Star Wars: Episode V - The Empire Strikes Back

Corrected entry: In the Special Edition, when Luke is falling through Cloud City after the duel with Vader, a scream has been added. This scream was lifted from the Emperor's death scene in Return of the Jedi. When Vader tosses the Emperor down the reactor shaft, the Emperor's scream is exactly the same.

Correction: This was changed in the 2004 DVD edition. There is now no scream.

Correction: He or she was right, it was removed in the DVD.

Corrected entry: Before being frozen in carbonite, Leia tells Han she loves him, Han says, "I know." The script actually says "I love you too," but Harrison Ford (Han) didn't think it sounded like something Han would say, so he ad-libbed it.

Correction: Actually he ad-libbed it because they'd attempted the scene so many times, that Harrison Ford got sick of hearing her say "I love you", so he just said "I know"

Corrected entry: In Cloud City, Boba Fett shoots twice at Luke but when Luke starts to walk again, there's only one impact on the wall.

Dr Wilson

Correction: Both the laser blasts hit in the same place.

STP

Corrected entry: Where Luke is recovering in the bacta tank, at first the liquid have a light-blue, water-like color. If you watch in the next scene when he is outside of the tank, you can see it in the background with a deep red liquid. (00:15:30)

Correction: Bacta fluid has medicinal qualities, and it's more than reasonable to suppose that at different times throughout the process, its make-up and appearance can change. Note that the colour change occurs after the patient has been taken out of the tank.

STP

Corrected entry: When the ice planet is attacked, it is impossible for the Empire to drop bombs or shoot lasers on the rebels' base, due to the protective field. Why is it then possible for them to penetrate it with the invasion force?

Correction: It's the same reason as in the Phantom Menace when the robots can walk straight through the Gungans' shields. Although in Return of the Jedi Lando tells everyone to pull up and wait for Han and co. to destory the shield generator before they can advance, this just implies that space shields are different to ground-based shields.

Tailkinker

Corrected entry: When Luke walks around his X-wing after Yoda raises it out of the water, his jacket is tucked, which it wasn't in the previous shot.

Correction: The whole time Yoda is lifting the x-wing, Luke's shirt is buttoned and tucked in. This never changes. You could point out that Lukes shirt is unbuttoned and untucked when he's sitting down, but when they show him next, it's buttoned and tucked in. But they also show his hands up by his shirt, so it could be implied he buttoned it up and tucked it in, between shots.

Corrected entry: The AT AT'S first scene is where you see them for the first time as four groups and they start firing. However that scene has the AT AT's with red cockpits, but they aren't red ever again. Inside the cockpit, the seats aren't red, the walls aren't red, and the lights aren't red. So the AT AT's red cockpit scene doesnt make sense.

DarPower1

Correction: Actually, only the closest one has a red cockpit, The others are dark. Who's to say that the lights inside the one seen isn't red? Or at one point someone had a red light on, then turned it off later when they showed inside?

Corrected entry: When Luke cuts off Vader's head in the cave on Dagobah, the head rolls to a stop on the ground. The items on the ground next to the head vary from shot to shot between cuts to Luke. First there are sticks on the ground, then those sticks move to make way for the pieces of the broken mask, then the mask pieces disappear and a large branch appears.

Correction: Since the entire scene takes place in Luke's imagination there's hardly a consistency problem.

Corrected entry: At the end of the light sabre duel in Cloud City, Darth Vader says "Come with me, it is the only way" and Luke falls off the platform into space. When Luke falls, you can see Vader lower his left hand down to his side, and in the next scene, he is seen lowering his hand to his side for a second time.

Correction: This was stated before & corrected. You 1st see Vader lowering his arm (looking down at him), then it switches to a frontal view as he continues to lower his arm. He's not repeating the same action. It's just a continuation of showing him lower his arm.

Corrected entry: On Hoth, in the scene where Luke is getting ready to get in his X-wing and Han is working on top of the Millennium Falcon, Han stops to talk to Luke and asks him if he is OK. There is a small droid that approaches from the right that Han stops to speak to. In the next shot of Han, the droid in the background is moving from right to left and you can see vertical cables being used to move the droid.

Correction: Unless this was fixed in the DVD release, you can't see any cables pulling the droid. I looked at it several times, and couldn't see anything pulling it.

Corrected entry: When Captain Needa is killed by Darth Vader after he loses track of the Millennium Falcon, he dies with his hand clutching his throat. But when two Imperial Guards go to pick up the dead body, Captain Needa's hand has moved from his throat to his side.

Correction: As Needa falls, his right hand drifts from his neck to his chest. It is picked up there by the deck crew.

LorgSkyegon

Corrected entry: During the Battle of Hoth, some of the Rebels fall down without being shot.

Correction: They could be tripping over their own feet, after all they are running for their lives.

razoprill

Corrected entry: When Luke is sucked out of the shattered window, more of the window is broken than in the previous shot of the window. If something hit the window and broke it in the meantime, we should have heard it.

Correction: It's a broken window. Pieces could have dislodged and broke off (off-camera) by the force of the wind. We wouldn't have necessarily heard it over the roar of air rushing into the shaft.

JC Fernandez

Corrected entry: When the first transport leaves Hoth, the ion cannon fires four shots quite rapidly. However there are only two of the shots that take down the Imperial Cruiser.

ClearanceClarence

Correction: Here's the precise sequence: 1)The ion cannon fires two shots. 2)Two bolts fly past the transport with a third coming from the planet. 3)Reverse angle of the transport, two bolts fly past the transport and head to the star destroyer. 4)A closeup shot of the star destroyer taking two hits. It's unclear whether the bolts flying past the transport in shot 3 are intended to be the same bolts that flew past in shot 2 from a different angle (a common filmmaking practice) or an additional 2 shots. Regardless, the ion cannon may have simply missed some of its shots. The sequence can be reviewed here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bUSOjCpqJmA&feature=related (Time: 04:47-05:01).

JC Fernandez

Corrected entry: It seems that during the Luke/Vader duel in the carbon freeze chamber, immediately after Luke blasts Vader with steam, and again immediately after Luke kicks Vader down the stairs, you can hear David Prowse's voice through the mask instead of that of James Earl Jones.

christob

Correction: That it "seems" to be someone else's voice is not a mistake, it's an assumption. Even if it were Prowse who made the grunts you're referring to(which hardly qualify as a voice), there are lots of things that go into recording and mixing sound. For instance, I highly doubt Vader's breathing is James Earl Jones's own breathing. This is no more a mistake than Vader's voice sounding like James Earl Jones when there's someone else in the costume.

JC Fernandez

Correction: This needs more details. In which shot is it transparent? Which part of the ship? The only transparent portion I see is the gigantic bay window they stand in front of just before the credits.

JC Fernandez

Corrected entry: When Han, Leia and Chewbacca are walking through Cloud City with Lando, when they come around a corner, Lobot (Lando's aide, with "headphones" on his head) walks off to the left. When the stormtroopers enter to cut off their escape, Lobot is back, but he enters from the right.

Correction: He can only be seen from behind when he walks off to the left, so it's only an assumption that it's Lobot and not some other Cloud City operator.

JC Fernandez

Corrected entry: When Luke and Darth Vader are fighting and Darth Vader is hurling things at Luke, one thing he throws flies through the window and makes a giant hole. However, when Luke gets sucked out, the hole is twice as big even though nothing else went through it.

Jack Kaltenbach

Correction: There is clearly a vacuum (or at least drastically reduced air pressure) on the other side of the window. The suction created by the pressure differential could have easily sucked more of the broken window out.

Guy

Corrected entry: When Luke screams in pain after Vader cuts off his hand, you can see that the sleeve of his shirt goes a little past the stump, which is impossible, given that his hand was severed only a moment ago. (01:45:55)

Correction: Not really. Luke pulls his arm back immediately, which forces his sleeve further down his arm.

Corrected entry: When the canopy on the snow speeders is coming down, there's a whirring sound as if there is a motor closing it, but it's actually the gunner pulling on two handles that's closing them.

Correction: The whirring sound comes from the mechanism that keeps the canopy from simply falling down.

Phixius

Visible crew/equipment: When C-3PO is on the conveyor belt, if you look in the reflection in his head you can see the camera crew. (01:26:40)

More mistakes in Star Wars: Episode V - The Empire Strikes Back

Yoda: Told you, I did. Reckless is he. Now, matters are worse.
Obi-Wan: That boy is our last hope.
Yoda: No. There is another.

More quotes from Star Wars: Episode V - The Empire Strikes Back

Trivia: This was the only movie in the Star Wars series until Episode VII in 2015 without a scene on the planet Tattooine.

Xofer

More trivia for Star Wars: Episode V - The Empire Strikes Back

Answer: The short, short answer to this is "Yes... from a certain point of view." The long answer is complicated and depends completely on what timeframe you mean by "always." If you're going back all the way to the early rough drafts of the early-mid 70s (which actually resemble Episode I more than they do the Star Wars of 1977), you'll find there's a cyborg father figure protagonist that makes a heroic sacrifice, and then another character that is a "black knight" villain that eventually turns to the side of good near the end. Just to make things more complicated, there is yet another character, a villain by the name of "Darth Vader" that is a human Imperial officer like Grand Moff Tarkin. It may be a stretch to count all that as "Darth Vader was always the father" but the pieces were all there, at least.

TonyPH

(1) Now the earliest explicit mention on any documented material that Darth Vader is Luke's father comes from notes Lucas made outlining the general story of the trilogy and its place in the larger Star Wars saga. These were found in the archives for The Empire Strikes Back, but they are undated and we don't know if they were written before Star Wars (1977) and carried forward, or if they were written afterward. These were found fairly recently (made public in 2010) and as far as I know Lucas has never commented publicly about them.

TonyPH

(3) One thing we know, at least, is that Lucas had come up with the idea of Darth Vader the father before starting work on The Empire Strikes Back. Something incredibly odd, though, is that the first draft written by Leigh Brackett does not feature the twist (and in fact introduces Anakin himself as a ghost); for a long time many fans took this as proof that Lucas hadn't thought of the idea at all by then, but after the series outline was discovered it was made apparent that Lucas simply hadn't told Brackett for some reason. Perhaps he wasn't sure yet that he wanted to go through with it, or maybe at that point he was thinking of revealing it in the third film. Either way, Lucas would write the second draft himself, and that's where the twist first appears in script form.

TonyPH

(2) Something that must be understood about Star Wars (1977) is that it was an ALTERNATIVE to his original plans of a saga. By then he didn't think it was realistic that he would be able to make a long series of many movies, so he came up with a "Plan B": he crammed the general story of the trilogy into one movie. So we know that when Star Wars (1977) was filming, Darth Vader was NOT Luke's father, because this one movie was IT, that was the whole story. But what we DON'T know, is whether that means Lucas had abandoned the idea of Vader being the father in order to simplify the story, or if Lucas simply hadn't thought of that at all just yet.

TonyPH

(2, cont.) On a side note, you can tell by watching Star Wars (1977) how it has condensed the story of the trilogy. The middle portion has the characters trying to escape capture from the Empire while one of them loses a duel with Darth Vader (like The Empire Strikes Back) and the third act is a final battle against the Death Star above a forest moon (like Return of the Jedi). The first act features a member of royalty on the run while a couple of protagonists find the main hero on a desert planet, resembling the original drafts and by extension Star Wars: Episode I. Because of this we've arguably never actually had a "pure" first chapter to the original trilogy, even though Lucas eventually had the film serve this purpose anyway.

TonyPH

Answer: Yes, however, he didn't want anyone to KNOW about it. In fact, the original script said "'Obi Wan never told you what happened to your father.' 'He told me enough... he told me YOU killed him!' 'No, Obi-Wan killed your father'" Even Hamill was only told the real line just before shooting, so his reaction is somewhat natural.

SexyIrishLeprechaun

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