I am yet to see a space battle in any movie that even vaguely resembles what such a battle might really be like. George Lucas, in his Star Wars movies, has always drawn on the past for his inspiration; the dog fights in A New Hope more closely resembling WWI biplane warfare that that of modern fighter jets, and the battles between the huge cruisers in all the Star Wars films is straight out of the Napoleonic wars. I have a hard time imagining that vehicles with sufficient technology to cross interstellar space have such low powered weaponry that they have to close in and broadside the enemy. Why not nuke the enemy ship from several parsecs away?
Back to the dogfighting thing, I have never seen a movie space battle between small fighter-type vehicles that respected the physics involved in space flight, with the possible exception of some scenes in The Last Starfighter. Vehicles moving through a vacuum cannot execute lovely banking turns, as if an atmosphere was applying pressure to the vehicles wings. Speaking of wings, why the f%$& does an X-Wing have wings at all???
The nearest thing I have seen to a space battle that didn't totally ignore the physics of bodies moving through a vacuum is the old PC game "Elite". Taking out a marauding pirate was nothing like a dog fight, and required a totally different mindset than the standard console game rubbish, and actually required a bit of an understanding of physics.
Unfortunately we humans are a rather unimaginative bunch, and we can't really imagine what the future of warfare might be like. Could Napoleon have envisioned a modern cruiser, or an F18, or even a modern artillery piece capable of hitting a target that is over the horizon? Do we really think that a space cruiser would need to be within sighting distance of a target before it can start shooting? "Starship Troopers" is a good example of a really bad case of short-sightedness. Why send infantry to that nasty alien planet, which was nothing but desert and big bad bugs? Why not just nuke it from a nice safe distance?
I think the main reason reality, logic, reason and physics tend to be ignored by filmakers is that the reality is just not interesting. A modern high-speed fighter jet battle is really kinda boring from a spectator point of view, because the field of operations is just too damn big to be seen in its entirety from any vantage point. If Heinlein had followed logic, and had his military nuke the surface of Klandathnu (or whatever that planet in Starship Troopers was called), his book wouldn't have made it past chapter one, and we would have been spared the movie. On the other hand, there is a certain romanticism attached to WWI dogfights and Horatio Hornblower-esque broadsides, which look so much more dramatic on film. There are some exceptions, such as Top Gun, which tried to show modern air warfare with some sort of accuracy, and succeeded to some extent (though it failed badly in the casting department...)
End of rant.
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Topic: What is the greatest outer space battle that has been animated ? (Read 20175 times)