Damn you, Civilian, damn you. I thought I could now walk away from this neverending argument with the
Return of the Jedi lovers - but your terrible insinuation that I had become one of them has stirred me up again and now, not more than ten minutes since my last post, I find myself back here.... damn you.
Some people are saying that Lucas did put effort into
Return of the Jedi. Now, I'm going to use their own arguments against them - debate style.
Rory, who is the best equipped of the
Return of the Jedi lovers to handle himself in a debate, said himself that it doesn't matter how much effort was put into a film - we must judge the film on its own merits. Okay, I will.
A quick overview of where Return of the Jedi fucked up.The opening text scroll. Luke Skywalker has returned to his home planet of Tatooine in an attempt to rescue his friend Han Solo from the clutches of the vile gangster Jabba the Hutt. This is not just a really bad run-on sentence, it is the first line that opens the movie. And compared to
It is a period of civil war. (
Star Wars) and
It is a dark time for the rebellion. (
The Empire Strikes Back), it is pretty weak.
The second death star. We had a death star already in
Star Wars. It served its purpose well. It was blown up. We saw it - the explosion looked big and pretty. We don't need to see it again. In bringing back the Death Star, Lucas was ripping off his
own ideas. I'm sure that some
Return of the Jedi lovers will say that we must look at the movie in its own right - and ignore the fact that this is the second death star we've seen. Wrong. It is the third movie of a trilogy, and must be viewed as part of the whole story. Seeing the death star again is too repetitive. Also it is impractical. It couldn't have been built so fast.
In addition to this,
The Empire Strikes Back proved that the Imperial Fleet was far more effective and frightening. The Imperial Fleet was not utilised well at all in this movie. If Lucas wanted something big to blow up at the end of the movie, that's fine. But there are alternatives to death stars. I would suggest a shipyard where new Star Destroyers are being manufactured - or an attack on Coruscant. That would be much more interesting.
Han's rescue.This was stupid on so many levels. Firstly the location was wrong. Whether or not Jabba was a slug (and he would have been MUCH more effective if he wasn't), he shouldn't have lived on Tatooine in a rusty palace with concrete floors. This is the head of a galactic wide smuggling ring. You need to see ships, the location has to look like a functional base of operations. People need to be coming in and out.
The rancor shouldn't have been there. And even if it was, Jabba shouldn't have fed innocent dancing girls to it. Why? Because Han used to work for him - and having Jabba be such a horrible creature reflects badly on Han's own character.
Boba Fett shouldn't have been there. He did not work for Jabba. It was clear in
The Empire Strikes Back that Vader had employed him before - so I would say that the guy gets around. I also don't see why someone who is just after money, would stick around and risk his life in that sail-barge fight. There was nothing in it for him - he shouldn't have been there.
The rescue was the most pointlessly elaborate, stupid rescue ever on film. Let's look at it. Okay, Lando is there to check the place out. Got it. Luke gives Jabba his droids. What the hell? How is going to get them back? Okay, never mind... there's enough problems to worry about as it is....
Leia comes in and gives Chewbacca to Jabba, who throws him in prison. Now, that's four guys Luke has to rescue if he includes the droids. Then Leia thaws Han out - hell, Lando could have done that ages ago - and she gets captured. So now Luke has five of his friends to rescue. Good plan so far.
Fortunately, Jabba doesn't kill
any of them - even Han, who owed him a lot of money - which seems strange seeing he killed a dancing girl earlier just because she didn't want to give him a lap dance....
... and conveniently, he takes them all out for a cruise over the sand-dunes, and everything about this Tatooine looks remarkably different from the Tatooine of
Star Wars, for some strange reason (perhaps because it wasn't filmed in Tunisia... that might have had something to do with it).
And there, R2 chucks Luke his lightsaber and everything is solved. Good plan - Luke was very clever, figuring out that Jabba would take them out to the dune sea and leave him on a gangplank with his hands free so he could get his lightsaber. Does that not seem in the least bit contrived to you
Return of the Jedi lovers?
And of course, Boba Fett dies in a stupid comical way that ends in a burp joke.
Also in the course of this, we had lots of annoying muppets, a stupid song, and Threepio translating stuff for Jabba into English. Can't this protocol droid, fluent in over six million forms of communication, speak Huttese?
What happens on Dagobah.Firstly, Luke should not have gone to Dagobah again until
after the movie. He was on his way to a rebel meeting in ten minutes and he thought, "I might just pop by Dagobah and finish my jedi training. So I might be two minutes late to the meeting."
Then he gets there and Yoda basically tells Luke he doesn't need any more training, despite the fact that he clearly told him in
The Empire Strikes Back that he had to complete the training - and there was quite a lot more to be done.
And he tells Luke that he's going to die - and is gone in two minutes. Wow!
And here was something interesting - Yoda said there is another Skywalker. Even if this is his sister and the other hope who was alluded to in the previous movie, this still sounds interesting. So I was still intrigued at this point...
Then Luke meets Obi Wan who is there on a very literal level and they sit down on a log and chat for hours like two housewives. Obi Wan just answers all of Luke's queries and cops out of lying to Luke about his father with his 'certain point of view' crap. Then Obi Wan tells Luke about his twin sister. Okay, it's still intriguing.
Obi Wan then says a lot of stuff that ends in the line "That is the reason why your sister remains safely annoymous."
"Leia." Luke says right out of the blue, using the name of the only woman in existence he knows - and what are the chances, but he's right - straight out of the box. I mean, come on!
What's really stupid is that other than resolving the love triangle in a really dull way, Lucas does nothing with Leia as the 'other hope' - nothing.
So basically, the idea of there being another hope is redundant and pointless - as was Luke's training. He didn't really need any afterall, it turns out.
The Rebel meeting.Call this nitpicking if you will, but that was too fucking casual for words. I've seen house warming parties and drinking games that have more formality than that meeting.
Endor.We spend
far too much time there in the movie. The speeder bikes were a real time killer - and in dense forest, I don't think the Imperials would really use transport that travels at 200 kilometres an hour. They're supposed to be intelligent - well at least they were in the previous movies.
Seperating Leia from the others was also a pointless time waster - as they all ended up back together again. Watching this, I almost forgot what the hell the movie was supposed to be about at some points.
The Ewoks.Lucas said himself that originally, he intended to have wookies. Why the hell didn't he? I could have tolerated wookies fighting storm troopers. It would also have made it more convincing in terms of having the wookies help the rebels. They've been oppressed by the Empire for years and Chewbacca would have been able to talk to them, instead of Threepio - meaning the rebels could have LEFT HIM AND R2 BEHIND, instead of bringing loud, bright shiny metallic objects into the forest that would constantly give their location away to storm trooper patrols.
Random storm trooper - "Hmm... what's that fucking bright golden thing in the middle of the woods? Let's check it out."
Wasted ground battle opportunity.The Empire Strikes Back opened with a ground battle. It was amazing. It was more amazing in many ways than the various space battles. However, in Return of the Jedi, the ground battle is reduced to a silly skermish with comical primitive sticks and stones tripping up Imperial technology.
An entire legion of the Emperor's best troops.Lets look at the Emperor's best troops. They came into the bunker and rounded the rebels up. One officer stood still, with his gun trained on Han, and did nothing as Han picked up a box and threw it at him. The force of the blow managed to make him go flying two metres backwards over a railing and plummet to his death. If I had been in his position, and had told Han to freeze, and Han went and picked up a big box right in front of me, I would have shot him.
Okay, and now problem two. Why didn't they just kill all the rebels? What was the point of capturing them alive and walking them outside? They didn't have anything that the Imperials could possibly want and besides, the entire alliance was about to be wiped out. Stupid.
The Emperor.Everyone seems to praise Ian McDiarmind as a great actor and the Emperor as a sinister villain. I am sorry, but on the version of the movie I saw, I saw a wizened little man who SLOUCHED in his chair like a lazy fat toad and cackled incessantly. His voice sounded like he was trying to impersonate Dracula but it was a poor imitation. Also, he was really stupid. He let the rebels know where his death star was? Why didn't he give them a false location and blow the crap out of them there? Instead he put his new station at risk, as well as his own life.
No, he was not a sinister villain. He was a stupid old fool with bad posture.
Darth Vader.Darth Vader was mellowed out in this movie so much, he was nothing but a pale immitation of the villain we had seen in the previous movies. Let's compare Darth Vader in
The Empire Strikes Back with Darth Vader in
Return of the Jedi.
In
The Empire Strikes Back, Darth Vader had free reign of every man, ship and other resource in the Empire and he used them ruthlessly. He almost annihilated the rebel alliance completely in a devasting battle and drove them into the furthest reaches of the galaxy, scattered and demoralised.
He killed a Admiral Ozzle, when he was in a completely different part of the ship, without lifting a finger or taking a pause in his conversation with Admiral Piett. He took deflected laser blasts off his hand, smashed the crap out of Luke in the best display of the dark side's power ever seen before or since and took over Cloud City.
The guy was one hell of a villain.
But in
Return of the Jedi, he has gone soft - and this is way before his redemption. He becomes the Emperor's monkey-boy and yes-man and he makes the dark side look puny. "You don't know the power of the dark side. I must obey my master." You must obey your master? Where's the power in that, Darth?
He doesn't do anything cool in the movie at all until he kills the Emperor, and honestly, killing the Emperor doesn't look like too much trouble.
How easily the rebels won the space battle.Admiral Ackbar suddenly says "Hey, let's blow up the Super Star Destroyer." and moments later, it's gone. It's so damn easy - all you have to do is shoot those balls on the bridge and their shields are down. It makes you wonder why the rebels didn't take out the last Star Destroyer years ago - if they are that easy to take out.
The acting.The acting is SHIT. It is the worst of the
Star Wars movies and any time someone writes that Harrison Ford was at his best in this movie, it makes my skin crawl. How the hell can anyone try to defend that performance?
Next time you
Return of the Jedi lovers watch your precious movie - look at Han's facial expressions when Leia tells him that Luke is her brother. Yeah, Oscar moment indeed! Terrible, terrible acting.
Darth Vader's funeral pyre.This could have been a powerful moment, as Luke farewelled the father he never knew.... however, the whole time, Ewoks were yabbering in the background. This kind of screwed the whole scene. Lucas sabotaged his own work here....
but having the stupid, mega-happy ending with Anakin's ghost just two minutes later really takes whatever impact that scene could have had and trivialises it.
Hell, having everyone's ghost there for the party trivialised everything.
"Oh no. My mentor is dead."
"Don't worry. He'll be a ghost in about five minutes so you'll see him again soon."
Wasted opportunities.We never saw Coruscant. We did not see much in the way of new locales. Wookies would have been so much better than Ewoks. We missed out on having a new and exciting character added to the fray... but lastly, Lucas wasted the opportunity to make another movie as great as
The Empire Strikes Back.
Okay, that's all for now. I know it won't change anyone's mind.... but damn you, Civilian for stirring me up and making me go back into this neverending war.
- Movie Goer, High Lord of the
Return of the Jedi Haters.
This post has been edited by Just your average movie goer: 14 June 2004 - 08:57 AM