Thoughts on Return of the Jedi (Original 1983 Edition) · 7:11pm Oct 18th, 2023
Watched this - the original cut, in point of fact, no Special Edition nonsense - with my sister and her husband last week.
May not be the "best" Star Wars movie but it's still one I very much enjoy all the same. People may bitch about the Ewoks but this movie still has plenty of fantastic moments in it; I will go to my grave maintaining that the moment Luke Skywalker sees his father's face for the first time is one of the most poignant moments in the entire Star Wars saga.
It was funny to watch this and think about how standards have changed. Mostly this came to my mind with the stuff in Jabba's palace. You have the skimpily clad slave dancer who gets fed to the monster in the pit; you can practically see her bare breasts through her outfit. And that's not even getting started on poor Leia's own slave outfit. One gets the feeling that if this movie were released later on, it'd get a different rating for that kind of stuff.
(And also, Luke Skywalker takes out over a dozen of Jabba's men with his lightsaber and not one of them loses any limbs. That made me chuckle and wonder about how the hardcore SW fanboys would react to another Star Wars production doing something like that.)
The last of the Original Trilogy movies I most recently watched was the original from 1977. It's fun to look back on that one and see how far Luke Skywalker has come since then. Everybody loves to joke about how whiny Luke was in the original movie... and here he's a lot darker - literally and figuratively. He enters the movie (in-person, not counting his hologram message to Jabba) dressed in black, strangles two pig-guards with the Force, and carves a swath through Jabba's men when the crime lord refuses to negotiate with him. And yet, in the end, Luke is still compassionate: he stops Han and Chewie from getting violent with the Ewoks, he goes to surrender himself to Darth Vader, and ultimately stops himself from going over to the Dark Side.
(An idle aside here. People who criticize the saga always dump on Obi-Wan and Yoda for keeping Vader's identity a secret from Luke and say that they just raised him to be their mindless weapon. But Luke *is* unhappy with them for doing that, and he refuses to kill Darth Vader when they tell him he has to. And for a further point... the Emperor WANTS Luke to kill Vader as well. Luke rejecting both of them in favor of trusting his father to do the right thing is what saves the day in the end. It's a much more nuanced instance than you'd be led to believe.)
Harrison Ford and Carrie Fisher may not get nearly as much time to shine in this movie - though Leia getting revenge on Jabba is a delight to behold for sure - but they are still fun to watch. (Some of Han's reactions to the goings-on around him are great. His expression when Leia tells him that Luke is her brother is priceless.)
All in all, glad to have revisited this movie. It's just a delightful space opera romp, and one that does manage some real heart, even amid the bizarre Muppet show rejects, walking teddy bears, and the "Death Star 2" plot.
As trying as it can be to be a Star Wars fan in modern years, it's experiences like this that make it all worthwhile.
All of that sounds fair to me.
I don't get the hate on 'em either, I thought the Ewoks were fine. It's another alien species that still kicks butt (using only rustic weaponry and not any of the tech the Imperials or Rebels have), and they still won. And... we never see them again except for that one scene in Rise.
Still the final battle... is still FREAKING AWESOME
Luke is compassionate, but he's not stupid. He knows Jabba and the people working for him of their own free will are Bad People and he has no sympathy for them. Also, Jabba is a slaver, and he is the son of a slave on a planet with an uncomfortable amount of slaves. He's probably been raised on tales of slaves escaping, being freed or dying in the process. His pity well for Jabba is not so much bottomed out so much as he gave Leia a red carpet to walk down on her way to throw Jabba down said well and then blow him up with said well.
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Thanks for reading, and glad that you think so too.
People are just weird about this stuff, is all that I can guess. All the weird aliens from the original movie get a pass, and so do R2-D2 and C-3PO, but until Jar-Jar Binks and the prequels came out, the Ewoks were the shame of the Star Wars fanbase... or so some would have you believe.
And agreed. The Battle of Endor was really excellent. It still holds up, all these years later.
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A very important distinction to make. Luke is kind but he's not a moron. He grew up on the planet that Jabba was top dog of, and had been top dog of, for who knows how long in-universe. Even if the Lars farm escaped the worst of Jabba's rackets, he *had* to have heard of, or even known, people who'd suffered from the depredations of the Hutt crime lord. Luke walked into Jabba's lair probably/certainly knowing that it would come to bloodshed, but he still gave Jabba the chance to do things simply anyway... and he lost no sleep over the Hutt sticking to type.
(It's pretty telling, as an aside, that if Luke has any regrets about anything from Jabba's palace, it's killing the rancor. One of the old EU novels had him express remorse at seeing wild rancors and how small and abused Jabba's was by comparison... I also remember reading the novelization of ROTJ last year and while it depicts the rancor as a totally unique creature - some kind of mutant even - and all the same, Luke still feels a certain sorrow for it after he kills it. After all, in the end, it was just another victim of Jabba's cruelty.)
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The Rancor may have been a vicious beast, but it was just that. A beast. A predator that, much like any, holds no actual malice in its heart. It was abused and kept in a tiny space with its only food being victims of Jabba's mercurial temper. No wonder it was practically drooling. Even a Gamorrean Guard is TINY compared to the Rancor. That's not a meal, I'd barely call it an appetizer! Honestly, putting it out of its misery was probably the kindest thing Luke could have done.
Also, the climax is a prime example of how Palpatine's psychopathy and sadism bite him in the ass. Vader Fell to save his wife and children. So seeing his Master brutally torture his own son to death in front of him, knowing full well he could kill him at any moment, but is still making the active and deliberate choice to hurt him? Yeah, he's getting thrown into a pit.
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Honestly, I'd agree with you totally. Killing the poor, tortured creature was probably a genuine mercy.
And I agree regarding Palpatine's ultimate downfall. It speaks volumes to so many things about him - his sadism, his arrogance, his lack of empathy - that he never once considered that this was not a Good Idea to pursue.