Quote Originally Posted by BloodSquirrel View Post
Why are you assuming that they can travel back to a supply depo in a few weeks, and why are you assuming that they can afford to take the time to do so instead of continuing with their mission? Even if they can get to a supply depo and return before the harvest comes in, that's a delay in their mission.
Others have replied but the simple answer is because that's the most sensible interpretation of the situation. If I see a warship show up offshore, not obviously damaged or in any kind of distress, I assume it's still seaworthy. If there's a reason it's not, I would expect that to become a conversation point. In the case of Rebel Moon, I'm not there to ask the question but it feels sensible that someone on the moon would ask it. Either of the Admiral or at least they'd ask among themselves.

Storytelling is about communicating the story to the audience. It's not like "reality" where things go unexplained, unless it serves the story for them to be unexplained. Spec fiction is especially sensitive to this. When you deal with magitech like FTL and galaxy-sized civilizations, you need to set some basic rules if those rules are going to impact the story. The need for food impacted the story, so we need to get at least a general sense of why and how.

Again, I agree with the interpretation that they weren't really there for food, but instead were using food as a means to suppress the locals. I'm only hung up on it (aside from it being the current example of writing problems for the movie) because they spent a good deal getting into the details of it all while avoiding saying anything about why it was happening or how it made sense that it was. They could have skipped a good 10 minutes of that and just left it at the empire just likes to oppress locals. It even seems like they wanted to with the "Everything..." line, but then I guess decided to muddy it by blathering about irrelevant food requirements.