Despite being a franchise about battling space wizards, killer teddy bears, sentient dustbins and horny gangster slugs, one fan has realized that the truly implausible thing about Star Wars is that the Millennium Falcon just doesn’t make sense spatially. We’re all too familiar with both the interior and exterior of this craft from the five movies it’s appeared in, but would those rooms really fit inside what we see on screen?
Apparently not – as proven by Star Wars superfan Stinson Lenz, who’s drawn up impressive looking blueprints of the Falcon interior as seen in The Empire Strikes Back and then overlaid them with the exterior of the ship. The results reveal a fair bit of fudging on set. The one bit that does actually match up is the loading ramp, but from there it all goes to hell.
The cockpit simply cannot head back into the hallway to the open area (with the hologram chess board), which in reality would protrude beyond the Falcon’s exterior. If that room were there, it would have opened out onto the vacuum of space, presumably killing everyone on board instantly (unless Leia was on hand to Force-fly back inside). I mean, sure, the Falcon is a heap of junk, but it’s not that bad.
Lucasfilm Story Group Executive Pablo Hidalgo seems to be tickled pink by the effort Lenz went to to work this out, saying it was “the best visualization I’ve seen” of the mismatch. Holding his hands in the air, he said “Basically, the second you break out the rulers in Star Wars, you start breaking it. But we do what we can.”
Showing off his impeccable nerd credentials, Lenz was asked in the comments on his blog whether he’d taken into account the escape pod room seen in The Last Jedi, and here’s what he said:
“I’m going to wait until I can watch the scene frame-by-frame. I do know that the TFA set had a few more corridors than the sets in the original movies. Specifically there’s a T-junction at the end of the corridor if you were to turn left after coming up the ramp. Never seen in the movie, but it’s there in behind-the-scenes materials, and in blueprints found in the Art of Force Awakens. I’m curious if they filmed the escape pod scene in that part of the set on Last Jedi, but it remains to be seen!”
It does indeed. Presumably, the upcoming Solo: A Star Wars Story will give him much more Falcon geography to chew on, and we can’t wait to see what he comes up with.
