his broom - a parallel to turning over of interpretational authority of scripture from the ecclesiastics to the laity.
Of course, all this was thrown away in the next installment, so it turns out I'm the fool!
Given that it's that time of year when the cable channels show Star Wars in entirety, this thread and your comment reminded me of a thought I had last year when rewatching Ep4 on cable. The amount of content that has come from throwaway one-liners that Lucas probably gave nearly no thought to is insane when you consider it. "I fought with him in the Clone Wars" has given us a whole movie in the saga, which then gave us a whole animated series, when then begat a handful of additional series. And that's just one example from one line. It's crazy to think about.
This is why I tend to roll my eyes at this sort of Tolkien-level analysis of the story and universe. It's just not a high-quality enough thing to really stand up to that sort of scrutiny. It's like talking about Jelly beans the same way you'd talk about wine. There's just not much there, and so much of it is just inventing things in the murk of the story.
The thing that has always bothered me about the Death Star is what a lethal place it was to work. Wrong turn and you plunge down a vent to space. Open the wrong door and you’ll be fighting for your life in a garbage compactor.
> Open the wrong door and you’ll be fighting for your life in a garbage compactor.
Technically the heroes blast a hole in the wall to get into the compactor.
Risk of being force choked to death too. The pay must be great.
I wouldn’t call myself a serious star wars fan, but my first reaction after the premise was established was “well in the briefing they told us where the trench is and so we know the fighters will come out of the equator”. Now im thinking all this really tells us is thank goodness Luke was listening during the briefing and was on the mission and not the audience or else we’d still have a Death Star.
> Why have so many of us been confused for so many years? I have a few ideas on that
Perhaps the strongest influence (?): Most video games from the Atari 2600 version in '83 onwards have a sequence where you enter the final run into the equatorial trench.
I assume the reason we got it wrong is because the equatorial trench is the only one visible to the audience at all scales.
Sure, there could be additional trenches on the surface of the Deathstar — like the seeming randomness of the digits of pi, there might even be a close approximation of the Taj Mahal somewhere on the surface — but we go with what we see, not so much what we imagine.
I played the arcade version of Atari Star Wars far too much in '83 & '84 and for some reason I never thought it was the equatorial trench.
You fly _towards_ that in the same way they do in the film (and away from it when you die), but it cuts to you in a trench so there's plausible deniability here.
It's possible I have a false memory based on my _belief_ that it's the equator trench and that there's a cut scene or transition in both the DOS version of tar Wars: X-Wing and Star Wars: Attack on the Death Star (1991) which are the ones I played most. Anyone remember for sure?
YouTube has things called "let's plays"/"longplays".
For DOS Star Wings: X-Wing, I scrubbed multiple videos and didn't see anything about the trenchrun:
https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL480EC9A01E8C50F7
There is no Attack on the Death Star PC videos that I could find. I did find Rebel Assault:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6FX3B8yC38U
Which almost explicitly avoids the entire conversation by starting at the trench entry.
I found an x68000 version of "Attack on the Death Star" (maybe the same, maybe different) and it does the same as the previous, only showing the surface turret battle and then directly into the trench:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lUzqbVRUxAE
It would appear that most games of the era were either unsure, or aware that it wasn't the hangar bay trench.
Now I have I have to read the West End Games sourcebook about the Deathstar and Episode 4 when I'm back home to check what those two have to say!
Please do and leave the comment here
Absolutely will! That's gonna take a couple of hours so.
I offer a third assumption... I believed it to be a trench parallel to the equatorial.
I knew the equatorial was hangars, but I was seduced by the shots in thinking that these were East-West trenches.
Goes to show how bad assumptions can be.
Weird, I'm not a big star wars fan but when I first watched it as a kid, the 3d map scene impressed me a lot and I always thought the trench was longitudinal because of this.
Not a big fan of the lore but I am a fan of the early production techniques and the feats that ILM pulled off on those first 3 movies were truly impressive. Also loved the design of those ships: the falcon, the tie fighter, the imperial shuttle, the slave 1. All of those were incredible.
The dish position bothered me though.
oh yeah, I distinctly remember being confused by that as a kid.
The fact that dominant common sense was so wrong about such a verifiable and obvious tidbit makes me less prone to getting emotional when people fail to understand basic biology or physics in everyday life.
Seems more Mandela Effect than scientific misunderstanding.
Interesting details here. I too have always thought the trench run took place in the equatorial trench. I thought they were just going so fast it seemed narrower.
Even within the article it is pointed out that the the computer graphics got the Deathstar dish in the wrong location.
And I just assumed they got the trench wrong too, ha ha.
Look, a lot of these sci-fi movies make no sense in space. Especially with the scale of things, and how they could structurally hold together.
For example I recently watched the movie "the Creator" and the space-based defense system "NOMAD" was clearly visible from the earth, as if it was maybe 1-3000 feet above. But no, it's in space! Yes, you heard right, it's in space, and you can see its scale in the movie, yet somehow instead of being a tiny dot, it's visible to everyone as it "hovers" over an area. So, they don't even try to make it realistic for people who think scientifically:
The main reason I take distance information in Star Trek, and space combat distances in both Star Trek and Wars, not seriously. They had to engage in what is basically hand to hand combat because both ships had to fit on either a TV screen from the 60s or the the cinema. Hence the close, perceived, distance.
The only SF series getting that right, potentially as an other way around budget issues, is The Expanse. The just show space combat on the control screens of the engaged ships. Makes more realistic as well.
The space combat in Star Wars was explicitly designed to be "spitfires in space". It was all designed from WW2 footage. Working it forwards from the physics doesn't get you there. They were going for a specific dramatic effect so everything that justifies the final look and feel gets retconned into place.
Scale’s remarkably consistent in Star Wars. There exist crazy-comprehensive analyses on the Web that check relative sizes of ships and elements of ships (and even things like blaster bolts) against one another in different scenes/shots and against stated sizes in other sources and it’s clear that’s something the SFX crews on (at least) the original trilogy paid tons of attention to, despite how much pain that must have caused, since they were working with physical models.
Obviously it didn't take place in either of those: the Death Star is not real, and the trench run was filmed in a (number of?) scale model sets.
That's an even more annoying answer, but I think it lets us pull a more interesting lesson out of this than a factoid which nerds are going to trump each other with: how "direction" in the filmmaking sense and "misdirection" in the magic sense are related. We see a series of shots from a variety of angles and follow the action from shot to shot - despite the shots not taking place at the same time or even necessarily the same place.
Watch a movie car chase set in a city you know ! For example, the Ronin car chase in Paris jumps from street to street all over the region in an entirely nonsensical way - but a person who doesn't know Paris won't mind at all, and it does look very Parisian... The rest of us just has to suspend disbelief !
Maybe the exception that proves the rule: I always thought The Blues Brothers perfectly captured the feeling of driving around in Chicago.
Bourne Identity 2. They start out on what looks like Palolem Beach in Goa, turn and walk off it into some bustling town nothing like the village there, before a few minutes later being embroiled in a car chase through somewhere looking more like Panaji.
Another example from the Bourne movie the takes place in Berlin: when he's on his way to Berlin he's not feeling well and has to pull over. But that scene was filmed in Berlin so I found it rather confusing when shortly after the scene he's still on his way and not there yet at all.
The Steve McQueen flick Bullitt w/ the car chase thru San Francisco[0] is a good example of a car chase skipping around (and one that goes thru locations people on HN may be personally familiar with).
The Morse/Lewis/Endeavour programmes often show that sort of thing, with the characters walking through various scenic areas of central Oxford which aren't directly connected.
I lived in a small town in Japan, and experienced this for a movie shot there. They would just bounce from downtown to the heights in a second!
You're never more than a couple of corners away from the Covered Market in Oxford-land.
I recall the Covered Market becoming a bus station in one Endeavour episode.
Morse was usually pretty good for this, and fairly regularly had shots of not-that-pretty bits of Oxford. Certainly the earlier ones.
Lewis, however, regularly teleported significant distances in the pursuit of A Clue.
I'll have to revisit those episodes, which I've not seen for a while.
I had an interesting experience with this for Michael Jackson's "Speed Demon" music video. I watched our copy of Moonwalker countless times, but watching the video as an adult, I recognized a number of streets and the freeway, and I realized they filmed the road sequences in Portland, OR (my home town). And it suddenly made sense, as the stop-animation in the music video came from Will Vinton studios, based in the Portland area.
My favorite, certainly because of personal connections, is when the car chase leaves Long Beach, CA to go to San Pedro on the Vincent Thomas Bridge. There's often a big dramatic thing with the toll booth, but the toll booth was on the Long Beach side, so you'd have to jump over it (or whatever) before you went over the bridge.
I believe the toll booths are gone now, the bridge has been toll free in both directions since 2000.
Lower Wacker Drive in Chicago is miles long if you watch the right Batman movie.
The insights about psychology and misdirection are definitely fascinating, but I don't see why it's necessary to shoot one aspect down to appreciate the other: For me, both discussions are taking place on different "layers" of the movie: One is the story it's trying to tell and the universe it's building, the other is the technical/artistic realisation of that story. Both are interesting (and flawed) in their own right.
When discussing a novel, you wouldn't say "well actually, none of that is real, it's all just letters on paper, but the font is really nice", would you?
I think it's less "it's all just fiction so why do you care" and more that trying to analyze fiction by looking at contradictions or inaccuracies in world building is easy but fruitless.
I think the most interesting part of the article is that it basically criticizes the film for featuring a prominent geographical feature that kinda looks like a trench and having the big ending scene take place in a trench but making the two completely unrelated. This is an example of misdirection, which can be a useful tool in storytelling, but it doesn't do anything with it.
Others have commented about films being "flexible" with real-world urban geometry to better provide a visual narrative but I think the point is that considering these "mistakes" misses the point. It's not that, say, Paris looks like that, but in the context of the film it is certainly meant to feel like that.
Patrick H Willems made a (infamous?) video about the related topic of "plot holes" a while back: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j9HivyjAKlc While I disagree with the idea that plot holes never matter (arguably they can get in the way of suspension of disbelief and be a case of bad craftsmanship even if the art itself still ends up fine) he's right that trying to dissect a film through the lens of "logic" usually misses the point.
> Well, it’s a longitudinal north-south trench because the movie literally showed us
Yeah, that's why I never believed otherwise. Didn't know anyone thought it was the equator.
Strange they misser that. As a kid when Star Wars came out it was obvious to me and my friends it wssn the equator trench
What I missed as a kid was how dumb it was to have to wait for the Death Star to "clear the planet". It's a giant planet destroying laser. If the planet is in the way you blow it up. Then blow up the moon, assuming blowing up the planet didn't take the moon with it.
That’s not really that dumb. The Death Star is powerful enough to blow up an Earth-sized mass of rock, but Yavin Prime is larger than Jupiter. If they could blow it up at all, it might have taken longer to do than just rounding the planet. Or, it might have been impossible to do safely at a range close enough to do it. Additionally, recharging the Death Star takes some time so even if destroying the gas giant was as fast as destroying Alderaan, the rebels might have gained enough time to flee.
Plus, they were really arrogant. Figured it was a sure thing no matter what they did.
I always assumed that a Death Star blast is rather expensive, so they only had the ability to do one at a time.
The planet’s a gas giant. Not clear what the superlaser does to such a body. Maybe not enough to harm the moon before the rebels have time to evacuate. Maybe it’d be dangerous to the Death Star, as well.
Yeah. Gas giant = lots and lots of hydrogen. Hit hydrogen hard enough and you can initiate a fusion burn--and while the fusion burn in the sun's core is peaceful enough it's very sensitive to temperature. Supply enough energy at one point and you can make it run fast--and propagate for a while. I rather think firing on a gas giant makes a mighty big boom--Yavin Prime, the rebel base and the Death Star would all die.
(Note that I'm talking energy densities far above a normal hydrogen bomb. The temperature/pressure required for a runaway fusion burn in deuterium-tritium is far below that required in plain old H-1.)
Maybe so, but Jupiter has been regularly impacted by meteoroids and comets with huge amounts of kinetic energy to little effect. Of course such events pale in comparison to the binding energy of a planet like Earth, which is approx. 60 trillion Gt TNT, which if I've calculated correctly is almost 9 quintillion Tsar Bombas. But if that's the Death Star's normal output, it would need to be 10,000x as powerful to completely blow up Jupiter. Who knows, maybe that's possible if the fusion reaction produced by the Death Star automatically scales up according to the mass of its target. But then I suppose a problem might be that such a large explosion could catch the Death Star itself in its blast radius, shockwave, or lethal particle shower.
Yeah, gravitational energy isn't enough to cause the sort of runaway reaction I'm talking about.
I'm not talking about the target increasing the energy of the Death Star, but whether the energy of the Death Star's weapon can initiate a runaway fusion reaction. Does Yavin simply go up like Alderaan, or does a good chunk of that hydrogen fuse to helium and fry everything around?
As it usually goes browsing this site, this was not the news I was expecting today. Having watched that scene a good handful of times, it always felt the trench was not up to scale. Good to know that it's because I was thinking they were in the equatorial trench upon every watch-through.
As an aside, it looks like they generated the visualization of the trench run with what looks like analog machinery? Interesting – I was always under the impression that they plotted on a vector display with a PDP-11, and then pointed a camera at that.
Sentient robots that can only whistle. That's all I've got to say.
For some reason that never bothered me, not even when two droids were bickering with each other on tatooine, but battle droids talking and "roger roger"ing to each other bugged me. Nobody in the 70s was asking why they didn't just use wifi, but it seemed so obvious in the new ones.
Can only whistle or choose to only whistle.
They can clearly communicate with other sentient robots, maybe they don't care that much about communicating to humanoids.
Click bait for all of you too young to have watched this originally in the theaters back in 1977.
I never assumed it was the equator but I did assume it was a line of latitude.
Green light saber. Everybody is adding way to much weight on a special effects thing they did just to make things look cool. Enjoy the story, and let it go. Nobody ACTUALLY designed a Death Star that it actually matters where the trench was.
Huh, I never thought too deeply about it, but I also never thought the equatorial band was "the trench."
Sheeple! The Death Star is flat!
Yeah, it’s a matte painting.
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Didn't we get a 3D map of the deathstar with the exhaust vent flagged? So we know where the trench is...
Crafted by Rajat
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