Star Wars: Episode IV A New Hope/Movie Mistake Corrections

* Just before Lord Vader appears the first time (on the boarded consular ship, through the breached door), there is a Stormtrooper checking another trooper apparently dead on the floor (he's lifting the dead one's head). Then Vader enters, and the Stormtrooper quickly straightens up, dropping the head. It turns out the "dead" Stormtrooper was actually alive, however, because he carefully lowers his own head to the floor. (00:04:30) **People have been shown to take non-fatal shots throughout the franchise, including in this film. Also, that's the very purpose for wearing armor - to increase chances for surviving just such a hit. So there's no real reason why the man on the floor must be dead.**
* *Cubs Fan* In the Judland Wastes, right before Obi-Wan first appears, Luke is alerted to the presence of what turns out to be Tusken Raiders nearby and goes to investigate, instead of simply leaving with R2 and 3PO. **Luke has an insatiable appetite for adventure, it is well within his behavior to investigate the Sand People; he even took a rifle with him suggesting he was expecting to engage with them.**
* *Family5* When Obi Wan Kenobi drops Luke as a baby to his uncle he is a fairly young man. In episode 4 given that Luke is only 18 or 19, why does Ben Kenobi look like he's in his 60s or 70s? He couldn't have aged that much in 20 yrs. ***Jon Sandys* It's slightly fudged but adds up OK. Ewan McGregor was 34 in Revenge of the Sith, but could easily be playing as slightly older, into his 40s. Alec Guinness was 63 in Star Wars, and Obi-Wan has been living a fairly hard life on the binary star planet of Tatooine - the sun damage alone would age him a bit.**
* *Dr Wilson* I'm not a specialist in audio equipment, but when the Jawas are transporting R2-D2, one of them has what I think is a microphone in his pocket. **Jawas are Junkers, meaning that he could be carrying just random junk.**
* If the Death Star disposes of garbage by crushing it in those giant compactors why is the red-eyed tentacled monster that attacks Luke still alive in there? How does it avoid being smashed up into pulp along with the trash? **The dianoga (which is sort of like an octopus with an eye on a stalk) leaves the compactor prior to the walls closing. You can hear a door opening prior to the creature releasing Luke.**
* When Ben gives Luke a helmet for his light sabre practice, Luke is struck by a laser bolt by the ball, to which Ben replies "Stretch out with your feelings". At this point you can see Harrison Ford turn away and start laughing before the scene ends. ***Twotall* At this point, Han has no belief in the Force, and Luke's exercises seem ridiculous to him. It's not out of character for him to have to turn away and laugh. Rude, but not out of character.**
* *gandolfs dad* When Ben makes the noise to distract the two stormtroopers just before he walks off you can see him look to his right. But what was there to look at apart from other crew and equipment? **He was making sure that nobody was watching him.**
* *Ed Y* The soldiers inside the blockade runner hear the ship docking with the star destroyer before the two ships even come in contact. ***Tailkinker* What they're hearing is the effect of the tractor beam that the Star Destroyer's using to pull the blockade runner into its docking bay. Parts of the ship are flexing under the strain.**
* When C-3PO says he speaks a cousin language to "Bacche", the uncle says "close enough". There is an expression, "Close only counts in Bocce". Bocce is Italian lawn bowling where you try to get a ball as close as possible to another. ***Twotall* That's not at all how the conversation goes. Lars asks if 3PO speaks Bocce, to which 3PO replies "It's like a second language to me". Lars then asks him to shut up and turns to the Jawa to finish the deal. At no point does anyone use the words "close enough".**
* *Dr Wilson* When the stormtroopers breaks into the Blockade Runner, the explosion leaves a lot of debris on the floor, but when Lord Vader arrives a little bit later, there is much less debris. ***Bruce Minnick* The debris would have been moved by all the personnel (rebel soldiers and stormtroopers) moving about. Also, there are a lot of dead bodies, these would cover up a lot of debris. \*Also, since it is implied that the stormtroopers moved the bodies out of the middle of the hallway (since we see them lined up on the side rather than sprawled out in the middle), they probably also moved any debris that was in the hallway out of the way as well.**
* When the rebels are preparing to attack the Death Star, Luke is told that the exhaust port he must hit is only two meters wide. Meters? Isn't it a little odd that the world of "A long time ago in a galaxy far, far away" uses "our" metric system? Especially considering that its units were (originally) based on the circumference of the Earth? ***Tailkinker* You have a problem with that and you don't think it's a little odd that they're all speaking English? As with any film of this type, things have been translated into terms that the audience will be able to understand. Standard cinematic practice; not a mistake.**
* *mikelynch* At the end of the movie when the rebel pilots are attacking the Death Star, red leader was able to get a shot off at the thermal exhaust port. He reports the proton torpedo didn't go in. Rather, it impacted on the surface, evidenced by a massive explosion. but when Luke gets off his shot, there is no visible damage to the exhaust port. ***Greg Dwyer* There is an extreme closeup when Luke's torpedo enters the port. If Red Leader missed by a significant margin, we wouldn't see the damage.**
* In the scene where the rebels are in the briefing room for the attack on the Death Star, the guy explaining the attack says that they will need Proton Torpedos because the exhaust port is ray shielded. When Luke finally gets the torpedos in, there are not any ray shields. (01:40:35 - 01:57:00) ***Tailkinker*  Just because they're not visible, it doesn't mean that they're not there. You'll note, if you pay attention, that shields in the Star Wars universe are invisible unless they're actually being fired upon, in which case their presence can be detected by the reaction of the laser blasts. Proton torpedoes just go straight through with being affected.**
* When Luke announces to Princess Leia that he has come to rescue her and tells her that he is here with 'Ben Kenobi', Leia also says 'Ben'. But since Kenobi had been widely known as Obi-Wan and the name Ben was a semi-alias he had adopted for his exile on Tatooine, how comes that she would call him 'Ben'? (In the novelization of the original story she bursts out of the cell calling for Obi-Wan, not Ben.). **Her mission was to find and contact Obi-Wan Kenobi. She knew what planet he was living on, it stands to reason she would also have known the name he was living under.**
* When Luke and Ben first see R2D2 and C3PO, Ben says he doesn't remember owning or know the droids, but we know he knows them from episodes 1 - 3. ***Phixius* Obi-Wan never says he doesn't know the droids. Just that he never owned them. R2-D2 claimed to have been owned by Obi-Wan, Luke passed the comment along to him, and Obi-Wan denied it. It's not a mistake. Even if Obi-Wan were lying, it'd still just be a character decision. *LorgSkyegon* He's not lying. Obi-Wan never owned a droid. Anakin owned R2-D2 and the only other droids Obi-Wan is to use were in ships and presumably owned by the Jedi Order.**
* Considering how expensive the Death Star was you would think that they would be able to afford decent chairs, during the first scene at the big table the back of Tarkin's chair wobbles like hell, especially when he first walks in and sits down. (00:36:00) ***Jazetopher* Not understanding something or giving your opinion of what you think should be done does not make it a mistake. There are several reasons that the chairs could wobble, including the fact that an object as large as the Death Star might be prone to being hit by space debris (meteors, etc.) and the chairs need to move a little in response.**
* *gandolfs dad* When Luke's uncle is next to the jawa transport telling Luke he can't go to Toshi's station with his mates, look in the background and you can see a line going through the background board and you can see a line on the floor where the board stands. **There is no 'background board'. This scene was shot outdoors in a real desert. The vertical line is the tall antenna of one of the rearmost robots, and the horizontal line is a rut in the dry desert floor. In my screen-shot, note the antenna ends below the transporter's overhang, and doesn't pass behind it as a 'background' would. No mistake here.**
* Why does C-3PO, upon 'returning' to Tatooine, not recognize the place of his creation, or the Lars family moisture farm, where he HAD briefly visited in the first movie. ***Super Grover*  At the end of Episode III Revenge of the Sith, Senator Bail Organa orders Captain Antilles to, "Have the protocol droid's memory erased.", referring to C-3PO. That's why many years later in Episode IV, A New Hope, C-3PO has no recollection of his surroundings or anyone he knew at that time.**
* *Matty Blast* Luke says, "Owen. This R2 unit has a bad motivator." The droid he's talking about is R5-D4 (source = starwars.com). ***han\_solo\_321* In The Star Wars insider magazine it said that R2 units are used so much that Luke would call any droid like that an R2 unit, much like "hoover" to refer to a vacuum cleaner of any brand.**
* *Dr Wilson* There's no stars in the sky during many shots of the Death Star's hangar. ***Sol Parker* This is a matter of perspective since it is very bright in the hanger, it is quite logical that one could not see the stars from back inside the hanger.**
* Luke's landspeeder changes sizes at least once. As he and Threepio are searching for R2, you can see that its about the size of, say, an El Camino or similar car from the '70s. But when the Tusken raiders are ransacking it, its barely as long as they are tall. ***Bruce Minnick* The speeder looks bigger when they are searching because of the camera angle and light, it is an optical illusion. They used the same model for all of the speeder shots, so it would be the same size for every shot.**
* *JustJudy* When C3PO and R2-D2 jettison from the embattled Consular ship in a pod, one of Darth Vadar's men comments to another 'there goes another one.' A few minutes later an officer, who reports to Vader that his troops could not find the plans on board the ship, mentions that a pod with no life forms aboard had escaped. Wouldn't the officer want to mention ALL the pods to his commanding officer? ***:han\_solo\_321* The gunners shot down all of the others pods that tried to flee, because they contained lifeforms. Later, they concluded that the empty pod contained the plans.**
* When Luke exits his X-Wing , just after the final battle with the Death Star, Leia rushes to greet him. However, after he's climbed out, she greets him with "Luke!", whereas he greets her with "Carrie!". **This has been denied many times by George Lucas - it would have been very easy to dub over it, especially with the re-releases. He just shouts "Hey!", and it sounds a bit like "Carrie!"**
* When the Garindan, aka "Long Snout," directs the Stormtroopers toward the launch bay for the Millennium Falcon, he whacks himself in the nose as he points. Not only does this reveal the bogus rubbery nose, but it's also likely that a creature that spent his entire life with that nose would have learned by now not to hit himself there. ***C Fernandez* This is a ridiculous stretch just to create a mistake. We have no idea what the skeletal structure (if any) of the creature's "nose" may be. It could be like human ears, which also seem rubbery when you touch them. And humans' whole life experiences haven't prevented them from accidentally hitting themselves in the face, biting their own tongues or tripping over their own feet all the time.**
* When Obi-Wan and Vader are dueling, Obi-Wan calls his opponent Darth as if it were his first name. Darth is a Sith title, not Vader's first name, which is of course Anakin. **Yes, but it's a title like General, for example, and it's possible (I think it happens in Lethal Weapon) for the good guy to call the bad guy "Colonel", or "General". It probably happens in the Rock too. To add to this, it would be 3 years before Empire Strikes Back, and 3 years before we learn his real name. It would baffle the audience to hear a random name.**
* When Han begins to run after the storm troopers saying, "get back to the ship!" to Luke and Leia, in next shot, Luke actually loads a live cartridge into his blaster, revealing that the "blasters" are actually blank-firing guns. To prove this, you can hear a click-click noise before he says, "come on."  **He does not load anything into his blaster. Han shouts "get back to the ship." Luke lowers his hand, taking the blaster out of frame and you hear a metallic sound. This is likely a Foley sound added after filming to indicate that the blaster had been passed from Luke's left hand to his right.**
* When C3-P0 falls over after the Sand people attack Luke, his left arm is missing. They then pick up a right arm. **It is a left arm. The hand on the arm is clearly a left hand. The thumb is facing us. The angle of the arm is viewed from slightly underneath making it appear to be a right armed joint. It is an optical illusion. The hand clarifies which arm it is.**
* When the empire is invading Princess Leia's starship C-3PO says, "The princess is in danger!" But later in the movie when R2-D2 shows his projection video he doesn't know who she is. ***Tailkinker*C-3PO isn't stupid. Yes, he knows exactly who it is, but he doesn't know, having only just met him, that Luke can be trusted with that information.**
* Princess Leia knows the Millennium Falcon was being tracked as it headed to the rebel base, but she still decides to deliver the stolen plans in person. Why didn't she just transmit them across space like when she first got them at the start of the film? ***Sierra1* Since the Empire controls the HoloNet, the Rebels are unable to transmit information quickly over such large distances as Tatooine to Yavin, which is why Leia's ship had to be sent to intercept the Death Star specifications in the first place.**
* After darth vader kills Obi Wan Luke shouts "nooo!" and the stormtroopers start shooting them. During the shooting the trooper on the 2nd left is shot down, then in the next shot it is the same trooper and he's dying again. ***JC Fernandez* He isn't dying again; it's one continuous action from two different perspectives. He's shot in the chest in a medium shot then begins to fall. He continues to fall in the next shot (a long shot of the same set of troopers), eventually falling down the shaft.**
* *Douglas Leathem* When Luke (disguised as a stormtrooper) goes in the room (where Ben goes away), right when Luke closes the door, (for the first time) if you see Frame-by-frame, the door shakes left and right as it comes down. (it could be spotted through normal time, too.). ***Phixius* This isn't a mistake. One could argue that the door just needs some lubricant, but even without an explanation I don't see how this could be considered an error on the part of the film makers.**
* In the beginning when R2 projects the hologram of Leia, When she says "You're my only hope", she is standing up. In the next shot she says it again, but is bent over. **When we initially see the recording, we're seeing a malfunctioning repeat of one piece of the message where the audio and video don't match. Later, we see the message as it was recorded, without the malfunction.**
* Original theatrical version: After Han, Luke and Leia get out the giant trash compactor, at the bit where they are overlooking the Falcon from the bay, Han says "There she is" and a second after, Chewbacca runs by him and becomes transparent. ***Garlonuss* He does not become transparent. It's a glare from lights off to the side of the shot. If you watch a little further, the shot changes to the droids, then the ship, then back to the main group. When Leia says "You came in that thing? You're braver than I thought," you can see the same glare pattern on the back wall, next to Chewie.**
* When Luke has rescued Leia on the Death Star and stormtroopers have prevented them from going back out the way they came, Han says that there is no other way out when there is an exit on the other end of the corridor. (01:13:00) ***Jazetopher* He means there is no "safe" way out now that their planned exit is blocked, as he realizes more stormtroopers are likely not far from catching up with them. It's a "Death Star" the size of a small moon. He obviously isn't implying that on the whole station, that was the "only" exit point.**
* In the lightsaber duel scene, Vader's lightsaber changes from shot to shot from red to pink. **Red to pink is mostly in the mind. The graphics people used the same overlay each time for Vader's light saber.**