Slashdot Mirror
Quantifying How Much the Force Is Used In Star Wars (bloomberg.com)
An anonymous reader writes: Bloomberg has posted a data visualization for a very important subject: how much, how often, and to what effect The Force is used in Star Wars movies. As you may expect, we see the light side of the Force used much more often than the dark side. Luke Skywalker spends about 11 minutes using the Force, but pre-Vader Anakin clocks in at under 3 minutes of Force time — less, even, than Palpatine. It also turns out that Jedi really love Force Leaping, while the dark side has a monopoly on making lightning and choking people. It's kind of silly, but also kind of cool. Bloomberg even posted their methodology: "To arrive at a figure for total on-screen Force time, we decided to measure cumulatively, by scene. That means when multiple people use the Force simultaneously, we counted the time only once. Light-side and dark-side times are the cumulative durations that characters associated with each side are depicted using the Force. When multiple characters associated with the same side at the same time use the Force, that time is also counted only once. When light-side and dark-side characters use the Force at the same time, the durations are scored separately. Each recorded duration is rounded to the nearest second, and no use of the Force was assigned less than one second in duration." (That's just a fraction of it.)
Bah, they forgot all the times Darth JarJar used the dark side of the force, from the force jumps to using a combat droid attached to his leg as an aimed weapon.
Socialism: a lie told by totalitarians and believed by fools.
Interesting! I must have missed that part. I'll need to watch it again. But obviously training is overrated. If you can kill one of the major Dark Force guys using half-forgotten lessons it must not be very difficult to master. Maybe just a short course is all that is needed.
Luke used to bullseye womprats in Beggar's Canyon back home, and they're not much bigger than two meters, which apparently is amazing marksmanship, and that was possibly before he had even heard of the Force. And he was able to hold his own against Vader for a while at the end of Empire, despite the fact that his formal training on Dagobah lasted.. maybe a week, tops? And he had no formal training before the amazingly acrobatic fight with Jabba's gang in Jedi.
So it would appear that, yes, at least for certain people, proficiency in using the Force is more a matter of natural talent, and knowing what's possible with it, rather than a result of repetitive drilling. Which, frankly, is kind of what one might expect when you're dealing with a mystical and ineffable power that pervades the very fabric of reality.