The Star Wars sequel trilogy is dumb for a bunch of reasons, starting with the way it totally undoes all the good that was done with the original movies, both in terms of plot and also the character development of all of the original cast. But Episode 8, "The Last Jedi", might be the dumbest of the lot, because the plot holes are just so huge.
(It has been pointed out that the movie also fails to give Rey any real character development; all of her actions are obvious and require no change or sacrifice. And Finn gets totally shafted in terms of story. But I need to move on to the bad science.)
A big chunk of the movie centers around this long chase scene, where the good guys can't jump away in hyperspace, and they're being chased by a big bad guy ship with lots of starfighters, and slightly-faster sublight engines. The good guys have decided that their only hope is to make it to the closest planet, where maybe they can hide. (How this helps if the bad guys are in orbit and there's no way to jump away, I'm not really sure, but ignore that for the moment.)
Right away, this premise is stupid, for a couple of reasons.
- Even though the bad guys' big ship is taking a while to catch up, the TIE fighters could easily go and take out the rebels. But the bad guy leader dude explicitly says no to this plan. I guess he really wants to use the big guns, even if takes days to catch up.
- Unlike the good guys, the bad guys can do a hyperspace jump. They could just jump a short distance ahead - either to catch up, or (if that's too tricky, given Star Wars hyperspace computation logic) a little bit farther, putting themselves in-between the good guys and the planet they're trying to reach. Then the good guys would have nowhere to run to.
