Star Wars is not a science fiction movie; it’s a fantasy movie with spaceships.  Star Trek is a science fiction movie: it contains spaceships and every piece of technology has a thin veneer of scientific explanation.  Star Wars, on the other hand, contains technologies with no explanations: they just work.  Ever wonder how a light-saber was able to contain the beam?  An actual sword made of light would need some sort of cap or lens on the end of the beam, otherwise it would continue on forever (or until it dissipated).  Light sabers don’t fit in a science fiction world.  In a fantasy world, however, it’s not important how light sabers work, they just do.  It’s the same way a mage can summon fire from his hands without setting his sleeves on fire.  In fantasy, it just happens.  In science fiction, there has to be a why.

Star Wars is a fantasy movie with sci-fi trappings and that is why some fans got angry when the Force got midi-chlorianed.  The Force didn’t need an explanation, it just was.  The Force had descriptors (it’s everywhere, between this rock and that tree, the land and your ship, etc) but it didn’t require any empirical evidence about how or why it existed.  The explanation, via midi-chlorians, as to how the Force worked betrayed the fantasy aspects of Star Wars and made it science fiction, which, in my opinion, it shouldn’t be.

Incidentally, these are the kinds of things I think about when changing a video card at midnight because my other card died and I really wanted to log in and goof off for a bit before going to bed.

Maybe I should have just gone to bed.