Super Awesome Girlfriend and I have introduced our Small Ones to the “Star Wars” series. At 8 and 9 we figured they were more than old enough to handle the awesomeness.
I’d always remembered “Return of the Jedi” as the weaker of the original three films but we just watched it today, and you know what? That movie sucks. Is it as bad as the prequels? Hells no, because it does have, at least, understandable characters and a plot that, while kinda dumb, is a sensible plot. But the movie is just terrible, really.
The entire opening bit with Jabba the Hutt fails to make any kind of sense in about a thousand ways and is totally disconnected from the rest of the movie; rather than fitting saving Han Solo into the story, they just have two stories. With that over, the rest of the movie starts up and it’s really awful. The reappearance of Obi-Wan’s ghost is super bad (a ghost that has to sit down?) the dialogue is bad even by the simplistic standards of Star Wars, the movie has too much shit going on, and it’s another goddamned Death Star. It’s a stupid movie.
Do movies run out of energy before the third installment? I’m not sure. “The Dark Knight Rises” was disappointing in a lot of ways. I thought “Return of the King” was shitty though I’m in a minority there.
Return of the Jedi was a solid movie. If you’re a fan of that genre, it should be an enjoyable watch.
You’re right that it’s two stories in one and one of those stories is recycled. However, I think the Jabba sequence plays an important role in updating us on how the characters have matured and I don’t mind it as much as you do.
For me, the biggest problem in ROTJ is the Ewoks. They’re bad enough as cutesy allies to help sell plush toys, but when they start beating “an entire legion of my best troops” with sticks, it loses me.
If you took the Ewoks out and stopped the movie at “Now, young Skywalker…you will die,” it’d be almost perfect.
I liked it then. I have seen it relatively recently, and I like it now. I wouldn’t call it my favorite. But, I think they are able to mix the action with the humor pretty well. It does get rather schmaltzy at times, but that’s made up for by bad ass light saber duels, and funny Ewok scenes. (I liked them then. I like them now.)
It was supposed to be a planet of Wookies, IIRC, but budget constraints forced them to, er, work smaller. I always like the scene of Luke vs. Jabba myself, though I agree it’s disconnected from the rest of the story.
I don’t think it was budget constraints-- I think it was a desire to have something cute to sell merchandise with. And it worked.
But really, you can turn Return of the Jedi into a great movie just by making that one change: Turn the Ewoks back into Wookies. A movie with only one significant flaw isn’t all that bad.
It sucked. Sucked, sucked, sucked, sucked, big time! I hadn’t been so disappointed with a movie since 1977, when I actually paid to see Emmanuelle. :mad:
I still like the movie overall. Even for a few of its faults.
The Ewoks were definitely a misstep, and I hate how these cuddly little furballs conquered the legion of crack Stormtroopers. The version of the switch from Wookies I heard was that having a bunch of spearchucking Wookies made no sense in the same place as Chewie being a starship pilot, and obviously comfortable with advanced tech.
One of the great aspects I like, particularly about the first storyline, is Luke growing into his Jedi power. Last time we saw him, he was still mostly a whiny farmboy, then suddenly this black clad badass shows up, waving his hand around. Very cool.
The built up Boba Fett into such a big deal – deadly bounty hunter, never gives up, always on your case – and then just kicked him into the Sarlacc pit as a joke. Absurd. Bathos!
(I apparently don’t use the word “Bathos” the way some others do, but I understand it to mean a jarring contrast in dramatic tonalities – like taking a scary, deadly, implacable character…and killing him in a comic pratfall.)
Yeah, it wasn’t ST-V:TFF bad, but it was a let down from the first two.
ANH was easily the most exciting thing I had ever seen in a theater up to that time when I first saw it. Anyone who didn’t first see it in a theater the year it came out will always miss out on just how big an impact it made on us young sci-fi fans.
ESB had a great feel, beginning to end, great character development, and some very intense and varied battle/fight scenes. And the end was a little melancholy, but obviously setting us up for what should be a FANTASTIC third movie.
RotJ started out pretty neat. I liked the Jabba compound scenes. And, we got the GOLD BIKINI! Then, roly poly fish head Admiral (It’s a TRAP!) and the Care Bears in Space came out and I was somewhat let down by that all. Not greatly let down, mind you, but still. A decent movie, fit in the trilogy well enough, but I remember us all thinking it could’ve been really something.
I agree “Jedi” wasn’t as good as “Empire”, but that’s hardly a controversial statement. But the scenes with Luke, Vader and Palpatine on the Death Star were great, and actually I enjoyed the “human chess game” that Luke played to get Han back. (Luke was awfully up-front about how he gleefully looked forward to killing Jabba, though!)
Not budget constraints. It’s that we were so familiar with Chewbacca as a pilot, the idea that his race would not be tech-savvy was lost. The point of the Endor battle is primitive tradition over new-fangled technology. They build armour that (supposedly, but not very effectively) protects against laser bolts, but they have forgotten how to protect themselves from spears. Admittedly that wasn’t very clear, or really even logical, but that was the point.
So he took the Wookiees, cut them in half in size (and also cut the name in half and swapped them round) and made the Ewoks. I don’t think they were solely created to sell merchandise, but they were probably deliberately cutesified for that reason.