Special effects are not worthless but they are second-tier when it comes to storytelling.
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The particulars of this vision aren’t really important because they are just a bunch of teases that are disappointing but what is important is the number of questions raised around it.
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The End of Oak Street never answers the God question and never directly contradicts Carl Sagan but it raises nagging questions.
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The Force offers power, and, to maintain that power in a non-destructive manner, one must learn virtues and not give in to temptation.
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Flying a ship and fixing a ship are two different skills. They were able to patch the ship up well enough, but they couldn’t take care of the problem with the hyperdrive by themselves, which is why they went to Lando in the first place.
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Han tells Leia directly that he is in this for the money, not the revolution, which is not something a typical sleazy character would say.
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Rey’s piloting skills start out rough, but before long she’s weaving through a downed star destroyer with ease.
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The TIE fighters would make sense if the pilots knew someone was going to fly off the planet, but they have no way of knowing that.
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The point behind the “boy on a farm” trope is that the character must grow into the role of hero.
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There are plenty of flawless or powerful characters in storytelling. Sherlock Holmes has flaws, but he is powerful in the respect that his intellect is unparalleled, and his character has defined a genre of storytelling.
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The main problem with The Force Awakens is that it’s the most strategic—and by that, I mean cynical—films I’ve ever seen.
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A critical question for assessing the future of AI is, why did the space agency give HAL almost total control of the ship.
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We don’t really get to see enough of HAL 9000 when he is actually a help to the space travelers, which reduces the impact of his turn.
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One thing is for certain. In the iconic Dawn of Man sequence, the Monolith is conveying information. The question is how.
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Letting the question of who sent the monolith remain a mystery was probably a wise dramatic choice on the part of the writers.
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The greatest measure of a film’s success is the test of time. Something about this film works even though it breaks conventions.
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Escalation is where the Terminator franchise went wrong. The writers kept enlarging their world until it became contradictory.
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To keep the story under control, the time machine itself should be a hard system even if the concept of time is soft and pliable.
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Time travel into the future is not as tricky as travel into the past because altering the future does not create so many complex story problems.
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Shrouding the story rules in mystery only works with soft magic systems where the story focus is on something other than the system.
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