Reader Clint thinks that I should devote more time to the political elements in "Revenge of the Sith", and forget about the engineering shortcomings. I am mildly rebuked for focusing on minutiae. He further maintains that the secessionist, tax-dodging villains might have been the real heroes of the piece.

It’s an intriguing notion. That interpretation would of course cast the Jedi as the morally bankrupt enforcers for an oppressive, corrupt regime. On the other hand, the Jedi never indulged in orbital mass bombardment of noncombatants or the indiscriminate execution of juveniles, did they? And the invasion and blockade of Naboo look more like a mercantilist power grab than a quest for libertarian free trade. Clearly, mistakes were made on both sides.

De Gustibus, Clint. It takes all kinds.

Meanwhile, let’s just step back a bit and think. Sure, there was plenty more wrong with the movie, but my lack of commentary doesn’t mean I didn’t see it. It just meant that this particular flaw tickled my fancy. Equally egregious (good name for a general, huh?) examples abound.

For instance, why is there never an escape pod right there on the bridge in these sorts of movies? It’s always at least two decks away and down a burning corridor. Bad design philosophy, yet again.

The blowout shutters were a nice touch, and long overdue in my estimation, but then they went and forfeited my warm good feelings when I remembered the shutters on the hanger deck were sliding shut along the portal’s lengthiest possible dimension. Instead of racketing along from left to right, any sane designer would have had them close from bottom to top, or better yet, bottom and top.

I can hear your objections. It’s just an adventure movie. We need jeopardy to provide the thrills. We need fast paced, harum-scarum action, with pitfalls, booby traps, and skin of our teeth escapes. Therefore, the demands of the narrative absolutely require that Anakin pilot a disintegrating juggernaut all the way to the surface, that he dive his starfighter through the closing shutters with inches to spare, that he be subjected to much humorous elevator travail. Lighten up fanboy, it’s only a movie!

Sorry. That is not the fanboy way. Would you really have this or any other movie be immune to criticism? Of course not.

Leaving the trivial criticisms behind us for a moment, I have a more sensible objection to this kind of thing. If a movie is trying to produce a given effect on its audience, perhaps to sweep them up in a grand tide of emotion, it would seem prudent for it to avoid distracting them at crucial dramatic moments with annoying incongruities. The audience shouldn’t start questioning things too much, so the movie should avoid giving them things to question. For me, the auto-destructing civil engineering was a real mood breaker.

In fact, the whole idea of auto-destruct in general has always struck me as an iffy proposition. Why would you even want it? It’s just one more thing to go wrong.

Now if you had been raised in the Federation, where auto-destruct sequences seem to be a way of life, you might be able to explain the value to me. Federation kids grow up around auto-destruct mechanisms, so naturally they respect them and handle them properly. A Federation kid will commonly have an auto-destruct on his first tricycle. It's not unusual to see rural children toting surplus auto-destructs out to the woods to hunt squirrels with.

For that matter, if anyone remembers "Forbidden Planet" there's a planetary auto-destruct located in the Krell Machine control center. It looked very much like a bicycle pump. Now why would they have put that there?
It was in plain sight, without even a guard rail. Auto-destructs. Ha!

You know, I wanted to go along with The Lucas's promptings, but I just spun out and lost momentum. Why aren’t Obi-wan and Anakin being toasted by the lava’s heat? Why do those little floaty-droids have such dinky lava-buckets? Why doesn’t Obi-wan do the right thing, the merciful thing, and finish Anakin off?

Well, it had to be that way. There’s that next trilogy to keep in mind.

Others may have their own hot-buttons. Fine, it’s a big tent. How about an illicit love affair, carried out in a transparent penthouse apartment? An apartment surrounded by, I don’t know, maybe a million windows? Ah, but maybe it was tunable one-way glass. Space glass.

Okay. I can’t prove it isn’t. But what about Padme’s terrace? The Republic can build flying surveillance droids smaller than a basketball, but nobody seems to give that fact a second thought. I guess they’re illegal or something.

My mother once told me that it isn’t so much the big, expensive mistakes that kill a marriage. Those are usually forgiven (even if never forgotten). No, she said it’s all the little stupid mistakes, piling up day by day.

I want a divorce.