What’s the best Star Wars movie? The Empire Strikes Back, of course.
But something about ESB has always bugged me. It’s a question: For how long does Luke train with Yoda?
We can’t know for sure, because the movie doesn’t give us much in the way of dates. We do know, however, that he’s training while Leia, Han, C3PO and Chewie escape from the imperials, flee to Cloud City, and get polished up for lunch. How much time is that?
It can’t be much, unless Leia and Han actually spent a couple of months chilling out inside that giant worm’s belly. Let’s be generous and say an entire day goes by before they meet Lando, another day before Lando betrays them. That puts them around the time that Luke has his future visions about Darth Vader roasting up Han.
So Luke trains for 2 days — 3, at most — before he runs off to fight the most powerful Jedi Knight in galactic history. He’s lucky he only had an arm chopped off. Yoda doesn’t even teach him how to swing a lightsaber. It’s as if Jedi Knight Training is a course on Lynda.com. You learn out to turn on the lightsaber, swing it around, feel the force, put the certificate on your LinkedIn profile and there you go!
And yet — when you watched the film, how many people got up and left the theatre in disgust? Very few, I suspect. Most people probably didn’t bother to think of the problem. It made me wonder: how believable does a work of fiction have to be, in writing or in film, to work? How ‘true’?
It may depend, in part, on your medium. Massive plot holes riddle almost all big action films. But if you’ve got a giant non sequitur in the middle of your novel, chances are that everyone from your agent to your editors to your fans (if the book gets that far) will hold it against you.
A cynical take: Your work has to be just accurate enough to maintain the illusion of immediate believability, or what some people call the suspension of disbelief.
A more cynical take: write what you like, and it will work as long as you don’t get caught.
An even more cynical take: You can get caught, just after you’ve made money.
The decent thing is to be as accurate and as believable as you can be. Respect your audience. Being sloppy with plotting or timelines shows that you don’t think much about the intelligence of your readers, or your viewers. After all, you can fool them once, but the next time around, they might not be so forgiving.
I mean, George Lucas could get away with passing off the notion that you could spank a giant ball of steel in the sky with a proton torpedo barely big enough to kill a two-meter womp rat, and the whole thing would go kaplooey. (Yes, that was all rationalized in the last film, and yes, we were grateful.)
In the next film he convinced us that a 2-day yoga retreat in a swamp could turn a kid in a plumber outfit (oh, that’s a flight suit?) into a mythical warrior.
But Lucas tightened things up in Return of the Jedi. No need for trenches here. Instead, in the New and Improved Death Star, the imperialists have graciously created ship-sized tunnels that lead straight to the centre of the thing, where another womp-rat-sized target conveniently awaits.
Because no one would think of putting on HATCHES on those tunnels that you could CLOSE, so that an invading fleet couldn’t just fly into the guts of your incredible weapon to BLOW THE DAMN THING UP AGAIN, RIGHT?
Never mind.
