Definitely the least of the first three movies, but still pretty good. Yeah, the Ewok part was for the kiddies, but I loved when R2 shot the light saber to Luke and he started kicking butt - especially the first time.
Lucas still cared about Jedis at this point. Luke was the only real Jedi in all six movies. Being a Jedi, or so we were told, was not about chopping off peoples arms in bars. It was about giving Jabba a chance, even thought Luke knew he wouldn’t take it, and not killing his father when he could. Which made Anakin realize at last that he took the wrong path and his error could be corrected.
When the movie was in production Lucas had stuff out there saying “Revenge of the Jedi” to catch people stealing the inside information. I believe when the true name came out, he said that anyone thinking it would be called Revenge didn’t understand his conception of the Jedi.
So I think the ending on the Death Star more than makes up for the Ewoks.
(disclaimer, I love ROTJ and have no problem with ewoks in principle, I just wish they were uglier and not so deliberately cute).
I think you might be remembering the movies with empire-tinted lenses. In ROTJ, the ewoks and rebels caught a very small squad of stormtroopers by surprise, but we also saw the empire rally and rout the ewoks after their initial losses. The only thing that saved the day was Chewie commandeering an AT-ST to turn back the tide.
As to the effectiveness of the AT-STs, the movie showed that they were basically the Humvees of the empire. Poorly armored, and poorly suited for their primary role (i.e. attack support in a heavy engagement like on Hoth), their blaster turret wasn’t accurate enough for picking individual ewoks out of the forest environment. Their legs were also not suited for jungle terrain or obstacles, but meant for sprinting across open spaces like on Hoth.
I don’t recall that from the films. I thought Boba Fett was a bit character – one of many bounty hunters sent out – and it was the fanboys who made him into a memetic badass in the EU. From the actual content of the films, he’s more disposable.
He was pretty exceptional from the get go, from my recollection. He was the first action figure that was exclusively available by mail in rebate. He had an aura of mystique to him that most of the other characters in Empire Strikes Back did not. In Empire, it seemed that we got to glimpse just a bit of this cool character and then by Return of the Jedi, he’s just a tool hanging out at Jabba’s palace ready to get dumped into the Sarlaac pit for the sake of a burp joke. I’ve seen somewhere that Lucas said that if he realized how popular Fett was, he wouldn’t have killed him so soon.
I don’t have a problem with the Ewoks conceptually. I think the execution suffered. A big part of the problem is that the Ewoks were all played by little people. The Ewoks move like people who have mobility problems, who are also wearing heavy, restrictive suits. This is one area in the original trilogy where I’d like to see a practical effect replaced with a CGI effect. Imagine Ewoks as lean, agile predators, and not fat waddling teddy bears.
(Out of curiosity, I did an image search on “Ewok redesign” to see if anyone else had had the same idea, and found this. Which is pretty badass. Then I did a search on “badass Ewok,” and found this, which is better.)
I must again emphasize that I am not for an instant suggesting ROTJ is as bad as the prequels. If you rated movies from 10 being a sublime masterpeice to 0 being total junk, it’d go:
Empire Strikes Back - 9
Star Wars - 8
Return of the Jedi - 4, maybe 5
Revenge of the Sith - 2
Phantom Menace or Attack of the Clones - 1
The usual calls of “but NONE of the movies are any good” are popping up, I would presume from people who haven’t watched enough movies to know a good one from a bad one but whatever.
Return of the Jedi is not a good movie but it is at least a movie with a coherent story and a number of distinctive characters with clear motivations. It is, in a sense, a gateway drug to the prequels. It has many of the same weaknesses - too many parallel things going on, wildly inconsistent tone, painfully obvious marketing ploys, too many critical plot elements simply mentioned in passing/assumed to happen rather than shown, dialogue that’s well beyond “hokey but charming” and into “stupid,” and the characters do begin to break down; Han and Leia, especially, often seem like different people.
His backpack’s got jets; he’s Boba the Fett. Seriously, he could’ve been the bridge between Jaba and the Empire as he’s got s foot in both worlds. Plus he would get to be a badass, and put our heroes into some serious peril. Someone good needs to die. I nominate Chewie, who eats it on Wookie planet in full view of the previously disinterested local population whom the rebels couldn’t convince to help take on the Empire. Wookie martyr. Ditch Death Star two, and blow the budget on a Braveheart scale infantry battle with rebels and wookies vs the Empire. It should dwarf the Hoth battle in ESB.
I always liked ROJ. I like all the military scenes with both sides. I love the drama in the Death Star’s throne room. I like the soundtrack; I’m thinking specifically of the dramatic music that plays as the rebels are about to realize the shield is still up, and the vocal pieces in the aforementioned throne room. The Ewoks don’t bother me that much, especially considering the reason they were substituted for Wookies. I like the supporting cast a lot.
Lucas’s later edits were actually clever, in that they made the ending less abrupt, as we see the Empire crumbling on many planets. As for inserting Hayden Christensen, it’s not like Sebastian Shaw’s big scene was removed.
Emperor there to dedicate a new dam. Doesn’t really matter. Death Star 2.0 was the problem. Although I dug (and still do) the initial shot of the Rebel Fleet and the Imperial forces hitting head to head.
But Ewoks and the whole “redemption” crap outweigh Slave Leia, Boba Fett and the whole first half of the movie.
It wouldn’t be hard to come up with an alternate explanation.
For example, Endor could have something like its own version of Degobah’s dark side cave. The Emperor hangs out there in a summer palace of sorts (or a non-Death Star space station if you must) while he plots his latest evil deeds. The Bothan spies died while learning that the Emperor is at his most vulnerable while meditating on Endor because most of the galaxy is ignorant of its existence (thereby explaining the primitive Ewoks) and they’ve recovered a time table and the codes necessary to make an assassination of the Emperor an option. Luke, a true Jedi, goes because he hopes that an assassination is not necessary, if he can confront the Emperor and/or Vader himself and show them the error of their ways.
Meanwhile, the SSD Executor is in orbit. You really don’t need a death star to challenge a ragtag rebel fleet because a single SSD outguns everything the rebels can put together at that time even without the fleet of support ships and ISDs that would accompany it.
Will it hurt more to know that the escape inside the spinning gong and the life raft escape from the plane were both written for Raiders, and not used, because Lucas thought they were too stupid? (well, too “something”-I don’t remember the exact quote.) So when I saw them in ToD it was quite the shock. Between that and the “coming to a theme park near you” mine car rollercoaster ride, I almost left in the middle of the movie.
When I saw RoJ in the theater the first time, I almost stood up and yelled “who’s responsible for these damn teddy bears?!” when I first saw Ewoks.
I’ve never liked ToD. Worst Indie film by far - I don’t acknowledge the film with the geezer, the brat, and the refrigerator by the way - with an even stupider chase.
(Not one but two roads through the jungle - in parallel? Right. )
Sounds like an independent film, probably involving cannibalism. Directed by Peter Greenaway, or maybe Jean-Pierre Jeunet.
I actually hated* Indy Jones and the Saucer Full of Secrets* less than Temple of Doom. I didn’t like it, mind you, but its level of suckitude was less. The brat was not as bad as Short Round, and I can believe you can survive a nuclear blast in a fridge more than you can pull a man’s heart out with just your hand, like the sternum isn’t even there!
