Deus Ex Force

Writing proper continuity has to be tough when your main concern is telling a good story. Star Wars has to be one of the more popular stories ever made, but even the most popular stories can have flaws.

The Force is a convenient way to get your characters to solve certain problems, but it can also be a crutch because it makes things too easy. The line by Darth Vader says in A New Hope, “the ability to destroy a planet is insignificant next to the power of The Force”. Whoa. So does he mean The Force as a whole, or what a person can command from it? If it’s the latter, I see no point in bothering to do anymore more than twitching my trigger finger and ripping the top off the Rebel Base. Oh, and that Death Star you built, the Empire didn’t really have to build it because Vader can destroy Alderaan with a really loud sneeze.

Let’s say he’s talking about The Force as a whole, there are still some rather troubling inconsistencies. In Attack of the Clones, Obi-Wan waves his hand across a door and it opens for him. Is that because he really did open it, or that the sensor finally saw him come out of the rain? Sorry to say, but we can do that here on Earth. Supermarkets have them. In Return of the Jedi, Luke’s struggling to open the door to the Rancor pit. I suppose Yoda never taught Luke the intricacies of opening doors.

Jedi Mind Tricks are great at parties, but apparently not on the Death Star. These guys are supposedly clones, if I were Obi-Wan, I’d be Jedi Mind Tricking these Xeroxed bastards to kill each other. He planted a suggestion in some kid’s head in Clones to get a better life, is it morally wrong for some fabricated mouthbreather to shoot the guy in white next to him? Problem solved. In fact, I’d be more subtle about it and suggest to the stormtroopers that pink is in this year and that painting his uniform would be a good idea.

Force Choking is another interesting device. Luke used it on the Gamorrean guards in Jabba’s Palace, but didn’t use it on the Rancor, or Jabba, or Fett, or that obnoxious, laughing muppet infatuated with Jabba’s tail (it WAS his tail, right?). That whole Rancor pit scene is ridiculous because it should have gone like this:

Luke falls in pit

Luke kills the Gamorrean guard by Force Choking him.
Actually, scratch that, let the guard get eaten
by the Rancor first because that was pretty funny.

Luke Force Chokes the Rancor, and then his keeper
because he looks stupid on screen crying like a baby.

But that’s not exciting, is it? It would have been damn funny, though.

Force Chatting is when you can call up your friend’s brain and have a few words with them. That’s got to be annoying as hell. You’re sitting alone, watching “Dancing with the Star Wars”, and all of a sudden your brother invades your brain and asks if your dad’s birthday is this Friday or Saturday. When you ask why he talks to you that way, he says he can’t afford the cost of the call from Tatooine to Sullust. Your Jedi brother is cheap. As a plot device, why didn’t Vader pester Luke between Empire and Jedi? Vader’s supposed to be evil, I think he’s get in Luke’s brain as much as he could. “Luuke, Luuuuuuuuuke, tomorrow’s Father’s Day. Want to watch a game on the big screen at my house?”

One of the unintentional funny parts of Return of the Jedi is when The Emperor removes Luke’s shackles with a lift of his finger, and Luke looks up with his best Keanu Reeves imitation and has a look like “whoa, snap, he can do that with his finger”. I never understood why Luke had to have the look of utter shock on his face from that. Luke has seen Yoda pull an X-Wing out of a swamp, but releasing shackles is apparently bigger than that.

So in the end, the use of The Force is nothing more than a convenient plot device. It may not be deus ex machina, but it sure is deus ex force.

Tags: delomni, luke, rancor, sci-fi, science fiction, star wars, the force, vader, yoda

Category: Entertainment