Originally Posted by
DigiFluid
No, I don't think GL even knows. Because if you pay attention to the events in the film and think about them logically in terms of time passing, there are a lot of occasions where things just don't track. Some of these (I'm thinking in particular of hyperspace lanes) are explained by EU material, but in GL's mind that's a separate universe, so they can't really be counted when considering what his intent for the films may have been. Consider:
Episode I
The Jedi hitch a ride with the landing droid army at the beginning, but when they decide they need to go to Theed, the Gungan leader tells them that the fastest way to get there is through the planet core. For reasons unfathomable, this suggests that the droid army landed on the opposite side of the planet from the world's capital. Moreover, in taking the 'shortcut' through the core, they're supposed to be getting there faster, right? So how come the droid army--which landed on the far side of the planet--is already an occupying force in the city? That's one fast-moving army, for such clumsy droids!
And then eventually they get off-planet, make the jump to hyperspace, and decide they need to put down somewhere for repairs after just a scene in between to break up that story. They then spend what seems like it should be weeks on Tatooine, but it's portrayed as about three days while nary a day seems to pass on either Naboo or Coruscant.
They get off Tatooine, hop into hyperspace and....in the time it took them to get from Naboo to Tatooine (a b-plot scene interrupt), they're able to jump from Tatooine to Coruscant in the Core. So....why didn't they just go straight there and get repairs while they were taking care of business? Sure it's implied (or maybe even stated, I forget) that Tatooine is in the Rim while Coruscant is in the Core, but the on-screen depiction of the passage of time seems to ignore the transit time necessary to traverse vast distances in space.
Episode III
So right near the beginning of the film, after the Battle of Coruscant, Padme informs Anakin that she's pregnant. She's not showing any signs of it physically, she just knows, and we get to see some sickeningly poorly written and badly directed 'romantic' scenes to pass the time. However, in what appears to be the span of about 3-4 days by watching the film, she expands considerably and is indeed able to give birth at the end of the movie. Even if it's premature, she appears to have endured 4-6 months of pregnancy in what the movie seems to portray as 3-4 days. Impressive, but doesn't make any sense.
But when it really gets out of whack starts when Order 66 and the attack on the Temple occur. Think about it... Mace dies and Anakin/the 501st march on the Temple on the night of Order 66, while we see an actually fairly impressive and touching montage of the Jedi being exterminated. Obi-Wan impossibly survives a fall, Bail Organa is on Coruscant and sees what's happening at the time, and Yoda's dinner gives him heartburn.
On that same night and early into the next morning, Anakin stops by Padme's and then jets off to Mustafar to kill the Sep leaders, Yoda launches what seems to be an escape pod off of Kashyyyk and Bail is now suddenly and inexplicably on his ship in the neighbourhood of both Kashyyyk and Utapau and is able to pick up both Kenobi and Yoda. Then, without stopping anywhere, they head back to Coruscant (without ever explaining why Bail was off-planet in the first place) so that the Jedi can futz with the Temple beacon and Bail can attend the New Order session of congress.
So the Sep head of state and head of military are dead, but there are still thousands of star systems claim allegiance to them, the leaders of the various factions are (as far as anyone in the Republic knows) still alive, and there are countless billions of battle droids still active. And....this is when Palps decides to declare the war won and himself Emperor. Huh? Did...did nobody bother to point out that half the galaxy is still claiming secession? The timing here just really doesn't track very well.
But if we instead concede that a few days might've passed between the two events, Anakin's timeline won't make any sense. He goes to Mustafar the dawn after the Temple assault and kills the Sep leaders. If a few days pass before Palps declares the New Order, then Anakin is just sitting around on Mustafar with nothing to do but mope. For days.
Even the end doesn't track particularly well. Anakin is brought back to Coruscant to be suited up while Kenobi and Padme head back to Polis Massa and she gives birth. Except....Anakin is pretty much barbecued Sith when this sequence starts. And we know from Empire Strikes Back that as wonderfully healing as bacta is, Luke still had to spend at least a day floating fully submerged in the stuff just to recover from a thump to the head and maybe hypothermia. Makes you wonder just how long someone would have to swim in the stuff in order to recover from TRIPLE AMPUTATION AND 3RD DEGREE BURNS TO 99% OF YOUR BODY. Is the implication here that Padme was in labour for like a week, or what?
Star Wars
Not so bad, this one. But it still has problems related to the whole 'distances in space' thing. Tatooine, as we saw in both trilogies, is portrayed to be out in the middle of butt---k nowhere, so it makes sense that it takes a while for the protagonists to get from there to Alderaan in a more civilized part of the galaxy. Moreover, it also tracks that it takes a while for the Death Star to get to there from wherever it starts out when we first see it.
Except, in the same film we're also introduced to the concept of fast and slow hyperdrives. When they get away from Tatooine, Han even says to them "you can forget about those Imperial slugs, I told you I'd outrun 'em." This makes a very clear implied distinction, that smaller ships can be more agile and faster, while larger ships like Star Destroyers move slower. It makes sense if you stop and think about it, more energy and force is required to move larger objects.
And just a few minutes before that, we learnt that hyperspace is affected by objects in realspace--Han snarkily points out to Luke that "traveling through hyperspace ain't like dusting crops, boy," and that they could fly into a star if the hyperspace calculations aren't right. Even though hyperspace appears to be (and is described as in the EU, incidentally) a different dimension, it's still bound by the presence of objects in real space.
But when we skip ahead to the end of the movie this gets problematic. Yavin, like Tatooine, is portrayed as a remote, middle-of-nowhere hiding place for the Rebels. Except, the Death Star seems to be just a few minutes (or let's concede, hours) behind them. So, one of two things is happening here that makes little sense in context of what we've learned earlier in the film (the last two paragraphs). Either a) the Death Star, a moon-sized battlestation with no need for speed, inexplicably has a hyperdrive so powerful that it can outrun Imperial warships; or b) nobody on the Falcon noticed that a moon-sized disruption was following them through hyperspace.
But the long and the short of it is, the timing of the last act of the movie really doesn't work very well, and doesn't make much sense in its own context.
The Empire Strikes Back
Now....this one seems to be contingent on implication, so YMMV.
The timing of the Falcon story vs. the Dagobah story really doesn't work. On one side, you've got the Falcon being chased away from Hoth by Imperial forces, and on the other you've got Luke making his way to Dagobah. This works at first, but it pretty quickly falls apart.
On the Falcon side of things, they're pursued into the asteroid field, chill for a bit, cling to the Star Destroyer, and then limp their way to Bespin. This seems to take mere hours, or perhaps we can concede days (even though it doesn't seem likely based on how the story is told). However, meanwhile, we're also treated to Luke training on Dagobah--a story that seems like it spans weeks or even months. To suggest otherwise cheapens the relationship between the two characters--if it were merely a few days, as the Falcon story suggests, then the Yoda/Luke relationship is minor at best; merely acquaintances who met over a weekend once and then bumped into each other a few months later when one of them died.
But what's also, and far more importantly problematic, is that the Falcon's hyperdrive isn't working. As best we can tell based on the physics of the SW-verse, short of hyperspace, light-speed travel isn't possible. If it were, real-time communication between ships moving at full throttle (the X-wings at the Death Star and the Rebel base on Yavin, for example) wouldn't be possible, and it would mean that laser blasts from ships traveling at light-speed would be traveling faster than the speed of light.
And yet, somehow, the Falcon limps its way from the Hoth system--specifically identified as the Hoth system earlier in the movie--all the way to Bespin in another system. Now, space is big. Really big. The nearest star to Earth is 4.2 light years away (a stone's throw, in astronomical terms), meaning it would take 4.2 years traveling at the speed of light to get there. And the Falcon is not moving at light-speed, it's moving slower; probably quite a bit slower. So are we to take away here that the crew of the Falcon took years to get from Hoth to Bespin? It certainly doesn't seem that long, from Luke's POV on Dagobah.
There are....lots of timing problems. Trying to understand them from George Lucas's POV really doesn't work very well. The EU material helps peg some of it down better (III is portrayed as spanning a more believable length of time, for instance), but there are still a lot of problems. Best solution is really just to suspend your disbelief and don't think too hard about how much time should be passing.
A Question About Time In Star Wars Movies
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