MovieChat Forums > Star Wars (1977) Discussion > Which inconsistency in the entire saga b...

Which inconsistency in the entire saga bothers you the most?


For me it's obi wan totally not remembering R2D2/C3PO at all in TNH. I mean common!!

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[deleted]

Obi-Wan even used other r2 units in RotS so R2-D2 wasnt that close to him like he was for Luke

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What if that Discman had a name and a personality?

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WUT?!?! that's assinine comparison.. To use your analogy would be like the discman fought with you in many battles, has a name, saved your ass couple times, can talk etc...
Are you saying you won't remember a discman like that?

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[deleted]

I appreciate your thorough argument and even taking those points into account I still think it is unbelievable that obi wan totLly discounted ever knowing BOTH R2 and 3po.
If anything your explanation further deepens the mystery (inconsistency) because as you said if droids are such common household items easily discarded then surely Obi wan wouldn't have so non chalantly and casually waved off owning any droids when Luke brought them to him claiming ownership. At the very least he could've stop and try to remember his past.

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[deleted]

To be honest, this only became a plot hole after the prequels arrived.

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Still counts though! when you're making prequels you re supposed to think about these things

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Even though i agree, it would had been REALLY difficult to write them in a way that Obi-Wan wouldn't had met R2 and C3po in the prequels. The only way would had had been to simply creat new droids in the sequels (and then disapoint the audience because the audience had already had an attachement for the two).

So yeah, I guess we just havr to accept it as it is and assume that Obi-Wan lost a huge part of his memory.

I personnaly nearly ignore the existence of the prequels anyways. So for me, the original trilogy is the only one I consider in my heart, hence what plot holes they could had possibly created don't really bother me.

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They could have explained it by Ben Kenobi being a clone. When Obi Wan visits that clone master world where they are producing the clone army, they could have sampled his DNA easily. Somewhere along the line, they could have replaced him or maybe he could have died and the clone was dispatched to be a shadow caretaker of Luke. Other theories say that Ben was the original and that Obi Wan was one of a few clones. Thus his name was more a designation "O B One" followed by "O B Two" "O B" standing for Original Ben or Other Ben. Sadly none of these interesting explanations turned out to be true.

Instead, the prequels remain unabashedly flawed. Aggressively flawed. At least they have a lot of good parts to grab at while you are falling from the great heights of the OT (as opposed to the sheer cliff face of TLJ and Solo).

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How is the force still not a mystic thing?

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[deleted]

The scientific explination in The Phantom Menace took the mysticism out of The Force for me.Like I said .I got over it years ago.


Are you just making something up? They dont explain the force in TPM

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[deleted]

I assumed you were talking about the force

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I assumed you were talking about the force


He is.

The over-explanation of why the Jedi can manipulate The Force through a cellular symbiont was and is unnecessary, and it killed a lot of what made the concept of The Force special.

Obi-Wan's explanation of The Force in "ANH" is perfectly elegant and it's probably the best monologue in the entire series.

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Talking about your blood doesnt explain the force anymore than it explains oxygen. The force is still mystic and special, just because your ability to use is it biological doesnt change that. Didnt you already think affinity to the force was biological? OT pretty much said that

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Talking about your blood doesnt explain the force anymore than it explains oxygen.
We're just pointing out that it was unnecessary.

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No, the guy said that the prequels explained the force, they do not. If they explained how lightsabers worked would you create threads bitching about that?

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It did introduce a pseudo objective power level scale though. Which has seriously handicapped any real philosophical discussion of people who display force powers. People want to be told that x character has been measured with y number of midi-clorians before they can accept that they can best someone else with force powers, for example.

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Leia somehow just happens to remember her mother and Luke doesn't even though he was also there at the exact same time.

Since then, I've just learned to accept that the prequels were nothing more than dreams that Luke has which covers up all the plot holes they created.

Instead Leia did end up with her mother and grew up with her on Alderaan.

Humans are not the only species on earth.
We just act like it.

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I agree that Padme dying immediately was not necessary. The audience is aware that an 18 year gap exists between Ep 3 and 4. A long gap... Padme could have died sometime later off screen and it neednt have been a problem for the audience as A New Hope tells a different story.

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On this discrepancy I just feel that it makes sense that when the twins were born Padme would either of kept both or gave both away, not kept one and gave one away

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Not really. They could convincingly portray Padme giving one up. It could have played out that Yoda would sway Padme into giving one away as having them together would be risky. He would suggest giving Luke to Obi wan for protection. Padme, distraught, would understand the reasoning. That is better than having Padme just up and die of a broken heart despite having twovulnerable babies.

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I'm pretty sure that Lucas didn't mean it this way, but isn't it possible that Leia's adoptive mother also died while Leia was a young child?

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This! It was alluded to it but apparently some Lucas haters think that Padme dying during childbirth was also a plot hole :(

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The prequels were poorly written as far as canon is concerned, we have to put it down to a huge coincidence that both Leia´s mothers died before she was old enough to remember them...

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If we go deeper, even the OT had canon issues like making Vader Luke's father in Episode 5 and Leia becoming Luke's sister in Episode 6. Non of that was planned ahead of time.

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Im not disagreeing with that.

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"Leia somehow just happens to remember her mother and Luke doesn't even though he was also there at the exact same time."

This and it also bothers me that the goal is to hide the babies from the emperor but for some reason they let Luke keep the Skywalker name.

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the goal is to hide the babies from the emperor but for some reason they let Luke keep the Skywalker name.

Yep, another inconsistency that stems from Lucas making it up as he went along. In the original script and outline for Star Wars, Vader was specifically just a warlord who had in fact killed Luke's father, but Lucas was planning to bring his father back later on, surprising everyone that he's still alive. Then Luke and Daddy would take down the Empire together.

Vader was changed in Empire, which turned Obi-Wan's now-incorrect words about Luke's father into "a certain point of view," and created the problem of the Skywalker name which would stick out like a sore thumb.

In Star Wars and Empire, Leia was still unrelated to Luke. This is why there is a kiss and hints of a love triangle, just enough to compel Han to step up his game.

It wasn't until Jedi that Leia was changed into Luke's sister, basically shrinking the mythic scale of the story into a tiny universe where you're very likely to bump into your dad and sister randomly, and then get wrapped up in an adventure with them.

So, the revelations in Empire and Jedi were not actually revelations, they were announcements of character updates.

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"and created the problem of the Skywalker name which would stick out like a sore thumb."

Not necessarily. We don't know how common the "Skywalker" surname is in the Star Wars universe. It could be like Smith, Johnson, Williams, Brown, Jones, etc., in the real world.

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“also bothers me that the goal is to hide the babies from the emperor but for some reason they let Luke keep the Skywalker name.”

This originally came to be because Luke DID have a different last name: Darth Vader was at first not some title or nickname giving to him, it was actually his birth name. When Lucas wrote ANH, he wrote Anakin Skywalker and Darth Vader as two seperate dudes until Kasdan merged them together why’ll writing ESB. So Vader was actually meant to be his birth family surname.

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Probably not completely thought out. When the original movie came out, Luke & Leia were not meant to be brother and sister. That was a retcon in Return of the Jedi.

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Actually, we could reason that the "mother" Princess Leia remembered was Queen Breha Organa, her adoptive mother. She was, after all, the one who raised Leia in her earliest years. Some people reasoned that it was Leia somehow remembering Padme through the Force, but it makes more sense that the mother she was remembering was Breha.

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[deleted]

It was in AOTC.

Padme presses the same button twice to do two different functions.

That's some crappy writing right there!


--End Transmission: Code 350--

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Lol, although I can think of many 1-button devices that don't perform the same function when pressed.

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Such as?

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... you've never seen a context sensitive button before?

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It took you four months to come up with that evasive reply?

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No, it just took that long to type it out. Connection is in nibbles per day.

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You should try and cut down on streaming all that Kylo+Hux cosplay porn that's using up all your bandwith then.

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I honestly wouldn't be surprised if this existed - and you were one of the cosplayers ... XD

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You wish

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Everything that came after Star Wars.

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One sequence where one has to 'suspend disbelief' is the 'inside the death star' sequence, wherein the stormtroopers had ample opportunity to fatally hit the heroes, but failed to do so. I suppose that would have ended the whole sage premature if they HAD, though, so one can understand the logic behind that.

One line that sort of 'sticks in my craw' is the Leia's line when she first meets Luke. It just seemed odd that she would make that remark about his height - Mark Hamill is hardly a midget! lol

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"One sequence where one has to 'suspend disbelief' is the 'inside the death star' sequence, wherein the stormtroopers had ample opportunity to fatally hit the heroes, but failed to do so. I suppose that would have ended the whole sage premature if they HAD, though, so one can understand the logic behind that."

They weren't trying to kill them. They wanted them to escape so that the tracking device they put on the Millennium Falcon could lead them to the Rebel base. Watch the movie again; there's dialog that tells you that.

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"They let us go. It was the only reason for the ease of our escape." - Princess Leia

It's almost like the information was spoon fed to us as viewers.


A more problematic thing is that she then declares decisively, "they're tracking us," then proceeds directly to the Rebel base.

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"They let us go. It was the only reason for the ease of our escape." - Princess Leia

It's almost like the information was spoon fed to us as viewers.


Exactly, plus, immediately before Leia said that, Tarkin said to Darth Vader, "You're sure the homing beacon is secure aboard their ship? I'm taking an awful risk, Vader. This had better work."

A more problematic thing is that she then declares decisively, "they're tracking us," then proceeds directly to the Rebel base.


Yeah, they made Han look stupid there, as he didn't believe her, despite that it should have been even more obvious to Han than it was to Leia, considering how worldwise his character is supposed to be (Leia: "They're tracking us." / Han: "Not this ship, sister!"). Also, it was out of character for Leia to simply drop the matter after just one dismissal from Han, considering how much was riding on it.

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I agree that this isn't brilliant writing and one of the (very few) problems with the first film, but perhaps Han ran some kind of scan which said there was no device, the Empire having some unknown way of blocking such a scan...?

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That's one way of fixing the problem, but they would have needed to put something into the movie indicating that he did that. There also should have been something in the movie to address the even more fundamental problem of why they had to physically take R2D2 to the Rebel base instead of simply transmitting the Death Star plans. We find out near the beginning of the movie that they obtained the plans in the first place by intercepting a transmission, so data transmissions are obviously a thing in the Star Wars universe.

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Yeah, I agree. It crosses that line where I have to think for the movie. I don't mind a movie making me think, but I mean that the movie shouldn't leave a logic gap that I have to fill for it.

Whether it was a scan or otherwise, I can imagine a small missing scene where Han lets Leia poke around and run a scan or two and is therefore satisfied they aren't being traced. Alternately, I can imagine a scenario where she just feels like the Rebels need the plans ASAP even if they are tracked.

Still, it's a minor point in an otherwise near-flawless film. The kind of problem that a line or two of dialogue would have patched over, so I'll forgive it.

As to transmissions, I figure that they either have a range or are maybe too easy to trace? Which is maybe how Vader found out Leia had the plans to begin with (I'm ignoring Rogue One since that retcon clustercuss didn't exist when Star Wars was written). So maybe they didn't want to risk a transmission because (ironically) they would be tracked.

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Also, it was out of character for Leia to simply drop the matter after just one dismissal from Han, considering how much was riding on it.

Good call. I hadn't thought of this angle. Given her character, she would have pushed back for certain.

She was savvy enough to give the location of an abandoned rebel base when they wanted to demonstrate the power of the Death Star, but not savvy enough to stop at an intermediary location to change ships when she was certain they were being tracked? Seems silly.

Although, as I'm typing this it occurs to me that maybe she wanted them to track her. So the Empire would bring the Death Star to them and they wouldn't have to track it down after they analyzed the plans and found a weakness? Seems thin, but I'm going with this theory, just to make myself feel better.

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For me it's obi wan totally not remembering R2D2/C3PO at all in TNH. I mean common!!


Not really an inconsistency. Obi-Wan hardly did anything with R2-D2 in the prequels, and he wasn't there when Anakin said he built C-3PO. In our world it would be like seeing a computer you owned 19-31 years ago, despite there being thousands of the same system out there, and knowing that it is your personal system despite being out in the middle of nowhere.

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