Not even a fantasy-leaning sci-fi story like Star Wars is immune to this, no matter how much George Lucas might want it to be. I've seen so many people being taken out of The Last Jedi by the scene where someone goes outside without a spacesuit, even though it happens in basically every other space opera at some point. You gotta sell the trick or it don't work.
If you mean the Leia scene, it's not implausible to me, even by realistic standards. It's possible to remain conscious in vacuum for maybe 15-20 seconds, and to survive for up to 2 minutes. The timing was about right, and she was still incapacitated and in need of advanced medical treatment afterward. It's actually one of the less fanciful bits in
Star Wars, but audiences have been so misled by decades of inane misrepresentations of how vacuum works (the ultimate inanity being
Outland showing people exploding like water balloons the instant they hit vacuum, which is totally misunderstanding what "explosive decompression" means) that they don't recognize a reasonably accurate depiction when they see it.
It's nowhere near as silly as the sequence in Episode III where a ship in space tilts 90 degrees and the interior gravity rotates with it. I've seen it rationalized that the ship was actually hovering in place in Coruscant's upper atmosphere, but if it's levitating over a planet, then presumably it's negating the planet's gravity and any weight the occupants feel would be from the ship's internal artificial gravity, which should remain consistently toward the deck regardless of how the ship is oriented.
On the other hand, I thought red matter worked well because of how vague it is. I can't say it wouldn't work in real life, because I don't even know what it's doing! All I know is that is that it's sci-fi stuff from the future and when it's dropped onto something a black hole appears, and that's all the movie needs in the moment.
No, that takes it too far for me. It's one thing to postulate an as-yet-undiscovered substance that achieves a physically plausible effect, but what Red Matter did was just absurdly fanciful and offered without even a hint of a handwave explanation.
But Trek is usually good at giving impossible things enough levels of plausible explanation that I can reach an answer I'm satisfied with before I dig deep enough to hit the impossible part.
"How does the ship go faster than light?" - It uses a warp drive.
"How does the warp drive work?" - The warp drive uses a matter-antimatter reaction regulated by dilithium crystals to power giant nacelles full of warp coils which create a warp bubble that distorts space-time.
"How does... actually, you know what, I'm happy to accept that and move on."
But warp drive is not a fantasy idea. It's a legitimate, if prohibitively impractical, solution of the equations of General Relativity. It uses an entirely real physical phenomenon, the distortion of spacetime by gravity, to achieve a speculative result. It's a concept that was well-established in prose science fiction for over three decades by the time TOS came along. It's grounded in the known and the real, and that makes it a credible extrapolation. The only implausibilities of it are in the nitty-gritty details, which is good enough for fiction.
Heck, by the standards of 1960s-80s sci-fi TV, even acknowledging that you would
need a faster-than-light drive to reach alien star systems, rather than simply using a rocket or drifting on a rogue Moon, was above-average science literacy. And understanding that matter-antimatter annihilation would be the only energy source powerful enough to make it feasible was good science too, even if not all of Trek's writers understood how antimatter worked ("The Alternative Factor" being the worst offender in so many ways, but there was also "Obsession" grossly overstating its power). The way they used dilithium was fine, because they didn't propose it as the
source of power, merely as a part of the systems that stored and channeled the power.
Red matter, by contrast, pays lip service to a real phenomenon, black holes, but depicts them entirely wrongly and treats them as essentially magic. It's not the same at all. Abrams couldn't even be bothered to come up with a name that sounded like something scientific. "Red matter?" That's absurdly vague. At least "protomatter," the name of another completely fanciful Trek MacGuffin, suggested an actual meaning, as "proto-" suggests an ancestral or primitive form of a thing, a forerunner or more basic state that it arises from. You can tell from the name what it's meant to imply, and it's an implication that fits the context. I'd be the last person to argue that protomatter makes sense as a concept, any more than Genesis does, but at least its
name makes sense, compared to the laziness of "red matter."
Yeah, because that's point it goes off the rails. "Dilithuim crystals". Might as well be Kyber crystals.
There's nothing implausible about the idea that future science might discover or synthesize new materials we don't know about yet. Setting a story in the future but limiting it only to phenomena we know of today is the opposite of plausibility.
It's only implausible when you do it in a way that
contradicts what we already know. A recurring mistake is postulating that alien bodies or technologies are made of elements not found on Earth's periodic table. This is nonsense because the stars and planets of the galaxy all formed out of the same clouds of gas and dust, and the elements forged in stellar cores and supernovae and the like have been spread throughout the galaxy and intermixed and incorporated into new stars and planets. There might be new stable transuranic elements formed in some younger star systems, but they'd probably be too heavy and radioactive to be useful in forming living bodies or spaceship hulls or whatever.
It gets even dumber in something like
Captain Marvel where they say that Skrulls that have lived on Earth for decades are made entirely of unearthly elements. How can they survive on our food, air, and water, then? And if an organism has been living on Earth for years, eating and metabolizing our food, then most of its body would be made of Earthly materials by now, except maybe for the minerals in its bones and teeth.
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