Like all publications, I reckon they have space to fill and clicks to generate, but that's really par for the course in the movies. Since when does much of anything in the movies make any sense in the real world if you think about it too much? It's fiction for a reason.
Almost nothing in the movies makes great sense if you think about it too hard. There an entire youtube channel (often very funny) dedicated to nitpicking everything that was wrong with a current blockbuster. There's another hilarious channel called "How It Should Have Ended" and way back when they started and the animation was much poorer, they did Lord of the Rings, and I nearly fell over laughing, because it was funny, they had a point, and also because I had the same thought after I spent too much of my life reading Tolkien's books as a kid.
Sure. Every site wants clicks and making controversial arguments is a way to get them.
But I think that
PM is mostly criticizing a failure of imagination.
If you can remember back into the ancient past, think of a scene in
Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan. Kirk and the
Enterprise are fighting Khan in the hijacked
Reliant. Spock points out that Khan is using 2-dimensional tactics, a failure of the imagination. Kirk is able to exploit this, and Khan is defeated.
But the entire
Star Trek universe was one of 2-dimensional space attacks. The Enterprise was always "right side up," and enemy vessels nearly always approached as if they were floating on the same invisible ocean. At most, they might come in from 10-15 degrees above the "horizon," nearly always from the forward quarter, and oriented to the same arbitrary "up" and "down" as the
Enterprise.
And the same thing has largely been true of the
Star Wars universe, although I have to qualify that by saying that George Lucas lost me with
Episode One, so maybe it has gotten better since then.
PM seems to be saying that it has not, citing the "Dreadnought" in the latest movie as an example.
In space, there is no gravity, no up or down. It's all the same, all around you. The early rendezvous-and-docking sequence in
2001: A Space Odyssey got that part better than either
Star Trek or
Star Wars (through Jar Jar Binks, anyway) has typically done.
