George Lucas Fails Physics Forever

Rating: 9/10 (20 December 2009)

This movie's okay, but you have to have the education of a ten year-old child to not laugh your butt off all the way through. The movie starts off with two spaceships chasing each other and firing laser blasts at each other -- didn't the producers know that sound does not travel in space? Next we get a scene inside one of the spaceships -- and all the people are standing on the deck, as if there was actually Earth-normal gravity in space! They should be floating in free-fall, idiots! A bit later the Millennium Falcon blasts off from a planet and goes to "lightspeed" with no relativistic effects whatsoever. I thought everyone knew that the speed of light was not a limit that could be arbitrarily broken like that. Furthermore, even traveling at "lightspeed" the ship would still take several years to get where it's going -- that's why the unit of distance is called a "light-year".
The movie goes on to treat us with several more very loud space battles, some of them fought by spacecraft that look like they were based on modern jet fighters, and the tactics inspired by Red Baron dogfights. To be fair, the special effects of the original 1977 version are very good. The movie loses a few points in the politics department, by taking fairy tale monarchies and transplanting them wholesale to space -- after all, the story is about a quest to save a princess from an evil empire, and involves a duel between a white knight and a black knight. There's also Han Solo, a space cowboy with a talking dog called Chewbacca as his sidekick, and a pair of robots for comic relief. (BTW, the robots are not gay. Robots are machines and therefore asexual).
It's easy to see why this movie is so frequently ridiculed. No one who saw it in 1977 took it seriously, and it's lived on for the past thirty years as a total joke. Science fiction fans consider this at about the same level of quality as "Barbarella". Which is too bad, because it's really quite a fun little romp, kind of like the old Saturday matinée serials of the 1930s and '40s.