The Business: Mainstream Western Entertainment Can't Communicate Scope & Scale

Scale in film and television, and how to communicate it.

Die Neue These, like its predecessor, makes very good use of background to show just how massive the scope and scale of a given navel battle is. This video, taken from the first two episodes, depicts the Battle of Astarte. The Imperial side has about 25000 capital ships, and the Alliance side combined is the same size; however, as they are split three ways the Empire exploits this to gain a decisive advantage and win.

If this was Mouse Wars, or Star Wars, or Trek (Real or Fake), or anything BBC you'd never know without exposition just how huge this battle was. DNT shows this to you; hit Pause and take a quick scan of the ships on screen- and every single blip is a ship, that's how spread out these fleets are.

Now the original for comparison.

This is from a later battle, where the full Alliance invasion fleet faces off against just what Reinhard personally commands. (Yes, that's right, the Empire's space fleet is even larger that what was fielded.)

Again, every single blip is a capital ship. This is not including escorts and strike craft. There is nothing even close in Western film and television, live action or animated, that communicates this; furthermore, the corporate stewards of those Western properties don't even try. They seriously try to sell you on the idea that, for example, the Empire of Mouse Wars had a peak strength of 25000 Star Destroyers.

Preposterous, especially for a setting where star-faring states--with the economics to match--have been a fact of life for millenia. Meanwhile, both classic written Space Opera in the West (e.g. Lensman) and Space Opera in the East across all media have no problems say "Yeah, we have interstellar states with militaries of appropriate size. Deal with it."

The only attempt was the last Mouse Wars mainline film, and that's roundly criticized as being just as much a slapdash job as the rest of the film- and rightly so. Credit for trying, but only in the the way that spamming Copy & Paste without regard for verisimilitude or narrative or anything counts.

It's not that hard. The original Legend of the Galactic Heroes did it on a budget that was a fraction of what Deep Space 9 or Babylon 5 had at that time, and DNT's budget isn't substantially greater, yet both version succeed where Western competitors fail. You have to go to games like Homeworld or Stellaris to get close.

If you want to beat the Death Cult, learn to strike where they are weak- and things like this do count.