“We’ve almost got some of their telecommunications cracked; the front end even runs on a laptop!” The Mac that sunk a thousand ships could have been merely clunky product placement, not a bafflingly stupid tech-on-film moment.
“Senator Amidala is in a coma. Even if she recovers, she will never be the same and may not live long.” But no… George had to have his god-damned funeral scene, even if it demanded Simone Biles levels of mental gymnastics to save Carrie Fisher’s most emotionally resonant moment from ROTJ, as well as one of the more intriguing OT lore dumps.
Bonus points if a scene was scripted or filmed and got cut.
A little bit more emphasis during Star Wars that Vader wanted the Storm Troopers to aim poorly and let them get away. It would have solved decades of jokes and arguments about Storm Trooper weapon accuracy.
It was right there all along:
Grand Moff Tarkin : Are they away?
Darth Vader : They’ve just made the jump into hyperspace.
Grand Moff Tarkin : You’re sure the homing beacon is secure aboard their ship? I’m taking an awful risk, Vader. This had better work.
Evidently most of the fandom needs to have it beaten over their heads a bit more blatantly than that.
Another thing that would have been helpful is if it was made clearer just how monstrous the Ewoks actually are. There wouldn’t be as much shame to the Imperials for losing against them if people had only internalized a bit better that:
- Ewoks are strong enough that they can haul Redwood-sized logs up into the canopy to build deadfalls, using only crude vine ropes and muscles, and do it quietly enough that the nearby Imperial garrison didn’t notice.
- They are stealthy enough that an ordinary hunting party can sneak up on an elite Rebel strike force (including a Jedi).
- That hunting party was hunting a 3-meter-tall boar-wolf, by the way. Ewoks hunt these routinely.
- Endor is full of predators like that, and despite that the Ewoks let their children wander the forest on their own. Upon being confronted with an armor-clad alien wielding a blaster weapon and riding a flying machine, one of those lone children thought to himself: “guess I’d better kill him.” Leia helped, of course, but the Ewok couldn’t have known she would.
- One of their literal gods, personified in the form of a physical avatar before them, ordered the Ewoks not to burn some people alive and devour their flesh. The Ewoks hesitated for half a second and then resumed piling the firewood with a jaunty song. Gods are spiffy and all, but don’t get in between Ewoks and their cannibalism.
Is it cannibalism? It feels more like a (talking) bear eating a human.
I do feel like the Stormtooper point got lost on Lucas too by RotJ honestly. In Empire they do pretty good except when they’re, again, explicitly trying to lure the hero into a trap. RotJ has the most weirdness of the originals and probably the most EU ‘redemptions’/revisions. With stuff like “here’s what was really up with the Ewoks”, Boba not dying, etc.
Replace some of the stormtroopers in ROTJ with regular army forces and it might have helped the stormtroopers’ reputation.
“Not to mention how many troopers we lost under orders to not shoot to hit.”
Actually that raises another point. It is really unclear in the first film what exactly Vader’s position of authority is. Because he seems kind of subordinate to Tarkin at points. He even tells Vader to leave that officer alone when he’s strangling him, and he obeys the order.
I think Lucas thought he had it covered with Obi-Wan’s, “These blast points are too accurate for Sandpeople. Only Imperial Stormtroopers are that accurate” line. You are correct though, that is one change that was needed.
What? Never heard that. Why?
So that they can track the ship back to the rebel base!
That makes sense.
Because Luke is his son and he still cares about him. He just tries to hide it from the emperor and in the end has to kill him to save Luke.
The problem is the audience only ever finds this out in the final movie so it doesn’t make a lot of sense in the first two films. I’m not sure if there was a good way to address this though because the only option would have been to have a scene where Vader basically explains all this to Luke. It seems a bit late in the story for it really to be relevant.
Vader didn’t know Luke was his son until episode 2. They let them escape so they could track them back to the rebel base.
What? I’m pretty sure they do it so they can track them back to the rebel base.
I kinda think that if you can imagine a one-line fix to a plot hole, it isn’t really a plot hole.
I remember someone insisting to me that there was this huge plot hole in the film of the Fellowship of the Ring, because Merry and Pippin don’t get told about what Frodo and Sam are actually doing until the Council of Elrond, but still willingly run around risking life and limb to help them. Now, not only is this not a plot hole in itself (I’m pretty sure I’d help anyone fleeing a demonic horseman, just on principle, never mind if that person was my lifelong friend/cousin), it’s also quite obvious that they could have been told everything offscreen. The audience didn’t need to hear all that explanation again, five minutes after we first heard it.
A lot of plot holes people like to complain about are basically of this nature. ‘Can you imagine a fix?’ Yep, easily. ‘Did the audience need to hear it?’ Nope, because I could easily imagine it. ‘Well, there you go, then.’
Yeah, 90% of the time someone says pothole and I hear “The story didn’t spoon feed me the answer and I’m inexplicably mad about it.”
In another thread just today I was pointing out that this is the result of the Cinema Sins school of criticism taking over the average person’s relationship with media. People seem to genuinely think that how good or bad something is comes down to tallying up “plot holes” to come up with a sin score and calling it a day.
Plot holes are fine. Even legitimate plot holes are fine; if a story actually captures your attention and holds your emotional engagement, you won’t be thinking about plot holes because you’ll be too busy enjoying the story. This is Hitchcock described as Fridge Logic; problems that only occur to you hours after the movie is over and you’re staring into the refrigerator trying to decide what snack to make (yes, that’s the actual origin of the term). And he was very much of the opinion that this was absolutely fine; as long as any apparent inconsistency wasn’t so egregious as to break suspension of disbelief right there in the moment, it could be safely ignored.
When people fixate on minor plot holes it’s either because a) fundamentally the story sucks, so their mind is wandering, or b) they’ve trained themselves to constantly find or invent logic holes instead of actually trying to engage with what the storytelling is doing.
The Kessel Run being measured in distance rather than time could have been solved with a closeup shot instead of wide angle.
The way it’s scripted, Han thinks he’s got two local yokels and is feeding them a line. Obi-Wan, of course, is not a yokel, and reacts to that info with a “come on, dude” kind of look. Alec Guinness does do it, but not in a noticeable way. If there was a closeup shot, it would have worked. The wider shot that went into the film makes his reaction barely noticeable.
This leads to decades of treating Han’s line as actual truth and trying to figure out what he meant. Legends and Disney canon provided basically the same answer. Kessel is surrounded by black holes, and skimming closer to the event horizon would mean taking a shorter distance. Wasn’t supposed to work that way, though.
It mostly always just bothered me that a parsec is a unit of distance that relies on the Earth’s specific orbital distance around the sun. The Faraway Galaxy of Star Wars would have no way to measure how far a parsec is.
Star Wars does that. Han mentions “I’ll see you in hell” just before running off to find Luke on Hoth, and now there’s a whole Wookiepedia entry on what “hell” is in that galaxy.
I can track that though. Almost every culture on Earth has a concept of “The Bad Place” that it’s possible to go after you die. I have always been meaning to check and see if the race that Luke Skywalker is, is referred to as human in canon, and if Canon has anything to say about why they look exactly like us. I suppose I could look for myself on Wookiepedia, but I know as soon as I open that website, I’m not getting anything else done today.
They’re human. I don’t think it’s been fully covered how this happened, but there was one interesting piece that didn’t get published.
It combines Lucas’ various other movies like THX-1138 and Indiana Jones. Earth is overrun with an AI-driven society in THX, and a group of humans get on a ship to escape. They fall through a wormhole and end up in the Star Wars universe, becoming the first humans there. Han and Chewie travel back through this wormhole, and crash land on Earth in a forest. Chewie survives, and him walking around starts a bunch of stories about Big Foot. Indiana Jones investigates, finds the remains of the Falcon and Han, and wonders why this guy looks familiar.
I think American Gothic was in there somehow, too.
Even if it did get published, I can’t imagine it being taken seriously as Legends canon. Chewie was already killed off in the Yuuzhan Vong stuff with Han surviving. But that’s the closest to an answer we ever got.
As it stands, Courscant is often believed to be the original human homeworld in-universe, and whatever the truth is has been lost to time. Star Wars is interesting with how old the universe feels–which is more of a Tolkein-like property than traditional science fiction–and this is a pretty good example.
That’s cool. Thanks. I haven’t read almost any of the expanded universe stuff, but at some point I’m going to have to delve into it. My favorite part though, is the fact that a large percentage of Star wars fans, are also both professional and casual science nerds, so there are officially accepted orbital periods, and gravitational constants for basically every single planet.
Chewie died?
but speaking English is fine …
I had a friend who was really annoyed that there was a Scottish accent in Force Awakens. I said that none of the characters are speaking English in-universe, so any and all accents are just analogies for how each character is heard. Nope. He was still annoyed because there’s no Scotland in the star wars galaxy.
Extra weird hang-up to have, because the films have always had English and American accents side-by-side, even though there’s clearly no England or America!
Anyway, it’s really no different to them calling their ships X-wings and Y-wings, even though they don’t use our alphabet.
Shit that x-wing thing is really gonna bug me now.
Sorry!
In the original cut they did use the Latin alphabet, so this is, incredibly, yet another thing George Lucas did to make the first film retroactively annoying.
Nah dw about it, it is quite funny.
Yes it does. I’m given to understand that they also translate the film into the primary language of the region when it is shown in other countries as well. Why do you ask?
So translating from an Earthly parallax second to a Far Far Away Galactic standard parallax second also took place. Stop feigning being so thick.
I know you think what you just said makes sense, but it doesn’t.
Maybe the same but Coruscant?
I’m digging deep in my memory here so I can’t provide any details, but there was one episode from a very early season of Grey’s Anatomy where I got to the end of the episode and thought, “wait, did they ever solve this episode’s medical mystery?” There was a lot of doctor-plot that episode and the patient plot just kinda got dropped. Well I watched the deleted scenes for that episode, and low and behold there’s a line where they explain exactly what was going on with the patient. It wasn’t the real highlight/purpose of the scene, but I’m still shocked they would cut it because it left an entire plotline (albeit just for that episode) completely dangling.
I haven’t watched any Grey’s Anatomy to speak of, but I suppose that sounds about right from what I’ve heard.
I haven’t watched the series in over a decade so I have no idea how it’s aged (or how my tastes have changed as I’ve aged) but I remember the early seasons being quite good. Gray’s Anatomy was really popular the first few years that it aired, and at least at the time I thought it was deservedly so. I think I dropped the show around season six? It was getting too soapy/ridiculous and the plot was starting to go in circles. They ratchet up the tension really high pretty early on (both on the medical drama and doctor-relationship drama sides) so the writers inevitably set themselves up for failure, because this isn’t a shonen power fantasy, you can’t just keep driving things up to higher and higher stakes and still remain within the confines of reality.
For instance, in a very early season there’s a really bad train crash where a bunch of patients flood into the hospital and I remember it being a huge climatic thing with some fantastic episodes. Then in a later season they have a bad ferry crash plotline that falls flat because they already did the train crash, and the emotional impact of this huge public transportation disaster was significantly diminished by a sense of “didn’t we go through this already?”
I cannot believe that the show is still going, mostly because I’m amazed they have any audience left.
Yeah, my wife wanted to watch it together and we got burned out on the repeated catastrophes. At some point they move onto dramatic plot disasters that include a bunch of the hospital staff, to make it more exciting. The show went on for a ton of seasons after we dropped it, so presumably they found some way to make it even more dramatic than a disaster that kills a 3rd of the hospital every season finale.
Watching the show on netflix was also bad for emotional whiplash. They would build all season up to two doctors confessing their love in the season finale, and then immediately in the next episode (new season) they would be broken up again. I suspect it felt more natural with the delay between seasons in-between episodes, but watching them back to back like that felt jarring.
I cannot believe that the show is still going, mostly because I’m amazed they have any audience left.
Looks like it has eroded significantly over time, but I guess with a sticky core audience and a shrinking expectations for network TV, it’s got its niche.
While I haven’t seen it personally from what I can recall. There apparently exists an episode of Midsomer Murders where the motiv of the killings got cut before airing.
Fun to hear Gray’s also managed to do that blunder. Wonder if any other similar shows have do the same. Feels kinda easy to accidentally do in that type of shows, if you do a very character focused episode.
There’s an episode in House where they do that. But it turns out that it’s all just Houses imagination anyway, and so that makes sense because really everything is about him. So it makes sense that nobody cures the patient if he isn’t there.
“Eagles can’t fly us to Mt. Doom because of a magic curse or some shit”- Gandalf to the council in Lord of the Rings
In the books it’s explained that the eagles were involved in a war of their own during the first two books and couldn’t send help without risking their own destruction. There’s actually a part in the books where frodo is like “why didn’t the eagles just fly us” lol.
Kinda the inverse of your question (or an example of this being done poorly) but in the latest or (second to latest) star wars, after being accused of recycling the old trilogy plot over again, the writers attempted to deflect away from the obvious similarities to Hoth by having one of the characters taste what appeared to be snow on a frigid planet resembling Hoth by exclaiming “It’s salt”
“They fly now” is a similarly atrocious example given that they’ve been flying for decades, just not in any of the main trilogy movies yet.
As a dedicated TLJ fan, I recuse myself.
Christopher Reeve Superman. How come he’s fast enough to go back in time, but not fast enough to save Lois in the first place?
Scene needed is Jor-El explaining that Clark is as strong as he believes himself to be. He can literally focus the entire power of the Sun if he’s strong enough.
Do you think he was flying around the earth for kicks? No, he was using a gravitational slingshot to build speed. Granted, they could have explained it better, so I guess a line like “we need to use the turn of the world to speed up our satilites, and we still can’t match his velocity. Imagine how fast he’d be.” But less clunky, of course.
Someone once explained it that watching the earth spin backward was not him flying so fast that he literally dragged the Earth in reverse but rather that the Earth spinning backward was a byproduct of our third party view watching time go in reverse because Superman was traveling back in time.
But he would have to literally be stronger than the sun to do that because the only way you can travel backwards in time is to travel faster than the speed of light.
But it’s movie magic so what can you say?
Honestly my head canon is that just like how humans on a hell of an adrenaline rush can do superhuman feats like lift a car for someone trapped under it, superman has basically the equivalent, breaking his known limitations through sheer force of adrenaline.
Kind of like how in one of the early seasons of the CW Flash series, Barry accidentally travels back in time while pushing himself to stop a tidal wave from destroying Central City.
I like that idea.
In a similar vein, Supes could be much weaker if he were asleep or distracted. In the current iteration, if Clark Kent gets hit in the head by a ninja the weapon breaks; in the new one, he can be knocked out if he isn’t pumped up. Sort of like how Houdini was killed when he told a fan they could hit him as hard as they wanted; he meant after he’d had a moment to prepare.
Kind of like how in one of the early seasons of the CW Flash series, Barry accidentally travels back in time while pushing himself to stop a tidal wave from destroying Central City.
That one really annoyed me because like the next episode they were saying he needed to go mach 3 which was faster than ever! And I was like… Is time travel less than mach 3? I’m pretty sure have jets that can go Mach 3…
Yeaaah CW Flash was really inconsistent with its power curves and growth.
…and it was all a dream.
“The red fabric attracts phaser fire and other dangers”
Okay, yes, well, good, but why the fuck would Starfleet make their uniforms out of danger enhancing materials? That is like some 4D chess fucking eugenics program going on here.
Anyone stupid enough to wear the uniform deserves to get shot. They obviously fixed the problem by TNG so command were able to flex a little bit.
To keep the important people from getting shot. Same reason batman makes robin wear a flashy costume.
There’s a YouTube series called “how it should have ended” and 90% of them are basically answers to this question lol
Totally forgot about HISHE! Gonna have to check them out again.
Pirates of the Caribbean it was pointed out Bootstap was strapped to a cannon and dropped into the sea but the logical conclusion that by lifting the curse Will had to kill his own father was never a plot point. not exactly a plot hole just a missed opportunity.
In Frozen 2, the elemental spirits have trapped a kingdom in a magical barrier for many years as punishment for building a dam to stop a river. The day is “saved” by an earth spirit incidentally destroying the dam and freeing the river. There was this whole thing about the spirits calling out to Elsa to come and save them, but apparently the spirits had the ability the whole time to break the dam. The whole plot was basically pointless. Maybe instead they needed Elsa to break the dam, or needed to combine their powers.
Not going to pretend that Frozen 2 is my favorite movie, but having seen it dozens of times with my kids…
The dam wasn’t the problem. It was a symbol of the problem, which was the rift between the 2 peoples living in such close proximity. Nature is indifferent, people are not. Nature doesn’t care if there’s a dam, it just becomes a different habitat. People should have cared about impacting each other’s way of life.
Nature removed the dam, and the barrier to the people coming together, when the responsible parties decided to right their wrongs and consider each other, regardless of the high cost. Even if that’s not the case, the story remains that nature’s power has to be harnessed to a purpose by people. But I think they were going for the former.
Anyway, not a great movie, but also not a plot hole.
Then back to the Future part 2, Marty McFly should have arrived in the future where he disappeared 30 years ago and his children were never born.
Even if he did arrive history should have begun reverting itself, as his disappearance from the past should have altered the present until he returns.
As long as he experienced no ghosting effects, that would have meant that he was functionally immortal until he returned back to the present.
That entire scenario could have been avoided if doc Brown had said we’ve got a few hours until the universe begins to rectify the fact that you are not in the past with the temporal causality of the present future
even if it demanded Simone Biles levels of mental gymnastics to save Carrie Fisher’s most emotionally resonant moment from ROTJ
I don’t think it’s “gymnastics” to imagine that an orphan toddler might end up with some false memories of what she imagines her mother was like.
What I’d rather have had as a tiny change to “improve” the situation would be to confirm that Palpatine used some kind of Dark Side alchemy to drain Padme’s life to keep Vader alive, I really like that notion. Wouldn’t need to be with dialogue, even, just have some kind of scene showing Palpatine meditating and channeling something.
And also, I personally think that vaders redemption at the end of episode 6 was false.
Vader killed billions of people. He destroyed an entire planet for the lulz.
And he was a whiny little shit his entire life before becoming Vader.
One tiny little moment of redemption is not enough to undo all the shit he did.
It is my opinion that the force ghosts shown at the end of episode 6 are being created by Luke Skywalker to assuage his own mental trauma of the series of events that had let him to that point.
He did that so he can tell himself that he is a hero, that he is not a failed Jedi, that all of the pain and suffering he had been through was worth it.
The only reason why Leia could sort of see them was because she was tuned into his force power
And he was a whiny little shit his entire life before becoming Vader.
Nah, he was cool as fuck as a pod racing eight year old or whatever.
He was a particularly angsty* teen, I’ll give you that, but he was also kinda being constantly left in the dark by his weird religious magi cult who wanted him to be their chosen one, so like, I can understand why his rebellious streak would be so big.
I do ultimately agree though, no amount of “redemption” can bring someone back from nuking an entire fucking planet.
“We’ve almost got some of their telecommunications cracked; the front end even runs on a laptop!” The Mac that sunk a thousand ships could have been merely clunky product placement, not a bafflingly stupid tech-on-film moment.
It was explained in a deleted scene. In Independence Day, our computers are based on reverse engineering their crashed ship. That and why would a hivemind alien race ever even need cyber security? Up to that point, they probably never encountered a scenario where a planet they were harvesting had an intelligent race on it, said intelligent race recovered a crashed ship of theirs, and said race was advanced enough reverse engineer it.
Same with Jurassic park 3 and the T-Rex that somehow managed to kill everyone while at the same time being still confined in the cargo bay.
The original script made perfect sense and then for some baffling reason they deleted important scenes for the theatrical release. In the original script the raptors were also in there, they got out through the small hole the T-Rex made, and then they killed everyone and jumped into the sea and swim to shore. Then for some totally bonkers reason they edited it and decided that the raptors had already been transported earlier and had nothing to do with this bit.
Which would have been fine but then they should have reshot the entire boat sequence. The problem is then they would have needed the T-Rex to have escaped. Not really sure why they didn’t do that as it didn’t really change the plot all that much and at least then it would have made sense.
I think the problem was that they decided late on in production that they didn’t actually want to deal with the CGI of having the raptor swim in water since water is hard to do. But again they should have reshot it.
I might humbly suggest that whatever pacing issues the scene introduced would have been worth it in this case.
Roland Emmerich is a very dumb man with a very low opinion of his audience.
