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Return of the Jedi masterpiece or trash?

#31 User is offline   Lord Aquaman Icon

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Posted 30 March 2005 - 05:09 PM

ROTJ has its faults, that I will not deny (adding Hayden Christensen to the end while cutting out Sebastian Shaw doesn't help either) but I also feel the film to be unfairly maligned (disregarding the Hayden Christensen thing).
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I'd like a qui-gon jinn please with an obi-wan to go.
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#32 User is offline   Jordan Icon

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Posted 30 March 2005 - 06:22 PM

The series as a whole, if ever watched in order, will look pretty damn stupid. -civillian

ROFL!

It's so true, nice observation. He went from main star to background menace. Darth Vader in the OT is nothing more than a figure of hate. He has no growth in the first film, and absolutely none in ROTJ, until the last scene of the movie.
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#33 User is offline   Mnesymone Icon

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Posted 01 April 2005 - 07:41 AM

Sorry if I'm elbowing anyone here but I'd like to reply to the original post.

1. Did I like it?
I didn't love it... I didn't hate it either.

2. What would I have changed about it?

Here we have the big issues.

Darth Vader is Luke's father - therefore you would expect some father-son similarities to exist, as it were, in the blood, especially given Luke's vision in the cave in Empire. Return of the Jedi delves into Vader's light side... Personally, delving into Luke's dark side, and Vader's desire to overthrow the Emperor with Luke's aid would have been better. Could Luke have opted to take one for the team and tried to join with Vader to defeat the Emperor, hoping that he can withstand the temptation of the dark side to return to the rebellion, rather than join Vader. Just a thought.

Darth Vader is Luke's father - but why is he Leia's father. It adds nothing - it actually takes away the potential for the other, some character, new exciting and unlooked for to rescue Luke from his fall. It also provides a short cut to resolving the Han/Leia/Luke relationship. Making Luke Leia's brother means she has to take Han. Actually... if she didn't, Han would have felt seriously rejected.
"I'm sure Luke made it off that thing before it blew... You love him, don't you... When he comes back, I won't get in the way"
"He's my brother (Han looks confused and hopeful), So thanks for letting us be together (Han looks confused and disturbed)"
But I digress...

Ben's handy heart to heart. There are all sorts of weird and exciting plot threads - so Obi-Wan Kenobi arrives, sits down and closes all of them off, despite being dead. He looked so comfortable on that log that as a child I thought it was a park bench... I was quite confused as to why a park bench would be on Dagobah.

Interrogating the dying Yoda seemed weird - Yoda lies dying, Luke presses him with all his questions. Odd, that.

Jabba.
I wouldn't have had Jabba as a deranged and debauched slug who delights in the company of women anatomically beyond him and eating toads. Nor would I have had him mouldering in a low-tech fortress in the desert. I had thought of him as a sort of alien Godfather, far out of Han's star, and strong enough that the Empire would think him not worth the fuss. Also, he would to be on a world with technology, with an organisation with starships, smugglers, pirates and bounty hunters, capable of carrying out interstellar crime, not with a rusty old Spanish Galleon on repulsorlifts and a few miserable monsters.

The Emperor.
In the Empire Strikes Back, a face is first given to the distant Emperor. He is a calm man, with a calm voice, a keen incisive mind and the Force to unravel the future. He seems... imperious.
In Return of the Jedi, he is Montgomery Burns.

Death Star. Rehashed a little perhaps.

Also, combining the child-oriented Ewoks with the perverted sex undertones of Jabba's Palace doesn't sit well with me.

That doesn't mean that the sheer technical mastery of the space battle or Luke and Vader fighting before the Emperor like gladiators before Ceasar didn't move me - they were excellent scenes.

So I would say neither trash nor masterpiece, but aim for the middle.
Good film, far short of Star Wars's four-star adventure or Empire's entry-level five-star epic.

What is Star Wars in one paragraph?
Star Wars began life as the Adventures of Luke Starkiller. It is the story of a young man's growth through a time of war. It is not the story of Anakin Skywalker, or of Boba Fett's desire to destroy the Skywalker family. It is the story of the few against the many, the weak against the strong, the right against the wrong.
And it is a story that did not need a prequel.
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#34 User is offline   CowboyCurtis Icon

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Posted 01 April 2005 - 08:32 AM

Great points Mnesymone!

I think this sums it up pretty well:

So I would say neither trash nor masterpiece, but aim for the middle.

Lucas knew he had tapped into a general audience with ANH, so he tries to hit with several ideas for different age brackets. Your Jabba's palace example and the kid-oriented Ewoks is spot-on!
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Battle for the Galaxy--read the "other Star Wars"

All I know is I haven't seen the real prequels yet.
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#35 User is offline   njamilla Icon

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Posted 01 April 2005 - 09:04 PM

He [the Emperor] seems... imperious.

Yeah, I did like the old emperor better. He was very deliberate, and not "cackling" as was deftly put.

I'm still fond of the denouement of the climax. Yeah, I would have liked to have seen real "legions" of his "finest troops" but that's what ROTS is for. [Bring in the clones!]

Ok, so the Death Star was rehash (and there was dumb skatalogical humor), but for the time there weren't going to be future SW movies. I think the Death Star II was the perfect lure, almost a wrap up of the circularity of the trilogy. Coruscant would have been a good place instead of the Death Star, but that wasn't technologically possible at the time.

I was never impressed with the lightsaber fighting until I began writing my book. I like both the message and the revelations of the duels. Leia was a potential target, which made Luke's final struggle necessary. He was willing to sacrifice himself, but he wasn't willing to sacrifice his sister. Isn't that the point? Had it not been for his love for Leia, Luke never would have come to the realization that winning a lightsaber battle doesn't make one a Jedi.
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#36 User is offline   Mnesymone Icon

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Posted 03 April 2005 - 06:19 AM

Wasn't his love for Leia what unleashed his rage and drove him to strike his father to the ground - only stopping when he sees the mechanical hand and realising how alike he became to Vader?
It was his love for Leia that brought him to the edge.
It was the realisation of the pervasiveness and permanence of evil that pulled him back.
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#37 User is offline   Jordan Icon

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Posted 03 April 2005 - 07:25 AM

NJamillia

I Know what you mean about the legions bit. I was hoping to see the glory of Rome re-captivated in a SW visual sense.


Something that always bugged my about SW, and in most action movies, is the stupidity and meagerness of the bad guys army. They're nothing buy punching bags.

Storm Troopers were never menacing, not even a little bit. Ok, OK, The Hoth Sequence was well done. I saw ST's do more than scathe the good guys.

ROTJ really took all that credibility away though with the scenes on Endor. The Idea of the empire fighting teddy ruxpin with big machines is lame, the idea of the baby bears fighting back and winning is even more lame. Chewy took control of an AT ST, all of a sudden things started looking up, he single handily beat an entire cohort of ST's. Then, the remaining ST's were savaged with rock slinging Ewoks. I never felt a sense of danger, I could see myself on screen taking out ST's with my early 90's NERF bow and arrow.

The battle droids in the PT are even more pathetic. They are comedic in their movements and also very weak. It didn't even look like they Jedi were fighting them with any effort. What do I care if the JEdi are not in danger? They might as well been reciting Shakespeare.

The PT storm troopers did not even feel real. I saw a big battle jam packed into a series of short clips, which lasted maybe 8 minutes in length. It's as if Lucas forgot about the battle, and then quickly added it in during post production. (well, it was made during post production, but you get what I mean)

Save Hoth and the first destruction of the death star, I was never convinced, not even once, that the good guys were ever in any remote danger of losing.

This post has been edited by Jordan: 03 April 2005 - 07:27 AM

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#38 User is offline   njamilla Icon

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Posted 03 April 2005 - 01:24 PM

only stopping when he sees the mechanical hand and realising how alike he became to Vader?

Right, right. My bad. Got carried away. Completely agree with you! He was willing to protect Leia from harm, but he never would have had his epiphany until he saw the stumpt of Vader's hand.


Something that always bugged my about SW, and in most action movies, is the stupidity and meagerness of the bad guys army. They're nothing buy punching bags.

I guess that's what the stormtroopers became. My first impression (as it was for everyone else) with stormtroopers was from the opening scenes of EP IV. Of course, Obi-Wan too aluded to them abilities when he saw the stormtrooper. I guess they easily became canon fodder in a story with heroes which could never be injured. I'm waiting to see what they're like in ROTS. They look pretty cool there, and I'm more enamored (re-enamored) with clone troopers than I was with the pathetic Jedi on Geonosis.

Reality aside, all stormtroopers are supposed to be experts, right? In the real world, there are varying degrees of competence. History has a way of making troops seem more competent than they perhaps were. For example, not all samurai were competent swordsmen in the sense that they all meet the standards of the ideal and best trained samurai. A lot of lower ranking samurai, who never got great training or lacked it, were killed by more experienced troops. The same for the Roman soldier, who were predominantly citizens for most of Rome's history. And even the best troops could be slaughtered in an ambush.

And I contend that we moderns have the potential to create swordsmen that compare with ancients because he have a lot of modern training methods and a very practical way of parsing effective techniques from archiac fencing forms. Athletic elites of today's world are certainly more fit than our ancient counterparts because we have a better understanding of human anatomy and physiology(sp?).

Yeah, the "legions" of ROTJ should have been a little (a lot) more competent.
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#39 User is offline   Mnesymone Icon

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Posted 03 April 2005 - 10:44 PM

The stromtroopers in the original trilogy - faceless, inexhaustible cannon fodder of the empire - weren't all that scary or effective. Largely because of the heroes and villains set-up - but the sterile-looking armour coupled with the relatively small size of the stormies didn't help. Also, the design is quite simple, and features no real battering - not battering in the sense of beating it with sticks, but in the sense of rendering it more imposing, accentuating their bulk. Now if they looked like Uruk-Hai, then they have been scary.
In fact, the only time a stormtrooper looked remotely effective was when the young Han Solo was wearing the outfit next to the smaller Luke Skywalker.

But as for the ROTJ legion - well, some dozens of guys running through the merry woodlands in shiny white duds being slaughtered by teddy bears are inherently non-threatening.

If they had clear-felled the area around the bunker, as all evil empires do - and had a well-organised formation and some of those heavy-duty stormtroopers like the ones on Tatooine, and blasted Ewoks by the hundred - along with turrets on the bunker and suchlike - that might have worked.
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#40 User is offline   Jordan Icon

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Posted 03 April 2005 - 11:06 PM

QUOTE
The same for the Roman soldier, who were predominantly citizens for most of Rome's history. And even the best troops could be slaughtered in an ambush.
-njamilla

Off topic---

I take it you're refering to the battle in the Teutoburg Forest. Yikes! I'm really getting into ancient history, especially Roman, Celtic (Gauls), and Carthagian.

Njamilla, how long does a typical sword fight (samurai style) last for? I'm guessing that most kills happen when one of the oppenents gets tired out. Second question, is it true that Japanese swords were the most superior in ancient times? I know the Romans used dinky little blades, Celts used large and heavy Iron swords, and I think Perisans used something very similar to the samurai blade.

On topic---

QUOTE
If they had clear-felled the area around the bunker
- Mnesymone

Good call, no military engineer would clear just enough space in a forest to make way for a base. I think Lucas was going for a very dense enviroment, so the speeder bike scene would look as dangerous as can be.

I always loved the snow, storm, sand, and forest troopers costumes. It's just a shame the soldiers underneath were complete baffoons.

With all the epic granduer of the Endor scene, the thing that still catches my senses, above all the gun play, is the sound the speeder bikes make as they blow off into the distance (with the camera standing still) whaaaaaaaaa ohhhhhh uhhhh waaaa. It was damn cool.

This post has been edited by Jordan: 03 April 2005 - 11:07 PM

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#41 User is offline   Despondent Icon

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Posted 04 April 2005 - 01:09 AM

Yeah, the speeder bikes were great. I had a scooter in college and "recreated" those moments (with others- we'd play tag through the parks and on the streets of my hometown.)


QUOTE
If they had clear-felled the area around the bunker, as all evil empires do - and had a well-organised formation and some of those heavy-duty stormtroopers like the ones on Tatooine, and blasted Ewoks by the hundred - along with turrets on the bunker and suchlike - that might have worked.


That's good too. or if the encircling force field could close in on the ewoks. Speaking of the force field, wouldn't that be a speeder-bike hazard?

It bothered me a little how our heroes' stormtrooper suits dried out after the trash compactor sequence. It must be hot under all that, but I suppose the "uncomfortable" gene is removed from the clone pool.

Maybe the black part is rubber, like a wetsuit?

Rotj troopers were the worst of all. And that's saying something.
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#42 User is offline   rangwe Icon

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Posted 05 April 2005 - 10:00 AM

More info for your theory, doctor.

1. I liked ROTJ.
2. Even though I didn't hate it, I still would have changed the following elements:

- Change the title to "Renewal of the Jedi"

- Change the Death Star to a prototype Planetary Defense System.

- Have not just the Emperor arrive, but a general meeting of the "regional directors" or their representatives to see what the Emperor is doing.

- Eliminate the light-hearted, muppetish approach to Jabba's palace inhabitants and replace it with the outward calm and friendliness concealing grim violence that you would expect from a gangster stronghold.

- Take out the Princess Leia Conan-style wench outfit and replace it with a classy, expensive outfit.

- Have a solid explanation as to why Jabba's men didn't find Luke's lightsaber on R2 when they searched the droid for weapons. A much more likely "smuggler" would have been Lando, who, as an inside guard would have be able to toss the saber to Luke at the crucial moment.

- Get rid of the Han Solo/Lando rescue over the Sarlac. A simple back-shot by Solo (who, it turns out, was faking his Blindness - he recovered it while he was in the cell with Chewie) into Boba Fett gives Solo credibility as a rogue and gets him back in the action as an active participant in his own rescue. Plus, it ties up the loose end of 'getting even' with Boba for turning Han in.

- Have the Sarlac not be visible to the audience. Just put a hole in the sand leading to an unseen source of hissing and clacking. Its Hitchcock 101: Don't show all the monster, ever.

- Remove the blaster shot hitting Luke's hand. It serves no purpose.

- Keep Yoda alive, and develop the "Jedi Career Path" diagram by having Luke's coming confrontation with the Emperor be important to Yoda's own development. Yoda is surprised to hear that Vader is Luke's father. He thought "Blah Blah" Skywalker was his father. So did Ben. Yoda says Luke should trust his feelings. Luke says....it must be true. Yoda nods and says "Then dark the secret is, that reveal itself will in time. Trust your feelings you must, as confront Vader again you will."

- During the rebel conference on the Calamari Cruiser, work out the Lando and Han relationship. After all, Han's last major memory of the man was a slimy betrayal into the hands of Darth Vader, leading to torture and suspended animation! Maybe not friends, but an agreement to work together or not to kill each other.

- I'd also have used this moment to lay the groundwork for some preview of what the Rebel forces hope to do in the way of government.

- Mention that Cloud City has been reduced to rubble following atrocities by Imperial forces.

- Leave the droids with the rebel fleet. Have R2 provide backup emergency repairs to the Millenium Falcon.

- Have the planet where the Planetary Defense System is being built be the wookie homeworld, or some offshoot. The Ewoks were a mistake.

- Come up with a less transparent means of getting the strike team to the planet's surface than a "stolen imperial shuttle".

- Get rid of the Luke-Leia brother-sister thing. Yoda's statement about there being "another" was a waste and better left undecided in the trilogy. They just don't have the time to develop this "other" believably.

- Instead of having Ewoks do a "ha-ha funny let's cook the heroes like cannibals" comedy sketch, lets have the Wookies be intelligent and formidable. Develop the guerilla war these furry giants have been fighting against the Imperials and show them as ready to make their first "Tet Offensive", with stolen arms and explosives, just needing the "officer training" of a group of rebel commandoes to run point and inspire them.

- Get rid of the whole Han-misunderstanding of the exchange between Luke and Leia. Its played for laughs at the end of the film and it weakens Han's rogue character. Han is a "ballah" not a "suckah". He's a grown man and the relationship between these folks should be beyond this high school crap by now.

- Develop the Darth Vader evil and Luke's plea for goodness scene better. This scene could have been a lot heavier.

- Specifically: Vader forced himself on Luke's mother and she never told her husband. Ben didn't know this, and was wrong about Vader murdering Luke's father. Vader "betrayed and murdered" who Ben *thought* was Luke's father. This makes the truth of Luke's true past even more horrifying.

- Develop this horror more by having Vader describe the countless women he raped before Ben "put him in his suit" (with the implication of Ben giving into anger and castrating Darth, thus his Failed Jedi status). There are dozens of Bastard Vader children out there, strong in the ways of the force. Vader has been waiting for them to come of age so that he could "sense them", find them, and raise them to be an unstoppable family of evil. So far, Luke is the first and only one to make his presence known - but others will appear soon.

- The reasons for this, Vader makes clear, is that the Emperor became a Dark Sorceror of the Force before he knew that accepting such power sterilizes you. Indeed, the Dark Side chokes off all life and creativity. Using Vader as his surrogate, the Emperor was to foster a line of dark force children and bring them to support Vader should he (likely) replace the Emperor.

- In other words, Luke is part of a plot by the Emperor to use Vader to father a race of "superior force-users" to ensure complete control over the Imperial power centers. Presumably, each dark child, once raised and reared with the proper indoctrination, would become a "regional director", loyal to the center of power - whomever the Emperor at the time is (make clear that even the Emperor realizes he isn't going to live forever...he's working on establishing a Dynasty here, as all great Emperors should).

- When the Emperor springs his trap, pinning the rebel strike team and surprising the rebel fleet, get rid of any of the comic moments. Take out the double-closing of the blast doors when Hans tries to hotwire them. Hans just can't get any Rogue cred here! If Leia gets shot, she should DIE, not clutch her arm and wait to be surrounded. Once the blasters start flying, no one is going to be taking any prisoners!

- Instead of Vader tossing the Emperor down the tube, just have him break the bastard's neck. Play out the death scene *in the throne room*. Have Vader pass along something like a Force Crystal or Holocron that he had kept secret from the Emperor all those years to Luke. The expectation is that Luke will now rebuild the jedi using that artifact's secret store of lost knowledge, Yoda's tutelage, and the so-far unknown force children out there as founding members - with Luke accepting his role as the searcher for these members of the new hope of the jedi. Thus the title, "Renewal of the Jedi."

- Discard the flight into the superstructure of the Death Star 2. Once the Shield is down, have the fleet target the unarmored and unshielded sections of the PDS.

- Have the Imperial fleet retreat to regroup, allowing what's left of the Rebel ships to escape. The battle is *not* over, but show in the final montage many planets rising up into open riot, or the worried looks of surviving regional directors as they struggle to keep the Empire together. The Millenium Falcon can drop by to pick up the main characters after they have said their goodbyes to the wookies.

- For the wrap up, have Luke explain the situation to his friends. Make it clear that Darth Vader was *not* redeemed - all he did was step "out of the darkness" by admitting the good within him. Preseumably, he would then be a "Failed Jedi" like Ben, and some noble act in the future would (conceivably) redeem him - such as paying for his crimes by facing Galactic Court Justice. The implication being that if he were really saved he would resolutely accept consequences for his actions and face up to them. Do *not* make him a force ghost (I would have kept Ben as a "voice", never as an apparition), and leave his fate in the afterlife a mystery.

- Last shot: Millenium Falcon jumps into hyperspace, with everyone in the crew canopy. Give Han the last word, such as "May the Force Be With Us, Kid", only cooler.

3. Star Wars is about raising consciousness.

Luke pulls his father out of darkness and by extension, a part of himself. It takes a lot of courage, faith and skill to walk into the dragon's lair to win the prize.

But, as always, there is more work to be done. I find it interesting that Lucas chose to go backwards rather than forwards in time. Its as if he wants to regress to an earlier state of consciousness, before Star Wars catapulted him into a realm of immense power. Before his fall into the Dark Side of the Force. But, as always, the darkness is with us, always. Because the Force will be with us, always.

- rangwe
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Posted 05 April 2005 - 10:58 AM

There's some good stuff there, but not the rape. I wouldn't go there. I know that you can say "But this series has torture, so its not really for kids ... " but you'd be wrong. The torture in the STAR WARS films was pretty soft, and could easily be ignored even by the children who paid careful attention to it. Rape can't really be played down once it's understood.

Anyway, some good things there, many of which I agree would have fixed JEDI, particularly the Ewoks, Luke/Leia, Vader's redemption, and the "other." Essentially, every key element of the story. Nice to know you liked it, though! tongue.gif
"I had a lot of different ideas. At one point, Luke, Leia and Ben were all going to be little people, and we did screen tests to see if we could do that." -George Lucas, in STAR WARS: the Annotated Screenplays (p197).
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#44 User is offline   Jordan Icon

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Posted 05 April 2005 - 11:06 AM

The sarlaac pit was fine in the original ROTJ. It's the remastered version that has hands and a mouth.

Also, Jabba's band took a turn for the worst in ROTJ when they added that small fuzzy singer with a big mouth. That really destroyed everything. I knew he wasn't there, I knew Jabba, Boba, Lando, and Bib fortuna could not see him. I could not accept the idea of that thing existing, it's all a sham.

This post has been edited by Jordan: 05 April 2005 - 11:06 AM

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#45 User is offline   rangwe Icon

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Posted 05 April 2005 - 01:49 PM

@civnum2: I hear what you're saying. The main problem for me is that I don't accept that Ben was lying or being evasive with a half-truth in Star Wars. Darth Vader doesn't seem to me to be a dual-personality wherein Vader overcame and subsumed Anakin.

What makes sense to me is that either Darth Vader was lying, or Ben was ignorant of some unknown dark secret. From my own experience, the torture and the destruction of Alderran didn't register to me as a kid other than "that's bad". I think the intimation of rape as an explanation for Luke's background would have flown right over my head as well.

But its a moot point anyway. Lucas painted himself into a corner and blew it, all for the sake of a grandstanding soap opera revelation. Vader almost shooting his son down in cold blood, from behind? Torturing his daughter (which, given current events in today's headlines, probably the "Imperial Procedure" would mean rape)? Sick stuff.

How much simpler for Vader to say, "Dat's right, bitch! I shot yore daddy down and I'm gunna make you, his son, pray on my Scwartz and like it! Let's seein you just drop dem pants!"

Problem solved.

@Jordan: Don't even get my blood boiling with the re-re-re-mastered-4ever-by-way-of-da-Lucas-Trust-Fund versions. The war hell ride will never end.

But yeah, its fine enough to not be a major issue (unlike Luke and Leia sittin in a tree...ohmahghodwererelated). I think the scene could have added tension with the threat of the 'unknown' waiting to devour whoever fell into the pit. In Mafia terms, it gives the threat 'credibility'. The belching just made me go "oh its a muppet" when I was a kid. As the victims fell in, it was as if they were just "falling off the stage" and exiting the school play.

Jabba's band was entertaining in a poo-poo-tee-hee kind of way for me. I'd get rid of the whole thing and replace it with a Jazz Band that *looks* like it belongs in a Gangster Crib, not some play-doh pixel dash. Let's see some lounge acts, not some goofy tentacle smooching.

By contrast, the Rancour actually scared me. And its just a hand puppet! So I think its all in the approach you take. You can have c3p0 talk about a "thousand year digestion" and show a pretty fake-looking maw that belches, or you can have a lumbering, gigantic terror gulping down a guard like a Big Mac while you scream at Luke to hurry up and whip out his lightsaber.

But yeah, I still like the movie. It doesn't move me the way say, Exorcist III or Shaolin Soccer does, but its got its moments.

I reserve extreme prejudice for the prequels. ROTJ can be blamed on getting tired (I can understand that). But the prequels, ugh. Delete yourself, you have no chance to win!

- rangwe
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