Attack of the Clones is awful

Right, I forgot that Clones is considered by some to be the worst Star Wars movie. There's a case for that, so long as you don't count the Disney Trilogy as Star Wars movies, a position I endorse.

Comics catch-up

Spoilers...

The Phantom Menace is not as awful as The Force Awakens

To demonstrate how bad The Farce Awakens was, I will now do a recap of The Phantom Menace in the same style.

The Farce Awakens is awful (again)

I feel the need to go back and explain in detail why this movie is awful. I will use the term "Empire" interchangeably with "First Order" because they are not significantly different. Same for "Rebellion" and "Resistance."

The difference between drawing an inference and writing the story yourself

I have a long, unhinged rant against The Farce Awakens in the pipe, but I need to make a fairly large digression, so I'm going to do that in a separate post. That's what this is.

Good writing and bad writing have something in common: they won't spell everything out for you. Good writing will allow you to draw your own inferences to fill in the gaps without forcing you to play logic games. Bad writing will basically force you to put up a big chart on your wall with strings running everywhere in order to justify some holes.

Let me give you an example of each.

In A New Hope, R2 is looking for Obi-Wan, who just happens to be living near Luke Skywalker. This feels like a contrivance to get Luke involved in the plot, right? Except, Obi-Wan was very good friends with Luke's father, and could reasonably be assumed to be living near Luke in order to watch over his (Obi-Wan's) unofficial godson. This is a) the truth, as revealed by Episode III, but it's also b) perfectly deducible from the information we're given in A New Hope itself. This is good writing.

For an example of bad writing, I'm going to go after my biggest quibble with the sacred cow of the franchise. That's right: there's actually an example of bad writing in The Empire Strikes Back. I have analyzed this five ways to Sunday and it makes no sense, and I'm sorry if I'm about to ruin the movie for someone. Here it is: when the Imperial fleet arrives at Hoth, Vader kills Admiral Ozzel because "[he] brought us out of lightspeed too close to the system," thus alerting the Rebels to their presence. I don't understand this. Wouldn't the Rebels detect the Empire as they came in-system anyway? Wasn't the smartest move possible to come out of lightspeed right on top of the Rebel base? Isn't that what Ozzel did? Didn't the Rebels already have their shield up because they'd found the probe droid and knew the Empire was on their way?

Okay, so the only way that this makes sense, that "bringing us out of lightspeed too close to the system" is a problem, is if Star Wars sensors work like the ones in the Honorverse. In that franchise, it's easier to detect a ship translating out of hyperspace than it is to detect one coasting into the system. In that case, the best plan for the Empire would have been to come out of lightspeed outside of the Hoth System and coast in. The problem is, this doesn't square with what little we see of military tactics elsewhere in the franchise. For example, in Return of the Jedi, the Rebels do the exact same thing in their assault on Death Star II; they come out of hyperspace practically right on top of it, and are surprised that the Empire knows they're coming. We're meant to believe that Admiral Ozzel is incompetent, and yet Admiral It's A Trapbar makes the exact same mistake in the very next movie?

So in this case, not only does it require a massive logical leap to make sense of Vader's line, but on closer examination, that logical leap doesn't hold up. This is bad writing.