A Nowhere-Near Complete List of Star Wars Nitpicks
compiled by Chad Cook, Mark Kalar, and Keith Pille

So, Star Wars has been in the air a lot lately, and seeing Darth Vader's head on the front of a scooter at Target (there's some interesting merchandising-- when do we get our Josef Stalin skateboards?) reawakened the ancient urge to sit around and nitpick the hell out of the Star Wars movies.  Sure, it seems pissy and petulant, but complaining about Star Wars has always been part of the fun.

If we're overly slanted towards the original trilogy, it's because A) we've had more time to think about them and B) they're better movies.

-- So, exactly how much did Obi-Wan lie his ass off to Luke when they fist met?  We've known for a while that the whole "Darth Vader betrayed and murdered your father" bit was a load (from a certain point of view); but now it turns out that Kenobi was also stonewalling about not knowing the droids (to be fair, R2-D2 is just as guilty) and totally talking out of his ass about Luke's father passing along a lightsaber for his son (unless Anakin grunted something while he was burning).

Kenobi also spends a lot of time playing dumb about Leia.  Sure, we have an established reason for him not to tell Luke... but remember in Empire, when Luke takes off for Cloud City and Kenobi says "That boy is our last hope?"  Yoda tells him there's another, and Kenobi acts like it's news to him.

You can't trust that Kenobi guy.

-- And let's not even go into how much grief R2-D2, who pointedly didn't get his memory wiped at the end of Sith, could have saved everybody if he'd just spilled his guts about everything he knew.  He sat back and knowingly watched Luke hit on his sister.  That's one deviant little robot.

-- Consider this:  the primary plots for both Empire and Jedi are that Vader is supposed to find Luke and bring him before the Emperor.  But at the beginning of Star Wars (American Nerd will be a cold, dark husk of a website before we'll  call it "A New Hope." We know, it's always been there in the opening crawl, but for us Episode IV is just called Star Wars), all Luke will talk about is wanting to go to the Academy.  Given how nasty the Empire is made out to be, it's safe to assume that the only Academies in operation would be there to feed the Imperial navy.  We have to figure that he would've stood up to Uncle Owen and actually left at some point... so think of this:  if the Empire hadn't built the Death Star, the chain of events that got Luke off Tatooine and into the Rebellion never would've happened.  He would have joined their side (and, being the awesome instinctive pilot, would've risen up the ranks, caught Vader's attention, been properly indoctrinated, etc. etc).

They really screwed themselves.

Of course, you who know your deep trivia will point out that Luke would've just ditched the Academy to join the Rebellion, just like Biggs did.  Well, then, why doesn't the Empire shut down the Academy, since it seems to have a problem with producing rebel pilots?

-- So, after the wholly unecessary (and pretty cheap, frankly) revelation in Sith that Chewbacca is some sort of Wookiee leader, how is it that 20 years later he's second-in-command to a space pirate?

--  And speaking of Chewbacca, let's hear it for the real hero of the Rebellion.  Luke's (and Vader's) actions at the end of Jedi are completely irrelevant:  suppose Luke succumbs to the dark side, cuts down his father, and stands at the Emperor's right side.  While this is going down, Chewie's still going to take over an Imperial Walker, allowing the rebels to get into the bunker and blow up the shield generator.  And once that happens, Luke, the Emperor, and Vader's corpse are all vapor.  Luke's decision doesn't mean jack.

It's Chewie all the way.  Well, Chewie with an assist from Lando, Wedge, and Lando's copilot with the jowls.

--Who's backing these rebels, anyway?  Is it the CIA equivalent of some neighboring galaxy?  Somebody's bankrolling and equipping them. In Episode IV, the rebel fighters are clearly superior to the Empire's.  X-wings can absorb several hits; TIE fighters explode if you look at them (the one exception being Vader's special TIE fighter-- and think of how much better off the Empire would've been if their entire fleet was equipped with fancy ships like his).  Luke's X-wing has a hyperdrive; Han and Obi-Wan remark at one point that TIE fighters don't (although with Kenobi, it's entirely possible that he's bullshitting us once again).  By the time Jedi rolls around, the Rebellion has at least two entirely new classes of fighters; so they must have an R&D department, as well as some bang-up fighter factories.

-- Towards the end of Jedi, Lando is nominated to lead the fighter attack on the second Death Star.  The rebels are a little lax on assigning command authority to people they've just met, but whatever. As the attack is about to be launched, Han insists that Lando take the Millenium Falcon.  WHY?  Sure, she's got a fast hyperdrive, but it's well-established that below lightspeed she's slower and less maneuverable than a TIE fighter.  And, knowing that he has to fly inside the superstructure of a giant space station, Lando agrees.It's always a good idea to lead a fighter attack in a freighter.

One theory: Lando's a clever guy, knows there's a good chance of the attack going badly, and wants to make sure that he's got a good way out if things go south.

-- There are a couple of interrelated timeline problems in Empire:

1. We never hear exactly how long Han, Leia, and Chewie are running from the Empire in the Falcon, but it doesn't seem to be too long; there's nothing in the movie to indicate that it's a matter of months or even weeks (we never even see any sleeping quarters on the Falcon, so unless they're just sleeping in the hallway, it can't be that long). If nothing else, they don't look too rumpled when they get to Cloud City.  But that means that Luke's Jedi training went awfully fast. Considering that Yoda tells him in Jedi that he's received all the training he needs, Luke goes from talented-amateur to ABD Jedi in the same amount of time it take the Falcon to get from Hoth to Bespin. And that seems fishy.

2. Also, one of the big plot points is that the Falcon's hyperdive is down. Fine. But then how are they getting from star system to star system while running from the Empire? I'll buy that there's an uncharted asteroid field next to Hoth; but when they come out of the field, Solo says they're in the Anoat system, while earlier Hoth had been referred to as its own system. So they've apparently travelled pretty far. They then travel on, sans hyperdrive, to Bespin, which even Solo says is pretty far away. How are they managing all of this interstellar travel without the hyperdrive?

It's possible that they're doing all of their interstellar travel at some high percentage of the speed of light, and the resulting time dilation means that only a short period of time passes for them, while everyone else experiences months or weeks or whatever (this would also allow Luke more time for Jedi training, too). This doesn't feel like a very good explanation, though; seems like it opens up a lot of Relatavistic cans of worms.

--Imperial equipment suffers from some design flaws.  What's up with the armor the stormtroopers wear?  It offers lousy protection, given that stormtroopers seem to go down at the sight of a blaster (or an Ewok brandishing a sharpened stick).  It's colored bright white, which in addition to having no camouflage value must be a bitch to keep clean (and if it's at all similar to the casing on an iPod, it scratches if you breathe on it). We never really hear if the Death Stars are air-conditioned, but if not you have to believe that a stormtrooper's suit gets fairly pungent after a 12 hour shift.  On top of that, why do they need to wear armor inside the Death Star?  Do they actually believe that they will have to repel an invasion force at some point?

The Empire would be better served with black Adidas jump suits.

-- Why are they so nervous about disbanding the Senate in the first movie? Are there citizens out there who somehow think the Empire is still a democracy?

--The moon of Endor is a pretty obvious staging point for an attack on the second Death Star. Why not put a few more stormtroopers there?

--If Luke is going to teach future generations of Jedi, clearly the galaxy is in trouble. Any Jedi in any of the early movies could clearly kick Luke's ass. In Empire, he struggles to move his lightsaber using the Force, while young Obi-Wan is throwing battle droids around. If the Force is so strong in him, why does he suck?

-- In the attack on the first Death Star, why do the rebel fighters fly  down the trench to get to the exhaust port? Why not just fly right there? Luke's able to just pull up once he fires the torpedo so presumably it's just open to space.

-- The destruction of a metal body as large as the second Death Star in a very close orbit to an inhabited planet would inevtiably lead to a mass-extinction-level global environmental catastrophe. if you didn't like the Ewoks, you're in luck, because Lando, Wedge and the guy with the jowls guaranteed the destruction of their natural habitat (a more detailed-- and very entertaining-- discussion of this can be found here).