Rebel Moon Does One Thing Better Than Star Wars

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.