Yeah, Superman IV: The Quest for Peace is pretty terrible from just about every angle. I tend to think that there was a potentially good film in there somewhere, but there were a LOT of problems with it that prevented us getting that good film.

The script was dire, Gene Hackman's Lex Luthor was at best redundant and at worst an overly silly annoyance (and don't get me started on his nephew!), and Margot Kidder's Lois Lane -- who was one of the franchise's best characters -- is largely sidelined and underused. Nuclear Man is dire and his costume looked utterly terrible: like some reject from Masters of the Universe! They'd have been better off just using Neutron from the comics, who had a much cooler costume! And, of course, the lack of a serious budget (due to the production company's financial problems) meant that the special effects looked awful for the times.

The comic adaptation (with art by Curt Swan and Don Heck) is actually way more enjoyable than the film. For one thing, it doesn't suffer from terrible looking special effects, but like many film adaptations, it's actually based on an early shooting script and so includes several scenes that were removed from the finished film that in a number of cases actually improve the story. For example, there is a deleted sub-plot about the first failed Nuclear Man -- who was essentially the movie version of Bizarro.

I agree. Star Wars was never science fiction. It's Space Fantasy, pure and simple.

I think you're being a little unfair to the writers here.

Something to remember is that most of the dialogue you quote is not Luthor thinking out loud and fathoming out the existence of Kryptonite right there and then. He'd already worked a lot of it out earlier off-camera. As that scene opens, it's clear that he's been in his library reasearching this for a while. So what he's really doing in the scene is putting the finishing touches to his theory, while explaining it to his two dimwit colleagues, Otis and Miss Teschmacher.

It's established in the film that Luthor has a genius-level intellect. The greatest criminal mind on the planet, no less! So, it's not too much of a stretch to assume that using the exact location of the destroyed planet (which he gleaned from Lois Lane's exclusive interview with Superman) he worked out the probable trajectory and speed of the fragments of the destroyed planet (no engine needed...once something starts moving in space it just keeps going).

Lex deduced -- correctly, as it turns out -- that these fragments would be irradiated by Krypton's sun with a specific radioactivity that would be lethal to any surviving Kryptonians because...you know...comic book science and stuff! So, it was then simply a case of researching any unusual green meteorites that had been recorded as having fallen to Earth during the expected impact window (which would have been some years after Kal-El's powered ship had arrived), and that's precisely what Luthor finds in the copy of National Geographic: a rare green meteorite in Addis Ababa.

Now granted, it's all a little far fetched, but this is a movie about a man who can fly and outrun a speeding bullet, lest we forget. I can buy that a genius mind like Lex's could potentially work this stuff out. You have to just relax a little and enjoy the film for what it is.

I suspect that if you look at most films they don't do a very good job of accurately conveying the passage of time. Filmmakers are far more concerned with the business of telling a good story on film, naturally.

The difference with Star Wars is that it attracts nerds like us who examine the tiniest minutiae of the story, whereas the vast majority of other films don't attract that level of scrutiny.

Yeah, traveling through hyperspace has always been depicted like that, right from the very first time it was shown (the journey from Tatooine to Alderaan in Episode IV).




It's impossible to say for certain, but it can't have been long -- a couple of days, at most, I'd say. Possibly only a few hours!

Obi-Wan Kenobi was already very keen to get off of Tatooine quickly and deliver the Death Star plans that R2-D2 was carrying to Alderaan by the time Luke discovered his Uncle Owen and Aunt Beru had been murdered by stormtroopers. So, after they finished burning the bodies of the dead Jawas, the trip to Mos Eisley would have been the following the day at the latest. Maybe even later the same day?

Luke and Kenobi found a pilot to take them to Alderaan in the Mos Eisley cantina very quickly -- Kenobi was chatting to Chewbacca almost as soon as he reached the bar, after all. Selling Luke's landspeeder and arriving at docking bay 94 probably only took them a few hours at most.

Then, in the scene where Kenobi is training Luke in the Millennium Falcon's lounge, it's clear that when Han arrives that he has come directly from the cockpit where we last saw him. We can tell this because he says, "Well, you can forget your troubles with those Imperial slugs. I told you I'd outrun 'em" (clearly referring to when he made the jump to hyperspace to escape the Imperial Star Destroyers).

Obviously, Luke, Kenobi and Chewbacca had left the cockpit before Solo and gone into the lounge area (maybe Solo was keeping an eye on the Falcon's systems or monitoring whether the Star Destroyers were following them through hyperspace?). Regardless, Han had clearly stayed in the cockpit for a little while -- long enough for Chewbacca and R2 to begin a game of holo-chess and for Kenobi to start training Luke.

The amount of time that Han was with the other's in the Falcon's lounge is as long as it takes the scene to play in the film because at the end of the scene an alarm sounds to notify them that they're "coming up on Alderaan." They then all go to the cockpit, Han cuts the sub-light engines, and they arrive at what is left of Alderaan. They then encounter the stray TIE Fighter almost immediately and follow it to the "small moon", which obviously turns out to be the Death Star, resulting in the Falcon being captured.

So, the trip through hyperspace from Tatooine to Alderaan can't have taken more than a couple of hours (and that's only if Han stayed on his own in the cockpit for an hour or more). Likely, it was under an hour!

So yeah, it's impossible to narrow it down any more precisely, but the time from Luke discovering his dead Aunt and Uncle to the Falcon being captured by the Death Star could only have been a couple of days at most and maybe only 6 or so hours at the shortest.

Over Christams I treated myself to all three volumes of the Blake & Mortimer adventure, The Secret of the Swordfish...





This is the first Blake & Mortimer story, though weirdly it was published as volumes 15-17 in the English translations.

For the uninitiated, the Blake & Mortimer stories are 1950s "buddy adventure" detective yarns, in the "whodunit?" style. The books centre around the inseparable team of Captain Francis Blake and Philip Mortimer, two upstanding and heroic, pipe-smoking, upper class English gentlemen. The books are written and drawn by Edgar P. Jacobs, who was a friend and colaberator of Hergé's and, as a result, Jacobs's artwork employes the same ligne claire style that Hergé pioneered in the Adventures of Tintin.

I've read a good half dozen of the later B&M adventures, but I'm really looking forward to getting stuck into the duo's inaugural outing.