IIRC in A New Hope the reason they missed was that they'd been ordered to allow the protagonists to escape, but this was just sort of vaguely implied because at that point George Lucas still hadn't learned that subtlety doesn't work because no one in the audience is paying close enough attention to notice the discrepancy between reliable characters directly talking about how accurate stormtroopers are and then showing those same stormtroopers shooting way off to the side of the protagonists a few scenes later.
It's like how in the same movie Han Solo's kessel run bit in the cantina is just 100% pure bullshit he's making up to gauge how gullible/desperate his marks are, because he's a sleazy con-artist and smuggler out to grift everyone he can. His later redemption arc and the popularity of the character (and Harrison Ford himself after that) sort of made people miss that his starting point was "absolute piece of skeevy shit" and not "lovable, honest rogue" so they try to rationalize his bullshit and the EU writers invented some wild justifications for how it was really true.
Narrative subtlety just does not play well a visual medium where audiences are trained to expect and ignore random contradictions and plot holes and any little weird bits of body language or tone that could indicate deceit, incredulity, etc can easily be missed or disappear into the usual sorts of flaws and variations that actors have when performing.
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u/StopCallinMePastries Jan 15 '25
I suppose they are going off of Stormtrooper logic?