Explaining Star Wars

Have you ever thought about how much prior knowledge is required for movies?

"Passion of the Christ" is just a snuff film if you're not familiar with Christianity. And who was that guy we saw at the end with holes in his hands?

"Moon" requires the assumption that you know what clones are. And robots.

The movie that inspired this thinking was "Star Wars". I was listening to an audio version and started to think about the stuff that we just KNOW about what's going on.

Say you find yourself in a "Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court" type situation. Lacking any real skills needed to survive in that era you find yourself telling stories in exchange for food and shelter. A regular wandering minstrel sort. So you sit down to tell a story that you know well. Action, adventure, romance, and all that. "Long, long ago, in a galaxy far, far away..."

R2D2 and C3PO are obvious concepts to us. We're accustomed to computers and have an understanding of robots from previous movies. We see them and -ding- know they're robots. The story moves on. However, you're sitting around a fire and before you can get any momentum going they stop you.

"What's a robot?"

Armored golems, maybe? Do they even know about golems yet?

Then there's the trouble with space ships. They're a kind of sailing vessel that travels between the stars. You see, the stars are just suns that are very far away. And they each have their own planets with different kinds of people living on them.

You're looking at getting yourself burned as a witch before you even get to Luke and the Skywalker Ranch.

Stormtroopers can be described as special soldiers, Vader as a Duke dressed all in black. Princesses they understand. But the Imperial Senate? Heck, even we have issues with the ideas of royalty being elected. Having convinced them you're not a witch you could get beheaded for discussing radical new forms of government.

Try to explain how the robot projects a hologram of the princess. You're already having issues explaining robots. Now explain holographic messages to a people who don't even have wax records. And how does the armored golem shaped like a tree trunk make these magic images?

What are blasters to people who don't have cannons, let alone guns. Lightning arrows, maybe?

The Force comes remarkably easy since they had to explain that in the movie.

Then come the aliens. The metal automatons came to make sense. Jawas could be human, just small and robed. Try to get the idea of Jabba or the Rancor across intact. How about a light saber? OK, call it a laser sword, you still have to explain a laser. (note: the audio version described it as a beam of light as wide as a thumb. You might get to pull this off.)

Don't get me wrong. The movie can be adapted to medieval with some thinking. The point I'm getting at is how much we have to just know in order to make a movie work. Stuff someone must have introduced to us properly before. "The Matrix" was mind blowing for so much of the population because it had several concepts that fans of the sci-fi genre were familiar with but most people were not. A time paradox was novel when reading "A Sound of Thunder" back in middle school and still made you think when you first saw "Terminator". But by the time you got to season two of "Heroes" and saw Hiro go back and meet his childhood hero in ancient Japan you were more or less comfortable with the ideas of self-fulfilling prophecy and the grandfather paradox.

Of course, I'm using sci-fi as examples. Show Abe Lincoln a movie and the moving pictures alone would likely freak him out.