Wednesday 31 July 2013

Rainy Night in George Lucas's Imagination

I am in the middle of writing a mammoth post concerning the Song of Ice and Fire novels and the fantasy/sci-fi genres generally (of which - spoiler alert - I'm not a fan). It is nudging me towards thinking about fictionality and, hopefully, the issues I dealt with in my long-neglected thesis, which I need to return to.

But first - this. Below is a still I saw ages ago in a magazine article about the forthcoming Star Wars prequel (you know the one I mean – the one that was so bad it made your shit itch):


Bigger image here. Ewan MacGregor in the guise of a rained-on Noel Edmonds, acting badly in a bad film. What interested me was the rain - it struck me that, fantasy/sci-fi being what it is, this scene must take place on a planet where it always rains. 

A month or so later, as I walked out of the cinema in a cascade of obscenities and disappointment, I was at least gladdened to have been proved right - Obi Wan had visited the World of Always-Rain.

My question is - what property of fantasy/sci-fi made this predictable? Why would we think (or why did I think) that a planet of constant rain is appropriate to the genre, but a passing rain shower not?

1 comment:

  1. If you can't ascribe a believable character to your characters, you can try to ascribe it to their environment.

    More seriously, I suppose those genres always involve people's dealing with the special challenges of environments different from our own. Desert-World & Snow-World are rather more striking than Tuesday-in-Margate-World though, so you're right to pick on this latest instance as a sign of exhaustion.

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