Rebel Moon Does One Thing Better Than Star Wars

For the layperson, any sci-fi weapon that fires a ray or other bright projectile is automatically a laser. Blasters, pistols, phasers, disrupters—all lasers. In actual Star Wars lore, however, the blasters that the Rebels and Imperials constantly shoot at each other are not lasers. They’re plasma cannons.

For the layperson, any sci-fi weapon that fires a ray or other bright projectile is automatically a laser. Blasters, pistols, phasers, disrupters—all lasers. In actual Star Wars lore, however, the blasters that the Rebels and Imperials constantly shoot at each other are not lasers. They’re plasma cannons.

A blaster, also called a gun, was any type of ranged weapon that fired bolts of intense plasma or particle-based energy, often mistaken for lasers. Basically, a pulse of explosive gas is superheated by the blaster’s power back and flung forward magnetically toward its target. The firearms from Rebel Moon seem to operate on the same principle; only they’re better at showing it.

It’s pretty safe to assume blasters—like almost all Star Wars tech—were based on what looked cool, leaving the creators responsible for supplemental material to devise a pseudo-scientific explanation for how it works. Simply put, George Lucas probably wanted “laser pistols” that behaved like regular guns rather than actual lasers, and it was up to the old EU authors to make it make sense. The best way they could come up with to explain why blasters shoot bolts of energy instead of a continuous beam and how what looks like lasers could physically throw people back as if they were solid projectiles was to make them not lasers at all.

On-screen, however, none of this translates. Even in the sequel trilogy, the blaster bolts still look like lasers. It took Rebel Moon to finally deliver an accurate visual representation of the way the Star Wars blasters work in-universe.

Every time the characters in Rebel Moon shoot their “blasters,” a cloud of vapor/gas is emitted from the barrel, and the projectiles splatter a bit when they hit an object rather than going straight through like a laser. Snyder’s guns fire what amounts to a liquidy lava-like plasma—AKA that thing Star Wars blasters should do but don’t.

This mistake becomes glaringly evident when you consider how blaster bolts impact people and things in the Star Wars films. The perfectly straight, pencil-thin blasts that fly out of Han Solo’s BlasTech DL-44 Heavy Blaster Pistol routinely cause explosions and leave ragged holes in their targets, unlike actual lasers. Actual laser beams coming from something as small as a blaster would cause surface burning on flesh and certain other materials but would fail to do lethal damage as quickly as the weapons in Star Wars.

None of this ruins Star Wars for most viewers. Again, Star Wars, unlike its more science-based rival Star Trek, has always been about looking cool on screen and giving fans a half-baked explanation later on. It’s a fantasy where things explode and catch fire in the vacuum of space, and little green, backward-talking frogmen lift starships with their minds.

Likewise, knowing that Rebel Moon does Star Wars weapons correctly doesn’t make the movie any better or any less of a Star Wars/Warhammer 40K knockoff. Rather, it’s just a cool little piece of trivia. Now, any time you hear someone mention Star Wars and lasers, you can pedantically correct them and say, “Actually, blasters aren’t lasers….”

Just know that Giant Freakin Robot absolves itself of any responsibility if quoting this nitpicky article causes you to lose any friends.