Ok I give up what is so bad about Return of the Jedi?

[dalem]

I don't buy it.  I never heard a peep about how bad Return of the Jedi was until around 2000 when it became trendy to hate George Lucas..  I remember the buzz surrounding Revenge of the Sith in 2005.  Lotta folks said that it looked like it was gonna be the one good film out of the set of prequels, but then almost immediately after the movie came out a new set of people cropped up scrambling for reasons why it sucked.

In short, I distrust the sincerity of any opinion about Star Wars.  Lucas hating is just so in vogue that I don't see opinions, I see parrots.

Well I'm not going to challenge what you've seen and heard.  I can only tell you waht I've thought ever since I got home from the theater in 1983.  The first things me & my buddies yipped about were all cool - Leia's slave girl outfit, the speeder bike scene, the flight of the Falcon out of the DS.

But then we started talking about the bad FX, the fact that we didn't like the Emp, the cheesiness of the Ewoks, etc.  That's when it started for me, that's what I thought, and maybe I'm the only one, I'm fine with that.

And I hated Phatom Menace when I first saw it.  HATED IT.  Except for the last act, which has one of the best-choreographed and filmed fight scenes I've ever seen - and the space stuff, even though it was hugely derivative, was fun to watch.  And so I went to see it again, and it grew on me.  Then I had the temerity to like AOTC, and then I just chilled the Eff out about it and decided I like the prequels just fine.

So I'm no hater.

I do rate them all, best/like to worst/dislike, IMO, as follows:

ANH  - sense of wonder
ESB  - best movie
ROTS - points for pulling off an ending with so many threads
AOTC - impressive FX, decent story, embarrassing lovey stuff
TPM - overly derivative
ROTJ - cheap

That's just me though.  And all the details aside, I think ROTJ's worst sin is that it's cheap - it doesn't look or feel like the grand finale of a culturally iconic story arc whether that arc was a 3-parter that ended in 1983 or a 6-parter that ended in 2005.

-dale

[dalem]

This is also the film that took the first Really Cool Villian Created In a Long Time and neutered him.  People talk about Anakin being a sniveling jerk in the Prequels - this is where it started.  Suddenly he's the victim - he wouldn't be doing any of this if it weren't for the Dark Side.  Suddenly, we're supposed to transfer all our hate to the Emperor and cheer because Vader saves his son...?

And then Vader because of one act - which saving your own son when you even stood by and let a planet with millions of people be destroyed sounds like a selfish act to me - gets to go to Jedi Heaven with the other Jedis who stayed true all their lives?

Bingo.  I could have accepted Vader's redemption if he had come at a true price - Real Death.  But instead his son gets to open up his Vader wrapping and inside is a smiling package of "I was just kidding".  Fagh.  If Vader had tackled Empie and gone over the side with him, or better yet as my one friend said after we saw it, if Vader had pitched Empie over the railing, turned to Luke and said "Now that he's out of the way, let's fix this galaxy up the way we both know it should go..." and ended there, or forced Luke to kill him...

But that's not what we got.

-dale

[bettertomorrowamy]

I've always liked Ewoks.

You just made my signature.

[Action Batch]

This is also the film that took the first Really Cool Villian Created In a Long Time and neutered him.  People talk about Anakin being a sniveling jerk in the Prequels - this is where it started.  Suddenly he's the victim - he wouldn't be doing any of this if it weren't for the Dark Side.  Suddenly, we're supposed to transfer all our hate to the Emperor and cheer because Vader saves his son...?

And then Vader because of one act - which saving your own son when you even stood by and let a planet with millions of people be destroyed sounds like a selfish act to me - gets to go to Jedi Heaven with the other Jedis who stayed true all their lives?

Bingo.  I could have accepted Vader's redemption if he had come at a true price - Real Death.  But instead his son gets to open up his Vader wrapping and inside is a smiling package of "I was just kidding".  Fagh.  If Vader had tackled Empie and gone over the side with him, or better yet as my one friend said after we saw it, if Vader had pitched Empie over the railing, turned to Luke and said "Now that he's out of the way, let's fix this galaxy up the way we both know it should go..." and ended there, or forced Luke to kill him...

But that's not what we got.

-dale

Look, I don't know if this is DUH!!! but for me, I don't look at it as redemption for Vader. Anakin was always the one who was going to fulfill the prophesy by restoring balance to the force by killing Darth Sidious, and the only way he could do that is by giving in to the dark side, gaining Palpatines full trust, and be standing behind him while Palpatine was busy roasting Luke, so that act could awaken that last bit of Anakin in Vader to kill Palpatine.

(But then earlier he said to Luke join me and we'll betray the Emperor and rule the blah blah blah blah. Why Palpatine didn't see/know that is beyond me.)

[dalem]

Look, I don't know if this is DUH!!! but for me, I don't look at it as redemption for Vader. Anakin was always the one who was going to fulfill the prophesy by restoring balance to the force by killing Darth Sidious, and the only way he could do that is by giving in to the dark side, gaining Palpatines full trust, and be standing behind him while Palpatine was busy roasting Luke, so that act could awaken that last bit of Anakin in Vader to kill Palpatine.

(But then earlier he said to Luke join me and we'll betray the Emperor and rule the blah blah blah blah. Why Palpatine didn't see/know that is beyond me.)

Well I don't know how much of the "balance to the Force" junk was in Lucas' original storyline.  All I know is what Plastic Duck outlined: choke guys to death, torture your daughter, willingly participate in the murder of billions of people, and as long as you take out the Hitler of your time, you're golden.  And I don't buy the "only way to do it is to become his servant and build trust" argument either, because little Annie got played.  Empie was willing to, and did risk death to turn the little whiner after years of manipulation.  If Anakin had been less of a beeyotch he'd've run Palpy through any number of times or let Mace do it, assuming it ever got that far.

I know Lucas decided to try the "evil guys do bad things for complex reasons" route, but he scored a lot bigger with simple elemental baddassery than he did with mommy issues.  Some folk are just Bad.

-dale

[Compound]

I prefer the special edition for just getting rid of the YUB NUB song at the end.

Now see, that I can't agree with. I played a lot of the Return of the Jedi arcade game back when there were still arcades, and I grew to like that song. (They used it as BGM in the game.)

[NRRork]

Ewoks and the discussion Luke and Leia have about him having to go face Vader alone. The dialogue in that scene still hurts me.

Carrie Fisher summed it beautifully in that Empire of Dreams documentary. "There's this saying that you can type it, but you can't say it!" and then another, I think Harrison Ford said "I remember reading and thinking 'Who TALKS like this?'"

[FordPrefect]

I don't buy it.  I never heard a peep about how bad Return of the Jedi was until around 2000 when it became trendy to hate George Lucas..  I remember the buzz surrounding Revenge of the Sith in 2005.  Lotta folks said that it looked like it was gonna be the one good film out of the set of prequels, but then almost immediately after the movie came out a new set of people cropped up scrambling for reasons why it sucked.

In short, I distrust the sincerity of any opinion about Star Wars.  Lucas hating is just so in vogue that I don't see opinions, I see parrots.

Well I'm not going to challenge what you've seen and heard.  I can only tell you waht I've thought ever since I got home from the theater in 1983.  The first things me & my buddies yipped about were all cool - Leia's slave girl outfit, the speeder bike scene, the flight of the Falcon out of the DS.

But then we started talking about the bad FX, the fact that we didn't like the Emp, the cheesiness of the Ewoks, etc.  That's when it started for me, that's what I thought, and maybe I'm the only one, I'm fine with that.

And I hated Phatom Menace when I first saw it.  HATED IT.  Except for the last act, which has one of the best-choreographed and filmed fight scenes I've ever seen - and the space stuff, even though it was hugely derivative, was fun to watch.  And so I went to see it again, and it grew on me.  Then I had the temerity to like AOTC, and then I just chilled the Eff out about it and decided I like the prequels just fine.

So I'm no hater.

I do rate them all, best/like to worst/dislike, IMO, as follows:

ANH  - sense of wonder
ESB  - best movie
ROTS - points for pulling off an ending with so many threads
AOTC - impressive FX, decent story, embarrassing lovey stuff
TPM - overly derivative
ROTJ - cheap

That's just me though.  And all the details aside, I think ROTJ's worst sin is that it's cheap - it doesn't look or feel like the grand finale of a culturally iconic story arc whether that arc was a 3-parter that ended in 1983 or a 6-parter that ended in 2005.

-dale

You say that you didn't like the special effects in Return of the Jedi. Do you feel that the special editions fixed this problem? Which version of ROTJ do you find more watchable?

[Plastic Self-Cleaning Duck]

Well I don't know how much of the "balance to the Force" junk was in Lucas' original storyline

There was no original storyline, remember?  The press made that up and he went along with it.

The press even forced them to print that A New Hope was part of "The Journal of the Whills" in the book of the screenplay they printed all those years ago.   

And the "balance to the Force" - Yoda and Mace even talked about that the prophecy could have been read wrong (which I'll always love that Lucas never dared tell us word for word what that "writing" said - didn't have the guts to try to write something with two meanings).  And it looks to me that he brough a kind of balance - it was just the Dark Side that he balanced.

I know Lucas decided to try the "evil guys do bad things for complex reasons" route, but he scored a lot bigger with simple elemental baddassery than he did with mommy issues.  Some folk are just Bad.

I still think that it was that someone convinced Lucas that Luke was a stand-in for him so that made Vader a stand-in for his own father....and it freaked him out as to what this meant he was saying about him.  He had to make excuses for "Dad" to have done all of this

(which REALLY becomes disturbing when you think about Padme's character under those circumstances...Mom was an enabler for a mass murderer and would rather leave her newborns orphaned than face the truth.)

Carrie Fisher summed it beautifully in that Empire of Dreams documentary. "There's this saying that you can type it, but you can't say it!"....

And if you've ever suffered through one of her books you'll know she's an expert on that.

[Action Batch]

And it looks to me that he brough a kind of balance - it was just the Dark Side that he balanced.

IIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIiiiiiiiii don't know. I still think that taking out Palpatine was the fulfilling of the prophesy. And as for Mace and Yoda saying they could have gotten it wrong, they did and they didn't. They thought that it was going to be Anakin, and it was, but not as they saw it. I'm guessing they saw Anakin as a powerful Jedi master confronting Palpatine mano y mano.

And if you've ever suffered through one of her books you'll know she's an expert on that.

[ouch]  !  [/ouch]

[Plastic Self-Cleaning Duck]

[

And if you've ever suffered through one of her books you'll know she's an expert on that.

[ouch]  !  [/ouch]

Seriously....

I read her "memoir" "Wishful Drinking" - in about an hour in B&N (it's a lot of photos and big print).  All through it she keeps saying that there's lots of things about her life she doesn't remember because of the shock treatment she took for her bi-polar (I guess she keeps forgetting that she wrote it fhe first time so she tells us over and over and the publisher doesn't bother editing her books).

I kept thinking that - judging by the one and a half books that I read - all you've done for four or so novels is live a few years of your overly-indulged, privileged drug-addled life, then write it down (using metaphors that mean nothing) and change the names.  You try reading them - it might jog something for you?  Or are you saying you can't sit through them either?

(I'm sorry but I readed that memoir and counting how many times she almost died from her drug taking and other stuff that - if she wasn't who she was - she should either be in jail (for possession or doctor shopping), unable to work in most careers and living in poverty, up to her ears in medical debt or dead.  Instead she had a book publisher call her and ask her to write a novel based on nothing but one Q&A she wrote for Interview magazine! A book deal she wasn't even trying to get just handed to her because of which womb she sprang from. And she sees none of this - basically, "Boo hoo! You don't know what it's like to be me! Why do I have to still remember that Princess Leia hologram speech clearly!"  Really got up my nose.)

[dalem]

You say that you didn't like the special effects in Return of the Jedi. Do you feel that the special editions fixed this problem? Which version of ROTJ do you find more watchable?

Many of the issues were fixed by the SE - the sail barge stuff, for instance, which was really bad in the theater and even worse on the VHS.  And they really toned down the infamous magic marker blur on Empie's cowl in the final scenes.  But the matte paintings are still awful and the film grain or something is just... off at times in the space shots.  Weird results from ILM.

If I feel like watching a scene or part of a scene from ROTJ I'd pop in the DVD, which is most definitely the latest SE.  I have an Asian import set of DVDs that I think are the original SEs - I dunno what changes might have been made between the original SEs and the last DVD release, but I haven't cracked those since I got the "official" release.

-dale

[dalem]

Well I don't know how much of the "balance to the Force" junk was in Lucas' original storyline

There was no original storyline, remember?  The press made that up and he went along with it.

Really?  Even the legal pads with handwritten stuff he shows in that Making Of thing?  Not a challenge, I've just never heard that that stuff was being questioned.

The press even forced them to print that A New Hope was part of "The Journal of the Whills" in the book of the screenplay they printed all those years ago.   

Are you running away with my leg now?  I think you are.

And the "balance to the Force" - Yoda and Mace even talked about that the prophecy could have been read wrong (which I'll always love that Lucas never dared tell us word for word what that "writing" said - didn't have the guts to try to write something with two meanings).  And it looks to me that he brough a kind of balance - it was just the Dark Side that he balanced.

I dunno - I think for Lucas, a phrase like "A prophecy, which misread, might have been."  has no more or less meaning than "General Bobo's fleet is in the YubYub system".  It's filler dialog, no more, no less.  Doesn't make it good, but I don't really expect any depth out of it.  Star Wars, and I think Lucas himself, is the penultimate "Show don't Tell" product.  Which is mostly why I think the Clone Wars stuff is a perfect medium for Star Wars - action after action threaded with shallow banter - the perfect eye candy.

I know Lucas decided to try the "evil guys do bad things for complex reasons" route, but he scored a lot bigger with simple elemental baddassery than he did with mommy issues.  Some folk are just Bad.

I still think that it was that someone convinced Lucas that Luke was a stand-in for him so that made Vader a stand-in for his own father....and it freaked him out as to what this meant he was saying about him.  He had to make excuses for "Dad" to have done all of this

(which REALLY becomes disturbing when you think about Padme's character under those circumstances...Mom was an enabler for a mass murderer and would rather leave her newborns orphaned than face the truth.)

Mmmm, I don't see it that way at all.  If you're a guy and you're building that universe, you're not creating a Luke Skywalker for your alter ego - that's what a Han Solo is for.  Guys want to be the cowboy, not the ranch hand who tags along.

Carrie Fisher summed it beautifully in that Empire of Dreams documentary. "There's this saying that you can type it, but you can't say it!"....

And if you've ever suffered through one of her books you'll know she's an expert on that.

She does come across as really whiney and bitter in her interviews and her SW commentary track.  Would have rather had Hamill or Ford or a dung beetle in place of her comments.

-dale

[pezdrake]

Ewoks and the discussion Luke and Leia have about him having to go face Vader alone. The dialogue in that scene still hurts me.

I think that conversation is one of the best parts of the movie - that and the conversation Luke has with Vader when he turns him self in on Endor.

[dalem]

The Vader convo is okay, but the Luke-Leia stuff is truly awful IMO.

"Do you remember your mother, your real mother?" in that horrible non-Luke whispery accent.  Yuk.

-dale