Star Wars is definitely not hard sci-fi. It’s, as generally understood, very soft. But according to this video, it’s a bit less soft than you might think.
In a new video, YouTuber EC Henry focuses on the original Star Wars film, A New Hope, to explore the ways in which it’s not as fantastical a science fiction film as you might think, and in fact in several ways it is fairly grounded in terms of the mundanity of space life. Sure, there are the fantasy elements like the Force, but, especially in the original film, those live next to a meticulous attention to things like heat management, the mechanics of space travel, and realistic portrayal of things like depressurisation and magnetics. It’s definitely imaginative, but it looks and feels somewhat realistic.
It’s an interesting argument, and one argued well, with examples of how the found future look of the film ties into the real aesthetics of space travel in the 1960s and early ‘70s. A New Hope is definitely not what we think of when we imagine hard science fiction, but it has more going for it in that department than we might think. Even if it isn’t always consistent in how it depicts it.