This is not the plot hole you are looking for [Star Wars]
So I’m back from my honeymoon, and what better than to critique a bad blog post about Star Wars???
Cracked has an article about 8 movies that got away with plot holes. The #1 movie with a plot hole is The Empire Strikes Back. Here we go, FJM style.
So there’s the famous sequence where Luke gets trained by Yoda on Yoda’s shithole of a planet. To break up the sequence, the film cuts to the Millennium Falcon getting chased by the Empire to Lando’s cloud city. When they arrive, they get captured, at which point Luke has finished his training.
First off, Luke clearly leaves before his training is finished. It’s like a huge, gigantic point. Second, the Empire does not chase the Falcon to ‘Lando’s Cloud City’ (also called Bespin), the Falcon goes there after escaping the Empire (more on that later), and is followed there by Boba Fett. Starting off your section with these clearly erroneous statements make me instantly disagree with anything you might now say.
Well, that doesn’t work. Were they chased for months? Or was Luke trained in an afternoon? Either we were spared some extended scenes on board the Millennium Falcon featuring starvation and debates about when they’d have to eat Chewbacca, or becoming a Jedi is easier than getting a cub scout merit badge.
Someone (i.e. the writer of this Cracked article) needs to rewatch this movie ASAP. Let me refresh everyone’s memory.
Luke and the Falcon leave Hoth at the same time. Luke goes to Dagobah.
The Falcon immediately gets into some trouble with Imperial Star Destroyers. Then they enter an asteroid field and try to repair the hyperdrive. We are led to believe that they are there for a while. Vader has time to send out a call for bounty hunters and they arrive, which I assume takes a while. Then, eventually, the Falcon leaves to escape the worm, but the hyperdrive is still broken. Then Han attaches the Falcon to a Star Destroyer and escapes by acting like it’s part of the trash. Then the Falcon has to go to Bespin from wherever they are, at SUB-LIGHT Speed, because the Hyperdrive is broken.
So let’s recap. Two ships go to two different planets. The X-Wing flies straight to one planet, the Falcon spends some time going through an asteroid field, then flies to another planet. Assuming that both don’t use hyperdrive (Luke says as he’s going to Dagobah he wants to leave it on manual for a while, and I’m not sure if the X-Wing even has hyperdrive), and given that we are not told ANY info about how long it takes to get to these planets, and given that we are in SPACE where it might take a while, I don’t understand how two ships flying to two different planets where we have no info about how long it may take is a plot hole. I guess we assume it takes 20 mins because that’s how long this part of the movie is?
And as for the ‘extended scenes of starvation’, we are to assume that the Falcon has no food? Ooh, I know another plot hole in Star Wars, people only eat like 3 times in the entire trilogy, and you almost never see anyone sleeping!
I love how this writer is inventing plot holes by making assumptions about things that are never ever discussed.
The latter explanation seems more plausible, as it just reveals Luke to be an even whinier bitch than he seemed. Talk about ungrateful, he’s getting taught God-like abilities in about six hours, and he complains through literally every single one of them. It also means Yoda’s insistence that Jedis start their training as young children isn’t because the training’s such a long arduous process, but because he’s amused by the idea of children knowing how to choke each other with their minds.Now it’s true that when Luke tries to leave, Yoda insists the training isn’t over. But when Luke returns to Planet Shithole in Return of the Jedi to finish it, Yoda waves him off and tells him there’s nothing else to learn.
Then it turns out the final test Luke has to pass to become a Jedi is to defeat Darth Vader, the most powerful Jedi in the universe which kind of seems like a huge leap in difficulty after his one-day training session. That’d be like if the final stage of your driving test was to win the Indy 500.
So to answer the question, at what point did George Lucas stop paying attention? It looks like it was part way through the second movie.
Just stop it. Yes, the Star Wars movies have some problems, but attacking them in this way is just annoying. If you can’t come up with some sort of explanation about why Luke doesn’t need any more training (Yoda knows Vader can never kill him and will eventually turn on the Emperor, or Luke is some sort of Force Savant and is just that good, or that the Emperor is so powerful that he will never be defeated in one on one combat, whatever), then you should stop watching movies.
Because coming up with a suspension of disbelief in a movie where people can move shit with their minds is basically the easiest shit ever.
“the Falcon spends some time going through an asteroid field”
how long does it take a spaceship to travel through an asteroid field? and with the TIE fighters chasing it, it doesn’t feel like an epic trek, it feels like a high-speed chase. fixing a hyperdrive should not be similar in difficulty to training a jedi from almost nothing.
the way I understand it, dagobah is in some kind of time warp. because even if I give you some benefit of the doubt, I don’t think there’s any way to stretch out the falcon chase to match the weeks or months Luke seems to spend on dagobah. the scene where luke confronts vader/himself inside the cave suggests that the whole experience is doing some weird things to luke’s usual conception of reality. maybe yoda has condensed the years long jedi training program into a single afternoon– but it still feels like years to the student?
and I don’t think there’s anything wrong with luke coming back to dagobah in jedi to complete his training– only to be turned away. his skills have obviously increased and the fact that he still makes the effort to honor his promise shows he’s internalized other traits as well.
more of a problem for me, now that you mention it, is where those bounty hunters come from? how long did the falcon stay inside that worm?
They are traveling at light speed. Go look up the theory of relativity. Time SLOWS down for the Millenium Falcon because they are moving at light speed. This is how the light speed works. If you don’t believe me, look it up.
HOWEVER, the writers may not know this so it WAS either a huge plot hole or the writers REALLY thought this out scientifically.
First, in response to Kstay, they aren’t traveling at light speed. The hyperdrive is broken.
Now, to brian. The passage of time on the Falcon involves two different parts. First is the scene through the asteroid field. Second is the Falcon leaving the asteroid field, and then going to Cloud City. My entire point is that we don’t know how long they spend in the asteroid field, nor do we know how long it takes for them to get from the asteroid field to Cloud City. If you don’t know, then you can’t claim there’s a plot hole.