The Phony Physics of Star Wars Are a Blast. You can’t see laser shots and X-wings wouldn’t turn like that in space, but “it’s more fun this way”.
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Oh cool! Thanks for linking to my friend Rhett's article!
Looks like a great article, but it's paywalled for me.
Not that I'd condone such a thing, but sometimes you can work around that by going to Reader View (Safari - Mac) and then doing COMMAND+R to page refresh.
I remember the moment when I really gave myself over to the "space fantasy" concept: during "The Force Awakens" when the First Order destroyed Coruscant (or whatever it was), and everybody on a completely different planet just looked up in the sky and watched it happening, as though the distance between planets was like us to the moon. "Alright," I said to myself, "we're just gonna be okay with this. It's about space wizards for chrissake."
To this day, any time I feel the itch for hard science fiction from my Star Wars, I'll mutter "space wizards" to myself. It helps.
When the first (release sequence) movie came out I in 1977 recall some publicity that suggested the makers had studied film of WWII dogfights for the motion. So the fighters moved in ways viewers could interpret and might expect - even if not 'realistic'. Related, I am convinced that I hear the sound of a Rolls-Royce Merlin in the introductory sequence.
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