Sunday, May 22, 2005

Flying Firetrucks

I saw the new Star Wars movie. I got my $12 worth from one scene fairly early in the film. I'm not going to give away anything of the plot, but if you haven't seen it yet, and are one of those people who wants to go into the movie knowing nothing about it, then you should stop reading this entry.

The scene that made me realize I hadn't wasted my money starts out in outer space. Our heroes are aboard one of those big space ships that the the camera stereotypically takes half the opening credits to pan over. For reasons directly related to our heroes' presence, an emergency situation arises. They enter the atmosphere and the emergency snowballs, or perhaps more accurately, fireballs, until the craft is on final approach, blossoming with flames, and flanked by firetrucks. The firetrucks, or should I say, fireships, fly next to the burning spaceship and spray water on it while it is still in the air.

It lands and skids blazingly down a landing strip that is really quite long, considering that every other ship in the movie lands delicately and comes to rest on a single spot. Maybe it was a special emergency landing strip. I was laughing so hard and clapping, that someone else said I made that her favourite part.

Plus R2D2 kicks a surprising amount of butt.

3 comments:

Anonymous said...

You would have thought that if they have flying fire trucks that land on the spot, they could have eliminated the risk of catching fire on re-entry.

Anonymous said...

I wonder if they had to fill out triplicate forms for the F.A.A., call the Union, pee in a bottle for the Justice Department, report to the Chief Pilot, re-qual in the simulator, and finally, attend
sensativity training and listen to the flight attendants weep.

Aviatrix said...

The firetrucks delivered pathetically small streams of water, and for some reason the water sprayed straight onto the burning ship and was not affected by the passage through the air.

Here's a picture.