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.

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

I’ve watched a lot of television, good and bad. Except for perhaps the MASH finale, I can’t remember a time when so many people were glued to their televisions for a series finale. Lost was definitely worth the trip.

At its core, Lost was about the characters. It might have had glowing caves and time travel, but in the end it was the characters that mattered. What made the ending so satisfactory was that there were no gimmicks used to sell you the ending. In fact, the writers did a great job of allowing people to interpret it the way they wanted.

The didn’t answer a lot about the island, but we know all we need to know. Perhaps in time we’ll learn more through other mediums like books or comics, but for now, we’re happy with the information we have. We can postulate that the island was created specifically to keep evil out. Somehow, good and evil started sparring on Earth, and the island was a way to keep evil from spreading.

– Spoilers below –

There was a lot of discussion about the sideways timeline. When the bomb went off in 1977, the characters thought it would destroy the island, and Oceanic 815 would never crash. In a sense, it’s what we all believed until we saw Desmond on the flight. Desmond was supposed to be on the island pressing that damned button, so if he’s on the flight, is it because time changed and he wound up on the flight, or was it for some other purpose? If the island really was destroyed, it’s a pretty creepy coincidence that Desmond wound up on the same flight as everyone else.

People can analyze it for years, but in my opinion, the ending was rather clear. Jack saved the island, and in effect, the entire world. He did the job he swore to do, and sacrificed himself to do so. He passed the role of caretaker to Hurley and Hurley finally gave Ben the purpose he wanted by making him his right hand man. Awesome scene.

What the sideways timeline was, to me, was Jack’s friends coming together in a timeless purgatory after they died to help him pass on after he died on the island. To be specific, they all died at some point in time, but they came together at this one point for Jack. The ability to remember their past lives is what was necessary for them help Jack. Why didn’t Ben go inside? My guess is that somehow he’s become immortal and can’t die, so he had no place in the church, or maybe he’s not ready to pass on yet. People like Michael are trapped on the island and unfortunately cannot pass on because of their sins.

The writers did a great job of allowing people to interpret the ending the way they wanted. Did anyone notice the symbols of different faiths in the stained glass window of the church? That was most definitely done so that the viewer can take what they have of their faith and apply it to the ending.

I’m happy with the way it ended. I feel like the last six years of investing in this show and its characters were worth it. In the end, it’s about love, and friendship, and asking yourself who’d show up in that church for you.

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Post tags: charlie, claire, delomni, hurley, island, jack, jin, kate, linus, lost, sawyer, sci-fi, science fiction, sun, tv

What a thrill it was to learn as a kid that a new Star Wars movie was going to be made. Sequels weren’t unheard of in the 70′s, but they weren’t as prolific as they are now. How could George Lucas not make another Star Wars movie? He had the hottest property Hollywood has ever seen, and he always spoke about how Star Wars was supposed to be a nine-part series.

In the 70′s and 80′s, movies that did well were re-released in theaters because home video wasn’t yet the big business it was to become in the mid-80′s. There was no internet to connect to, so the only way to see the trailer for the new Star Wars movie was to see it in the theater when Star Wars was re-released in 1979. The trailer for Empire has to be one of the best trailers ever made. Not only did it show brief clips of unexpected events from the new movie (OMG was Han shooting at Vader? Luke fighting Darth Vader?), but showed clips that were enough to get your nerdgasm going (Walkers…’nuff said, right?).

The events leading up to May 21, 1980 were pretty intense. The Star Wars Fan Club had a special phone number to call to hear messages from characters in the film (1-800-521-1980). I had those recordings at one point and apparently lost the one tape that I think had them all. I wanted to know which theater in my area was playing the movie. Star Wars played at the General Cinema in Menlo Park, NJ and it was the best theater in a 30 mile radius. Sure enough, Empire was going to make its area debut at that theater. The Monday before the movie opened, my mom bought me the novelization to the movie. If there was ever a time I tested myself to not spoil a movie for myself, this was it. Turning to the dark side for just a little bit, I opened to a random page near the end of the book. There, in black and white, were the five words that would make the audience gasp, and send fans into disbelief for the next three years. As a twelve year old kid, I had to tell everyone I knew, and I did, and I learned to never, ever spoil a movie for anyone ever again. To this day, I’m told by my friends of how I ruined Empire for them, but we laugh about it now.

The day the movie was released, one of the morning shows in New York teased scenes from the movie all morning. It was tough having to rip myself away from the TV to go to school, but I had to, hoping to see the movie itself that evening. My friends and I wanted to see it badly that night. Forget homework and chores, we refused to wait until the weekend to see it. My parents told me I couldn’t see it that night because my they were busy, but fortunately my dad was able to change his plans and took me to the 5pm show. There was already a line forming and we were lucky to get near the front, but as time went on, more and more people showed up and the line wrapped around the theater. I had never seen a line that long for a movie before, and it definitely wouldn’t be the last.

General Cinemas, Menlo Park, NJ. Photo courtesy of Joseph Scotti

Inside, my dad and I sat in the balcony’s front row. I got a copy of the Empire Strikes Back Movie Magazine, and flipped through a few pages before stopping myself. I had already spoiled the movie for myself once, I didn’t want to make it worse. I mean, all, we wanted to know is if Luke wound up with Leia, right?

Nobody knew how the movie would start. Flashbacks? A different opening altogether? Will things pick up at a point in the future? At 5pm the lights dimmed, the crowd went nuts, the 20th Century Fox and Lucasfilm logos came up, and there it was: “A long time ago, in a galaxy far, far away….”

The Star Wars logo erupted on the screen with the saga’s theme, but George threw us a curve ball: Episode V? Did we miss three episodes along the way? No, it was already stated that George decided Star Wars would be Episode IV, and Empire would be Episode V. Most fans already knew this, especially members of the Star Wars Fan Club who found out about it early.

Episode V

THE EMPIRE STRIKES BACK

It is a dark time for the
Rebellion. Although the Death
Star has been destroyed,
Imperial troops have driven the
Rebel forces from their hidden
base and pursued them across
the galaxy.

Evading the dreaded Imperial
Starfleet, a group of freedom
fighters led by Luke Skywalker
have established a new secret
base on the remote ice world
of Hoth.

The evil lord Darth Vader,
obsessed with finding young
Skywalker, has dispatched
thousands of remote probes into
the far reaches of space….

As the opening crawl ended and started to fade into the distance, there was a great disturbance in The Force…the film broke. A brand new 70mm print decided that it was going to snap just as everyone was getting excited about seeing the first frame of new footage from the movie. The audience, applauding just a few seconds earlier, was now booing the projection booth. They got the film fixed quickly, and we were on our way to Hoth by way of following a probe droid’s path.

I won’t go into the details of what happens in the film (since I don’t want to spoil it for anyone else!), but the audience was hooked. It was one of the few times in my life where watching a film was a communal experience. We weren’t watching it individually, we were watching it as a collective of fans. One point about the film which I always bring up is that I think the movie did well because it grounded the characters. Instead of these people being superheroes, they were characters we could relate to on a personal level, with only their environment being different than ours. The sets were incredible and really pulled the audience in. Dagobah in particular was done so well you’d think it really existed. Cloud City, to me, was the pinnacle of architecture used in any of the films because it took an unrealistic place and made you believe you could really float in the sky.

The story unraveled with such perfect pacing, something that’s lacking in today’s action movies which try to shove so much at the audience. Empire is an example of how you can make a movie that rivets the audience without having to blow something up every 12 seconds. Luke’s training on Dagobah resonated with many people and the struggles they’ve had in their lives to do their best, while Han and Leia tried to work out their romantic issues. Who hasn’t dealt with these things themselves? It all comes to a head when Luke has to decide between saving his friends and completing his training. Stay, and his friends may die. Leave, and he may be turned to the Dark Side. Both paths have their consequences.

Yoda was a pleasant surprise. When I heard there was going to be a Jedi Master in the film, I thought that it had to be a tall, warrior type. Instead we got this short, green, backwards talking character who really showed us that “size matters not”. Luke towered over him, but Yoda displayed such wisdom and power, you’d think Luke was still that whiny farm boy on Tatooine.

Boba Fett was shown during the only decent part of the Star Wars Holiday Special. That animated segment of the show was so popular that they decided to put Fett into the film. Again, the creative team did a fantastic job with his character, making him mysterious and giving him very few lines of dialog while still making him a badass.

The music of the film was beautiful. John Williams did a masterful job of creating a sonic landscape for the film. What Williams is extraordinarily good at is matching a musical score to the visual environment, and this is his best example of how he does it. One of my favorite pieces is Yoda’s theme which portrays his wisdom and patience which Luke needs to learn in this movie, as well as Yoda’s whimsical personality. Williams also created a theme for Darth Vader which resonated the very evil that Vader personifies. Some of the other notable pieces are the music in the Asteroid Field, the attack on Hoth, the theme between Han and Leia, especially when used at the end of the film in the carbon freeze chamber, and the music written for when everyone tries to escape from Cloud City. John Williams won an Academy Award for Best Original Score.

Similar to the musical landsape, I have to mention the amazing work by Ben Burtt and his sound design team. Ben made the environment believable by using sound effects which came from items in the real world. By using sounds that have their basis in our world, they don’t sound that alien and we believe what we hear.

Laughter, sadness, disbelief, anger, and confusion filled the theater that early evening. My dad asked me in the car on the way home, “So which did you like better?”. I had no immediate answer for him. Star Wars was fun, but Empire was more of a film. I think I told him I had to think about it. Thirty years later, I still teeter between the two for different reasons. Today, Empire is listed as one of the best films ever made, and it really is.

At the end we all shook our head thinking “wait, we have to wait three more years to see what happens?”. Yes, we did. Those were three very, very long years to wait.

Thoughts on the Special Edition

I felt I should weigh in on the Special Edition of Empire that was released in 1997. The changes to Star Wars were a mixed bag. I absolutely loved the shot of the Falcon taking off from Mos Eisley, but wasn’t thrilled with some of the other changes like the shot of Luke approaching Mos Eisley which looked poor, the edited shots of the Imperial officers being shot, and some of the bad CGI at the end of the film.

I was very nervous about the changes to Empire, and to be honest, I think they were all pretty good except the shot of Vader’s shuttle landing on his Star Destroyer. Not only did it destroy the pacing of the film, but it was a reused alternate angle shot from Return of the Jedi. I loved the redone shots of Cloud City. The pacing of the escape from Cloud City irks me a little to this day because I was so used to the original film. One other nitpick is a line that was changed. Luke says to Artoo “You’re lucky to get out of there”, which was changed from the original “You’re lucky you don’t taste very good”. The new line makes isn’t funny at all and I can’t understand why they’d alter that line.

I can’t complain too much about it, bit I hope those little nitpicks are fixed for the Blu-Ray release.

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Post tags: 1-800-521-1980, 30th anniversary, artoo, c-3p0, darth vader, delomni, featured, general cinema menlo park nj, han solo, lando calrissian, luke skywalker, princess leia, r2-d2, sci-fi, science fiction, star wars, the empire strikes back, threepio

Star Wars home page: http://www.starwars.com

Star Wars in ASCII: http://www.asciimation.co.nz/

Star Wars’ Wookieepedia http://starwars.wikia.com/wiki/Main_Page

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Star Trek’s communicators were pretty badass to me in the early 70′s. Oh sure, we had walkie-talkies, but they were extremely limited in range and bulky. Today, the iPhone is about as close to a communicator as we can get, and we don’t even need the flip antenna. I’d bet there were discussions about whether or not the antenna was even required in the 23rd century. I had the Star Trek Technical Manual and one of the things that got me into electronics was this schematic of a communicator. I knew communicators themselves were fake, but I always wondered if that schematic worked on some level, or if there was one component that was completely fictional. I’ll bet that mystery component had an Apple or Nokia logo on it.

Star Trek’s phasers were neat weapons, but we can’t harness a mini fusion reactor just yet. There are places to order lasers online which won’t disintegrate a raging Mugatu, but you can burn holes through balloons at 20 yards on AA batteries. I little side note: green lasers do more damage than red, but red lasers look cooler on TV. II shudder at the thought of what the world would be like with real phasers, anyway. Could you imagine what some kid that didn’t take his Ritalin could do to his classmates at school with a Starfleet issued Phaser Type II?

The two remaining technologies I’m waiting to see are transporter technology and warp drive. I still believe that there’s something that can allow us to move faster than light without turning us into a puddle of goo, but I could be completely wrong. The idea of transporters is intriguing since it brings up so many philosophical issues. For one thing, when you’re transporting at the speed of light, do you compensate for the Earth orbiting the Sun? If you don’t, parts of your body materialize on the other side of the planet in pieces as the stationary beam tries to put you back together while we move at several thousand miles per hour. Betcha didn’t think about that. Even if you try to compensate, tiny variations like earthquakes could make for a rather bad day. “Bob, what happened to your arm?” “Oh, there was a tremor when the beam started”. It’s the same issue I have with time travel movies. Then there’s the issue of whether or not a transporter can move your soul with you. I don’t want to get into that whole debate, but it’s an interesting topic to bring up at a pub.

Star Trek: The Next Generation had a lot of the tech that the original Star Trek did, but there was one piece of technology called the PADD which will be realized tomorrow, and that’s Apple’s iPad. Like the PADD on Star Trek: TNG, the iPad will have a touch screen interface, the ability to respond via voice, connect to a network, and play videos. Douglas Adams had a similar device in “The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy”, but it was the PADD that truly realized a personal data device. The nice thing about the iPad is that you don’t have to listen to Vogon poetry to own one. However, I can’t see streaming episodes of “The View” being any better.

I remember watching “The Martian Chronicles” when it was on TV, listening to the narrator say that the Martian was “listening to his book”. I thought about that for a minute and realized how cool it would be to passively close your eyes and listen to a book instead of reading it. Today, most major books are out in some audio format. Do we start colonizing Mars next? There’s talk about it. Ray Bradbury would be proud.

The problem with living in the future you always wanted is predicting where things are going next because you’re so enthralled by what’s current. Oh sure, things can get smaller, data networks can get faster, but in the end, we still have to drive to work, and we’re not eating preformed cubes as food (not very romantic). I don’t think 3D technology will catch on as the TV manufacturers will make you believe it will and be the next big thing, I think there’s going to be some new technological breakthrough, like the transistor itself, which will change everything all over again. It will probably be found accidentally.

I still think anti-grav would be fun at parties.

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Post tags: audio books, careful with that phaser eugene, communicators, delomni, phasers, ritalin, sci-fi, Star Trek, star trek the next generation, star trek tng, starman, the martian chronicles

You can find them at geekalerts.

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