Plot Holes:
It was hinted in
A New Hope, and fairly clearly established in
The Empire Strikes Back, that a ship cannot be tracked in hyperspace (unless you put a homing beacon on it, perhaps). So how did Darth Vader manage to catch Princess Leia’s ship at Tatooine? From Leia’s comments, the
Tantive IV was apparently on its way to Alderaan when it was intercepted, and they hadn’t planned to go to Tatooine at all. (Boy! For an insignificant planet in the middle of nowhere, an awful lot seems to happen on and around Tatooine!) Slipping Obi-Wan a message via R2D2 was clearly an improvised strategy on her part.
Okay, maybe the original idea was to make a brief stop at Tatooine, find General Kenobi, then make tracks for Alderaan with the
Death Star plans. That still doesn’t explain how Vader knew they’d be there and was able to ambush them. Certainly, he didn’t know Kenobi was on Tatooine, so he couldn’t have anticipated that they’d stop there to pick him up. So what made him think to set up a trap at Tatooine of all places? Maybe there’s a semi-rational explanation, but these sorts of things bug me.
The general consensus is that Luke was 17 at the time of
A New Hope. Even if we’re generous and assume he was as old as 20, how is it that his twin sister was a
senator, for crying out loud? Clearly, family connections play a
big role in the politics of Alderaan!
Why did the Stormtroopers bother to wear armour? It didn’t seem to do them a bit of good, and when Luke and Han tried to blend in by putting on some Stormtrooper armour, they immediately started complaining about how much it restricted their vision. Did people sign up for the Imperial Armed Forces for the snazzy but otherwise useless uniforms? Heck, in
Return of the Jedi an entire
legion of Stormtroopers was humiliated by a bunch of Teddy bears armed with sticks and rocks! So much for the utility of Stormtrooper body armour. All it seemed to do was restrict your vision and mobility.
Speaking of Stormtroopers, “only Imperial Stormtroopers are this precise,” Obi-Wan told Luke as they examined a shot-up Jawa Sandcrawler on Tatooine. What was Obi-Wan smoking? We saw later in the movie that a whole squad of Stormtroopers couldn’t manage to hit Luke when he was
standing still about 50 feet away from them, still in shock over witnessing Obi-Wan’s “death” at Vader’s hands. If there’s anything that’s clear in this movie, it’s that your average Stormtrooper couldn’t hit the broad side of a bantha at 2 paces.
So, Jedi Knights and Sith fight with lightsabers? Granted, the lightsaber is just-about the coolest weapon ever conceived of, but wouldn’t it be wise to at least carry around a backup weapon to be used against targets that’re farther away than arm’s length? Oh, right, Jedi use the Force only for defense, never for attack. Sure. Ever notice that whenever a Jedi and Sith confronted each other in one of these movies, it was typically the
Jedi who attacked?
Let me get this straight: Yoda and Obi-Wan hid Luke on Tatooine,
the one planet in the Universe that Darth Vader knows best. Yeah,
that makes sense! They didn’t even bother to give him a different name, like Lance Weedwhacker or something. And because Tatooine is a small, sparsely-populated planet, it’s easy to find people there, as Darth Maul commented in
The Phantom Menace. To top it off, they “hid” Luke by having Vader’s own stepbrother adopt him! Why didn’t they just make Luke wear a t-shirt saying “I’m Anakin Skywalker’s son” everywhere he went? It would have been simpler.
A New Hope; Plot Holes
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