Because I’m such an SF fan, people expect me to have something to say about Star Wars. I mean, it’s the final episode, the series is over (let’s hope Lucas really means it), and a chapter on SF movie history is closed, right?
Bullshit. Star Wars was fine and all, at first. It was a noble, heroic, knightly story with some Zen shit thrown in. Cool, weird little aliens and a mechanized monster of a villain. And yeah, a filial connection between the villain and the hero. You have your noble savage (the wookie), your WWII fighter pilot, your Sir Gawain figure, a hottie princess, a few clown-like droids, a few older zen masters, and some funky aliens. Cool, whatever. It’s really more of science fantasy, even before the indtroduction of the ridiculous “midichlorians” into the story.
But Star Wars in its current form is so far from SF it’s not even funny.
Let me put it this way: a society that has faster-than light travel will definitely have figured out a way to prevent things like death in childbirth, or death from a broken heart. I mean, Padme was just depressed. Anakin was burned to a fucking crisp, and they saved him. And don’t give me the Dark Side excuse. The Force isn’t what’s fueling those droids, or the tie-fighters. There’s tech, loads of it, and we’re supposed to believe that a society with the kind of precision systems design and control procedure to keep an individualized urban air-transport infrastructure from clattering to pieces (look at all the ships flying around the city) can’t save a woman from dying in childbirth? If Star Wars were real SF, the whole plot would simply be impossible. The twins would have been removed and implanted into some woman who could bear them to term risk free. Or better yet, Padme’s already reinforced body would be unable to die from something as simple as childbirth.
Why? Because scientists are humans. They have wives who die in childbirth. They want to prevent such things.
Do you know how much energy it takes to break the speed of light?
A flaming hell of a lot less than it takes to universally prevent death-in-childbirthing, is how much.
Even more simply, as Anthony Lane put it in The New Yorker,
What can you say about a civilization where people zip from one solar system to the next as if they were changing their socks but where a woman fails to register for an ultrasound, and thus to realize that she is carrying twins until she is about to give birth? Mind you, how Padm?got pregnant is anybody