Nintendo DS Survives Everest

[A Black Falcon]

Perhaps you just don't realize just how extreme a situation Lucas put on here when he created "level 8, lava world", but it really is that hot. Perhaps there is some property of those lightsabers that makes them unblockable by force powers though... I suppose that maybe they have special vibrations synched with those power crystals or whatever that manage to destabalize any force protection the jedis could have.

Then how do people stand near erupting volcanoes (in the real world), DJ? You can take the heat... and Jedis definitely have ways to deal with heat (or cold, or a lack of oxygen, etc). They can regulate things... they just can't regulate a beam of light hacking through their body. :) And if they get distracted, of course they'd lose concentration... maybe Anakin wouldn't have burned (or just his clothes would have) if he had not been in shock from being so badly hit, the Force gives them a lot of power. Not unlimited power, but a lot of power...

Once again, I feel I must point out exactly what I'm after here. When I say that certain things should be realistic, I'm not saying "that's not how it works, monkeys can't fly!".

You do kind of sound like that sometimes though...

Now on this jumping issue, I will simply say that I acknowledge that you can easily come up with retcon to explain exactly how it works. You've already offerend one possible explanation of constant reboosts in mid jump to maintain speed coupled with constant slowing bursts on the way down to prevent acceleration. Both would actually make tactical sense in fact. However, in the end that shouldn't have been needed. In fact, I'm not going to use such explanations. In the end, I'll simply conclude that the "reality" of the scene did involve all the right things, but it was this movie's expression of it that got it wrong.

Yoda does midair flips. They weren't started when he was on the ground, I think. :)

Just saying, there is obviously an element of midair corrections. Yes, another element probably is unrealistic portrayal, but it's not ALL that. Jedis definitely have the ability to adjust their jump midjump.

Surely if Lucas HAD actually taken the physics of thrown and falling objects into account, Star Wars fans would see that as an example of Lucas' attention to detail and applaude it though. This much you must admit would be true.

Reminds me of the articles arguing that there should have been complete environmenal destruction on the Endor moon... :)

It's fantasy, Lucas just wasn't thinking of it in a completely "is this really possible" sense. The books make a much greater effort to do things that are really possible within the rules, but the films sometimes admittedly do play with the facts... like Endor should have had some problems. :) Perhaps not that 'total obliteration' thing, not if they made an effort to minimize the damage (post-battle), but something... that's a big station, and not a huge planet (with low gravity -- how else would even small critters like Ewoks get those gliders to stay in the air?).

So, we must assume, as is indicated anyway I believe, that the gravity generator was somehow disabled.

I'm almost certain that it was mentioned.

Zero-G: I don't know how it "should" have happened. But I thought that they were entering the atmosphere, and they were sliding because the floor was tilted... I'd need to watch it again to be sure though, but I thought that they went into the atmosphere first (or were doing so)... oh, and once it is in the atmosphere, shouldn't they slide because now they are being pulled by gravity and the deck is sloping so they won't stand still?

Again, I'm not saying that they have to make everything obey real world physics. That's boring and crippling. But, there is something to be said for not only inventing new physics but maintaining a certain touch stone with us.

Not all of what you complain about actually breaks the rules of physics in the way you imply, I think... like the heat thing, that's explained by the Jedi powers, not by changing how heat works. Same for Jedis exposed to a vacuum would be, or how high/far they can jump, or being able to affect minds, etc... it's not so much changing the rules that exist as adding things that modify how those rules are applied. :) (same for hyperspace... normal space works as we would expect, I believe... okay, so Star Wars does have incredibly powerful engines and weapons (those turbolasers produce a LOT of power. A LOT.), and ships that can go really, really fast even in normal space, etc, but there is "technology that can do that" and I don't think that any of those things technically break the rules... they're just unimaginable from our current standpoint. There's a big difference there.)

For example, any good story has humans in it somewhere.

Humans... the main reason for this is obvious: We are humans, so we understand them. Alien cultures will necessarially be based at least in some way on our human culture... we can also guess based on other animal cultures, but no other animal on earth is anywhere near as intelligent as humans so that makes things hard... and we can't really go beyond the 'what' to the 'why'... we don't know what ants are "thinking", if they're thinking anything at all... so how would we know what a super-intelligent-giant-ant civilization would be like, or how its citizens can think? We base it on guesses and humanity, that's what we do... we are humans, so of course it's easiest for us to identify with them.

In movies, though, the answer is simpler. Actors must be human. :) Unless you're doing an all-CG film, you're stuck. It's either a person or someone in a costume, and costumes can only vary the human form to a limited degree... so we get Star Trek with its ridiculous "seeding of the galaxy by a humanoid species" to explain it, and Star Wars with almost all aliens conveniently having two arms, two legs, and a head on top (yes, there are exceptions, but they aren't the majority.). Books? I'd blame it either on limited imagination or the fact that truly imagining what a real alien species would be like is something kind of impossible for us to do, so we just do what we can and make a human-ish culture. (Oh, I'm not saying that there have never been well done 'really-not-human' cultures, just that they're a LOT harder to create, and when they are done they generally seem to bear a suspicious familiarity to at some Earth animal society or other (Giant Ants... FROM SPACE!)... :D)

And, I've come to pretty much be convinced of that. If I see something like The Lion King, they don't really make any claims that any of the animals are anything more than creatures who act exactly like humans. Had they made the claim that lions are completely different than humans, they would need to add one somewhere, perhaps shooting Simba's mother or something, so you could get some glimpse of how the author sees humans.

Oh, stuff like that doesn't even pretend to represent real cultures, I'd say. Any film with talking animals is about humans and human culture, not animals. Animals aren't like that and we all know it. It's not a 'touchstone' (which it might be in a LotR) because it's not actually a truly different culture...

However, that extra mile, an added attention to detail, really would have made it more clear. What I'm getting at is that something as simple as realistic jumping physics, after that initial burst of force, would really drive home how amazing the force is in this universe, at least at a barely liminal level.

It's scifi/space opera adventure. For that kind of film, Star Wars does great. You just can't expect the level of scientific accuracy that you'd get from a 2001, as GR said! It's not realistic! They don't focus on the science... they do things and hope it works somehow or can be explained. And for that, they did great... I wouldn't say that SW is full of major scientific issues that are completely unexplainable.

And again, in Zelda there is a LOT that defies our world, of course. However, they keep certain things normal so we have some idea of what the hell is going on. For example, Link is pretty much human (aside from those ears) and thus has human limitations. If everyone was a superpowered freak, then for what purpose would I be gathering a tool kit? No, it was the fact that he was realistically limited that made gathering all those tools with pretty obvious utility such a joy.

That's not done because, quite simply, then there would be nothing to expain why they didn't solve their own problems. :)