I’m not, in the end, a fan; but to me, that was the entire point. In the face of this crisis, their petty wants and desires, and even the more pressing matters of who and how they should govern themselves were irrelevant in the face of an ultimate threat, no matter how important they felt to those people or to the audience. The one person who held out against letting those lesser things go even temporarily was completely destroyed.
To me that's like setting up a complex and interesting WW2 story, and then just smiting the earth with an asteroid. Lazy and boring. Never mind recycling all the usual zombie tropes. Oh, and throw in the usual Star Wars trope of the mass enemy has a single weak spot that one person can attack to wipe it all out. Zzzzzz.....
Is the asteroid something that's known to the audience and characters involved from the beginning of the story? Is the asteroid something they could unify against and push back if they'd just get over their differences? Is the asteroid something that experts are claiming is coming but laypeople deny first as a fairy tale, then as not as big a deal as people claim, right up until it meaningfully affects their own lives?
It's an important story to tell, and I think your dismissals are indicative of the same flaw as the characters: thinking the petty struggles they face are more important than the survival of the species.
> thinking the petty struggles they face are more important than the survival of the species
It's a flaw of these characters, and also of the contemporary society. There's a kind of distance towards "petty struggles" of everyday life that I'd consider a part of being mature.
Related: this is why I like science-fiction, especially the older one that's written/directed by people who focus on ideas, and not people. I hate the modern critique of sci-fi that characters are "flat". If I wanted to read about character development, petty squabbles and love affairs, I'd pick literally any other genre.
> this is why I like science-fiction, especially the older one that's written/directed by people who focus on ideas, and not people. I hate the modern critique of sci-fi that characters are "flat". If I wanted to read about character development, petty squabbles and love affairs, I'd pick literally any other genre.
I don't think that they're mutually exclusive. Much of the sci‑fi and fantasy I've enjoyed over the years does both.
Certainly there's more tolerance for flat characters in sci‑fi than in other genres because you can focus on ideas, I agree with that.
But if all the characters in your story are flat, it does impact the quality. You can have good sci‑fi with flat characters, but great sci‑fi requires both interesting ideas and interesting characters. (And that's not quite enough either, but that's a tangent we don't need to get into)
