The worst part was when the Nu Deathstar was activated to "destroy the republic". The speed at which the tip of the beam progressed was clearly subluminal, yet somehow it reached another system however many light-years away (and in Star Wars these distances are over rather large, as the entire galaxy is inhabited yet travel times are days at the most extreme), and the protagonists on an entirely different system saw the beam in the sky*. , Once again** JJ Abrams proves he has either no idea whatsoever about astronomy and in particular scale in space, or doesn't care to the point of almost deliberately sabotaging the believability of these scenes. The Deathstar 1 and 2 at least were in the same systems, firing across distances of thousands of kilometers, not light-years.
I just hope there won't be another Deathstar style superweapon in the upcoming movies. So many stories that could be told that don't culminate in "disable the enemy's weapon of mass destruction"; The Empire Strikes Back worked very well even though no one blew up a Deathstar at the end.
*Actually, had that part about the beam being visible in the sky not been in, I would just have made up some ad-hoc headcanon that the weapon does some hyperspace-thing to transport the plasma stream across interstellar distances. But then he had to have it visible in the sky on another planet in another system, also moving at great but definitely subluminal speed.
Basically, the way it is depicted would require most of the locations in the movie not just to be part of the same star system, but the same planetary system, like many moons around a gas giant, so close to each other would they have had to have been (I hope this is the correct grammar
) for the scene to be remotely realistic.
**I saw his Nu Star Trek movies on TV, and still cringe from the scene where the Enterprise, engines disabled, magically starts falling out of lunar orbit... towards Earth. Seriously? It wouldn't even fall down in the first place, but even if it would (i.e. only if it weren't actually on orbit but on a powered high-altitude hover, which is unlikely as in Star Trek lore it is pretty established that ships go into orbits, it's even literally spoken about often enough), it would fall down onto the moon, not Earth.
