Nitpicking A New Hope from 1:05:15 to 1:19:18
Strap in, we're flying right into the Death Star.
It's huge. Its guns are huge. The Falcon is tiny. The docking bay is... middling. The corridors have little floor sweepers underfoot, which looks real dangerous when all your guys are wearing helmets with low visibility (why do you think Stormtroopers can't hit the broad side of a barn?).
The Imperials who search the Falcon find it empty. It's likely the occupants left in the escape pods. And yet, Darth Vader feels a presence he hasn't felt in years. Search every inch of it. Cue a couple guys just walking through the corridors of the Falcon again. No scanning of any kind. No pawing at the walls for secret doors and passages. It's pretty easy to smuggle stuff into and out of the Empire, it looks like. They most certainly don't check under the floorboards.
Nice to see Han and Chewie are the kind of friends who don't feel awkward about giving each other a nice petting. It's cool, so long as it's not meant to denote a character being treated like a pet. Okay NOW they're gonna send in a crew with scanners. But just technicians, okay? Technicians without armed escort, only Companion Cubes.
Han and friends punch these guys out before they can shoot their Portal guns, and then lure the guards in and do the same to them. I ask again, WHY isn't the initial search party equipped with scanners? From there, the heroes' plan is pretty good. They steal a couple of Stormtrooper armors and get all chesty with it, feign equipment malfunction, and invade the docking bay control center. Chewbacca even shoots first.
Oh, look at that: Even though gory sizzling was added to Greedo's corpse, or the blood in the dismemberment of the Walrus-Man kept in, when a HUMAN BEING gets hit, the Special Edition has removed the flaming hit! It's going to happen a number of times during the Death Star escape, but I find this sanitizing more than a little speciesist. For more Death Star lax security shenanigans, here's how you hack the whole blamed Imperial system:
Yep, just plug you strandard issue astro-droid (used models available at your basic Jawa scrapyard) into it and you're good to go. Plans, schematics, the location of the Princess, anything (ok, ok, some stuff restricted because of plot reasons). Now all Luke needs to do is dangle some cash in front of Han's face and they're off to rescue Leia. They disguise Chewie as a prisoner and head for the detention area. Confirmation from Luke on how the Stormtrooper costumes are bad for accuracy: "I can't see a thing in this helmet!" Down in the detention center, of course the officers are going to sneer at the lowly troopers and say they we're advised about the prisoner transfer, which is just about the only way this scheme has ever go before or since. Chewie gets "loose" pretty entertainingly though and every starts shooting up the wobbly sets (it's a problem for Doctor Who, but no one ever mentions it for Star Wars? Foo!) to get as many Lego studs as possible.
Once all the bad guys are dead - or maybe they'll be fine; after all, their chests no longer explode with sparks in the new version, except this one guy, so I don't know why ANYONE'S death was censored - Luke heads up the corridor while Han puts on that effeminate voice he also puts on in Blade Runner, you know the one, to tell the guys in whatever control center had its camera views just blown up everything is hunky-dory.
He's so bad at lying though, he has to end the "boring conversation" with a weapons blast. Hey, it's why we love Han Solo. You don't want to broach the subject of the weather at a cocktail party with this guy. PIEW PIEW! Meanwhile, Luke finds Leia resting suggestively in her cell. He's so taken by the sight of his sexy sexy sister, it gives him the body language of a Tex Avery cartoon.
And isn't he a bit short for a Stormtrooper? Well, yes, if they're all clones as the prequels suggest. Except no one ever notices he's short in among the troops, troops that have different voices and postures anyway. Hey, maybe there are clones, and then there are normal recruits. Maybe THEY'RE the bad marksmen, while the clones are some kind of Elite. Oh damn, people have been talking up the EU so much, they've got ME trying for a No-Prize now. Luke comes to his senses, takes the helmet off, and announces himself as Luke Skywalker! "Who?" So your mother never told you the whole story of Obi-Wan and his best friend Anakin Skywalker? Which, by the way, would be the first thing I'd have lied to Luke about if I'd been Owen and Beru if I didn't want his father to even find him. Why wouldn't you change his NAME?!
The rescuers get jumped by another bunch of Stormtroopers, which gives Han and Leia the opportunity to meet and be really crappy to each other, unresolved sexual tension and all that. Why she calls him "flyboy" before knowing he's a pilot is a little mystifying, but no less so than Han calling Luke "the brains" (haha). Silly Han, LEIA is the brains. And the guts. And she's the one who gets them out of the frying pan...
How does that expression go again?
Strap in, we're flying right into the Death Star.
How does that expression go again?
Comments
That is the current explanation (rapid aging, so the original clones are dying off, and it takes a while to grow new ones, who are also susceptible to biological attack since they're all genetically identical... hence, recruits). Personally, I prefer 'the prequels are pants, forget they exist, and btw the stormtroopers are all recruits'... but this works as a close second. :-)
"So your mother never told you the whole story of Obi-Wan and his best friend Anakin Skywalker?"
The mother she grew up with might not have known...? Ugh, did I just try to explain away a prequel-created continuity issue? Shoot me now.
"Why she calls him "flyboy" before knowing he's a pilot is a little mystifying"
Well, because...
...Uh, actually, that's a really good point. Maybe some part of his wardrobe is standard-issue pilot gear that someone in-universe would recognize? Or she just assumed 'well, the kid clearly isn't an experienced pilot, and we're in space, so someone had to have flown here...'
But, yeah- good point. I never noticed that before.
But yeah, the Organas were probably smarter than Owen and Beru. If you don't say anything about the kid's real parents, then said kid won't want to become like their parent and maybe fall to the Dark Side.
Then there's the question of how much Obi-Wan actually told Owen and Beru about Anakin. Did he get into the whole "he turned evil, killed a bunch of children, helped execute the Jedi, Force choked his wife, I amputated his limbs and set him on fire, then left him to become a cyborg" thing? Obviously, they knew *something* bad happened to Anakin, but to what extent? (Given that it's Obi-Wan, he probably would have fudged the truth somewhat, so as to not have to answer the "why didn't you make sure he was dead after you set him on fire" questions...)
Anyhoo... if any of the stormtroopers are still clones, it's definitely not all of them. The different voices pretty much proves that one definitively. Temuera Morrison played Jango Fett in AotC, and all the clones in AotC and RotS. Lucas then had him redub all of Boba Fett's lines in TESB, as Boba was a clone of Jango. (If Lucas had bothered to give Boba any lines in RotJ, those would've been replaced as well, I'm sure.) Since he didn't have Morrison redub any stormtroopers, it's safe to say none of the ones we hear talking were Jango clones. (It would also seem kind of odd that none of the clones show up amongst the non-helmeted Imperial troops, like the officers and whatnot...)
And on a completely different note... it's technically not an issue at this point in the movie, but what do they do with the scanning crew and the two stormtroopers in the Falcon? Obviously, they don't dump them out before they escape the Death Star, but... what happened to them? Did they kill those guys, or just knock them out? Did they become Rebel prisoners, were they dumped out an airlock, were they tied up in a storage compartment even while Han was leaving Yavin? (Crap, this is the kind of over-thinking that led to a whole lot of EU nonsense, isn't it...?)
The clones were considered tried and outdated after the "clone wars", just as the droids were trialled and dropped after the "Droid Wars".
Remember the whole rumour about Boba Fett possibly being a remnant of Vader's Shock Troopers? Which they eventually tied up with the Clone Troops all being taken from the same stock as he was? And how 'dem "Shock Troopers" supposedly predated storm troopers?
The Storm Troopers were never meant to BE the same guys as the clone troops, which face it, would all be bordering on sixty years OLD by now. I don't believe the Jedi ordered a second batch, did they, being dead and all....
The storm troopers were a return to standard soldiers, even I know that, even a marginal fan....
I wonder if Boba was related to Smur Fett?