Per­haps George Lucas’ biggest con­tri­bu­tion to film­mak­ing is not that he rede­fined the block­buster or that he showed the way to becom­ing a power-player in Hol­ly­wood, but that he almost single-handedly made sci­ence fic­tion films a gen­uine enter­tain­ment. It wasn’t that there were no suc­cess­ful sci-fi films before Star Wars; 2001: A Space Odyssey, Planet of the Apes and many oth­ers had helped to pave the way for scripts like Star Wars to be seri­ously con­sid­ered (though Luke’s script was passed by every­one and Fox made it seem­ingly out of pity).

George made it pos­si­ble for peo­ple to expect a sci­ence fic­tion movie to break box offices records just the same as Steven Spiel­berg would rede­fine the mon­ster movie genre as fer­tile ground for block­buster sta­tus as well. It was sci­ence fic­tion as enter­tain­ment that got Lucas to make Star Wars because as a kid he was glued to the tele­vi­sion with enthu­si­asm to watch sci­ence fic­tion seri­als like Flash Gor­don. Because Fox was mak­ing Ape movie after Ape movie, Lucas knew that they would make his movie if any­one would. (And, by the way, what guts to call your movie “Episode IV”? Can you imag­ine being the stu­dio exec­u­tive read­ing the script?)

So how does Star Wars stack up in reality?

The major char­ac­ter­is­tics and char­ac­ters of the movie worth review­ing are: PARAPSYCHOLOGY (The Force), TECH, ROBOTS,  ANDROIDS and ALIENS.

REALISM GRADE > PARAPSYCHOLOGY: A

The Force, as Lucas calls it in Star Wars, is both a reli­gion and a means to make things hap­pen. Need to do chill out? Use the Force. Need to blow up history’s most pow­er­ful bat­tle­ship with Lord Vader and com­pany on your six as you fly down a trench to drop bombs into a two-meter exhaust port and you can’t do it the first time? Use The Fore.

It is used to float, fly, fight and crush throats with­out direct con­tact. More clin­i­cally stated, The Force is a lab full of toys to be stud­ied in the sub­fields of telepa­thy, pre­cog­ni­tion, clair­voy­ance, psy­choki­ne­sis and appari­tions. Why there was no Force pyroki­ne­sis is a mys­tery to me; didn’t George con­sider this one?

As far as sci­ence goes, the field of para­psy­chol­ogy is the tar­get of much scorn, so it would hardly be very sci­en­tific to say that all of this is very real­is­tic. It should get low grades, right? Not so fast.

The pur­pose of this blog is not to tear to shreds a per­fectly good fic­tion in the name of sci­ence; this blog is here to tear to shreds crappy fic­tion in the name of sci­ence when war­ranted and praise per­fectly good fic­tion as well as praise great sci­ence used in fic­tion (and clar­i­fi­ca­tion of fact men­tioned in fic­tion when it’s interesting).

Star Wars has to get an A. It’s really the movie that all oth­ers should be judged against. Who would read this blog if we were unwill­ing to grant artis­tic license to great sci­ence fic­tion films even if the sci­ence is dubi­ous? Of course Star Wars gets an A.

So how can we look at this sci­en­tif­i­cally? The Star Wars uni­verse is loaded with hun­dreds (or thou­sands) of races which rep­re­sents hun­dreds if not tens of thou­sands of worlds. Just hav­ing thou­sands or tens of thou­sands of worlds with an aver­age pop­u­la­tion of a  to ten or a hun­dred bil­lion gives you one tril­lion to maybe a quadrillion beings, of which, you only need a very tiny frac­tion to have para­psy­cho­log­i­cal abil­i­ties. In that uni­verse, there seem to be more homo sapien-like humanoids who are strong with The Force and there are races which seem to only have one as a rep­re­sen­ta­tion. Isn’t it just pos­si­ble that, here on Earth, with only six bil­lion peo­ple (a vast major­ity of which obvi­ously don’t have para­psy­cho­log­i­cal pow­ers) that if there were one or two or three peo­ple with these pow­ers, that it is just very unlikely that they would be well-known; per­haps they would be more well-known if we lived in a global soci­ety that was less afraid of the unexplainable?

In the Star Wars uni­verse, those who were strong with The Force were iden­ti­fied by the count of midichlo­ri­ans which are in all liv­ing things in that uni­verse and then fur­ther trained to develop these super-being talents.

Is it sci­en­tif­i­cally prove­able that with that many beings there aren’t any beings with these kinds of para­psy­cho­log­i­cal tal­ents? No. It’s allowed to stand as valid in that uni­verse by virtue of our inabil­ity to prove it’s untrue.

REALISM GRADE > TECH: A–

The tech­nol­ogy in Star Wars is pretty basic and straight­for­ward except for one thing.

We can cer­tainly assume that ion dri­ves and laser blasters exist. That’s prob­a­bly a hun­dred years from now in our own tech­nol­ogy time­line for Earth. But the lightsabers present an inter­est­ing prob­lem. Sure, they are like swords or flam­ing swords or energy swords or what­ever you would like to call them. But let’s look for a sec­ond at build­ing one.

You have to cre­ate some­thing that has a fixed length with­out wires and just using pure energy. I’m sorry, but unless some­one sends me some sort or fic­tional expla­na­tion of this that actu­ally, makes sense, I’m tempted to just give it a B for being less than per­fect because of lightsabers.

REALISM GRADE > ROBOTS and ANDROIDS: A

The robots (C-3PO is actu­ally an android) were extremely believ­able by the way. Very top-notch; very good! Great diver­sity as well.

REALISM GRADE > WORLDS: A

Tatooine is the first major world set­ting in Star Wars. It is a desert world with two suns. This cer­tainly makes sense. In addi­tion, the hero of the story lives on a farm with his uncle on this desert world. What kind of farm you may ask? A mois­ture farm, of course. Well, that shows there wsa some gen­uine thought put into this. The inhab­i­tants, such as the Sand Peo­ple, seem very well thought out. Tatooine is coin­ci­den­tally the home to Jabba the Hut, the self-exile home for Obi-Wan Kinobi and a hang­out for Han Solo and Chew­bacca. This planet plays a major role in the Star Wars uni­verse as it appears promi­nently in Episode I which fea­tures the Boonta Eve Podrace.

Not much was men­tioned about the specifics of Alder­aan, the home to Princess Leia, other than the fact that we watch its destruc­tion by the Death Star.

There seem to be no major sci­en­tific flaws to these worlds, so they get an A.

REALISM GRADE > ALIENS: A

The aliens in Star Wars are really the result of a very fer­tile imag­i­na­tion. I can cer­tainly see wook­iees on other worlds; tall hairy bear-like guys and gals who yell almost as if howl­ing. I can see many of the crea­tures that were in the “can­tina” scene. These crea­tures were not cre­ated by Jim Hen­son by the way. They were very impres­sive. Unlike any­one had ever scene. This was cer­tainly the biggest movie to fea­ture aliens who were hav­ing FUN as though no one was watching.

But with the rein­ser­tion of Jabba the Hut into the orig­i­nal Star Wars (Episode IV: A New Hope), I must admit that I’m really skep­ti­cal about Jabba. This giant mag­got with eyes is some­one to be feared? Really? Why? OK, so he has some mus­cle around him and maybe he has a lot money, but this giant mag­got can hardly move; he can’t play cards or use a com­puter or fly a ship or really do any­thing that somone who has a lot of power can do. Oh, yeah, sure we could imag­ine that he has peo­ple doing these things for him, but how advanced could his race be? How would lit­tle baby Jabba ever grow up to leave his world and be the king­pin of a black mar­ket in a dan­ger­ous cor­ner of the Star Wars galaxy? He’s got no fingers!

Well, I’m really review­ing the orig­i­nal Star Wars which I saw in the the­ater a long, long time ago in a state far, far away. The aliens get an A.

REALISM GRADE > OVERALL: A

Sure there was lots of derring-do, swash-buckling (What does that mean any­way?), enor­mous ships (remem­ber the open­ing?), unfor­get­table things like “Death Star,” exotic but real-sounding names of plan­ets and peo­ples and robots, psy­chic choke-holds and a pro­jected 3D holo­gram that looks like a float­ing TV screen more than any­thing, but the movie was incred­i­ble and spec­tac­u­lar in so many ways. Again, Star Wars is the movie by which all oth­ers on this blog are to be judged.

The tech­nol­ogy wasn’t per­fect, but the aliens were great, The Force is indeli­bly ingrained into the psy­che of sci­ence fic­tion fans, the adven­ture was told in a way that only a true believer could tell it. Star Wars gets an A.

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