The Tomtrek
Love Wookiee
THAT'S FROM THE NEXT FILM NO SPOILERS PLEASE.
Hello I'm Going To Watch All of Star Wars
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The Tomtrek
Love Wookiee
Ewoks: The Battle for Endor
In my run through all of Star Wars, I've come across several dark moments: Darth Maul killing an entire village (with children!) to attract Obi-Wan's attention, Maul killing Satine while he forces Obi-Wan to watch, and of course Anakin murdering children and being burnt alive.
So when I say that "Ewoks: Battle for Endor" starts with one of the darkest moments in the Star Wars universe, I want you to know in exactly the kind of context I mean it.
The film starts off pretty much where Caravan of Courage left off: Cindel and Wicket are happily walking through the Endor woods, while her father makes the final repairs to their spaceship and the rest of her family prepare to leave the planet.
But then they return to Wicket's village to find it under attack by marauders. They find Mace desperately trying to fight them off, next to the body of his dying mother.
Mace tells Cindel and Wicket to run and save themselves, and as they do Cindel sees both Mace's and her mother's life signs fade on her wrist-bound life monitor. They're dead.
She runs to find her father at the space ship, but he's already been captured by the leader of the marauders, Terak, and his witch assistant Charal. They're looking for 'the power', which they believe to be the power core of the space ship. As Cindel's father sees her approaching, he makes his escape but is shot in the back. He only has a brief moment to tell Cindel that even though she will now be alone, she will still be OK. As Cindel runs, he dies.
I want to make this clear - there's no "you thought they died off-screen, but they're actually alive!" moment at the end of this film. Cindel's entire family - a family we just spent an entire film working to get back together - are dead. Mace, terrible actor though he may be, was one of the leads of the last film and he gets killed off in his first scene in this one.
WHAT THE FUCK?
The start of this film - aimed at children - starts with a five year old girl having to watch her entire family get killed! A family we know from a previous film! What! The! Hell?!
This film was released in 1985, which means that this film did the opening to Alien³ seven years before Alien³ did it.
This was, FYI, 100% Lucas' idea because he'd watched 'Heidi' with his daughter and thought it would be an interesting idea to have Cindel be an orphan in this film. So they killed her entire family off. Because George Lucas watched Heidi.
ANYWAY, within the nihilistic opening to this film there's a couple of interesting things to note:
The witch-buddy of the marauders, Charel, is just that: a literal witch with magic powers (fueled by a magic ring). Back in the crazy days of the old EU when someone had to make all of this nonsense fit into the wider Star Wars universe, someone came up with the retcon that she was actually a Nightsister of Dathomir, who had broken away from her sisters.
And you know what? I 100% totally buy that. If it wasn't for the fact that she didn't have grey skin, and that her magic used red effects rather than green, there's really nothing that she does in this film that wouldn't look out of place being done by Mother Talzin. To complete the "Nightsisters are basically the Bene Gesserit" circle, the actress who plays Charel - Siân Phillips - played Reverend Mother Gaius Helen Mohiam in David Lynch's Dune, only the year before!
So this film again has to tackle the "Ewoks don't speak English" problem. Instead of the narrator, they instead solve it by... having Wicket speak English. This, obviously, is the biggest problem with having these films be set before Return of the Jedi, as obviously he couldn't speak English there! The general fan-accepted retcon was that the Towani family weren't actually speaking English (or 'Basic', to give it it's Star Wars name) but some other alien language that we only hear as English as a conceit of the film, which means that the language Wicket learnt wasn't Basic so everything fits into continuity! It's a bit of a stretch, but, whatever. The upside of having Wicket actually speaking in this film is that it meant they gave his head proper mouth movement, which does a lot to make him less creepy! He still has the cold, dead eyes of a killer, but at least he moves his mouth when he talks now!
Another intesting thing to note is that the marauders ride creatures called 'blurggs'. They look like this:
You might remember blurggs from both "The Clone Wars" and "Rebels", where they were ridden by Cham Syndulla and his rebel gang!
That's a pretty neat callback!
So anyway, after witnessing the brutal murder of everyone she ever loved, Cindel along with Wicket and the other Ewoks are rounded up and taken prisoner by the marauders. Cindel and Wicket are able to escape (because they're the only two small enough to fit through a gap in the cart they're being taken away in) and they run off to hide up a mountain.
There they get attacked by some sort of stop-motion pterodactyl creature. To give this film some credit, the stop-motion in this film is way way way better than it was in Caravan of Courage - I guess they got more of a budget this time? The creature carries Cindel off into the sky, and Wicket has to use a conveniently placed Ewok glider to rescue her (I mean they had the glider prop already, so why not use it!).
After rescuing Cindel, they go to sleep in the forest only to be awakened the next morning by this asshole trying to pickpocket Wicket.
His thing is that he can run very fast! He leads them back to an old (and messy) hut in the middle of the forest, which Cindel and Wicket assume to have been abandoned. They decide this would be a great place to live now that both of their families are either dead or imprisoned, and so start to clean it up and use the stove to make some food.
This is all fine and good until the real owner of the house approaches! Oh no! Who could it be??
Oh. Oh. It's Wilford Brimley, seen here sporting his sick-ass vape rig. Brimley plays Noa, another spacer that crashed on Endor years ago and has since set up a life here. To his credit, Brimley plays the "grumpy old man who warms to the kids" role pretty damn well, and actually seems to put some effort into his performance. It's important because Noa is a really vital part of this film, essentially taking the parental role from Cindel's actual parents (who were pretty bad in the last film).
There's a whole sequence of him sending Cindel and Wicket away (and eating the food they cooked!) before slowly warming to them and letting them stay. If it wasn't for Wilform Brimley having quite a nice screen presence then these scenes would have totally failed, but again he's actually pretty good, so it all kind of works.
There's even a scene where Cindel has a nightmare about the marauders coming to attack her and Wicket (which is pretty fair after what she watched them do). Weirdly, the scene actually starts out black and white, until the marauders are revealed and it all switches to colour. It's not much, but Star Wars doesn't go full arthouse very often (a couple of the weirder episodes of Clone Wars fit the bill) so even something like this is worth noting.
Cindel and Wicket where Noa goes every day, so they follow him. As it turns out, he goes to his old crashed spaceship, which is surrounded by traps! Noa says that he crashed with a friend who went of to find a replacement power cell, and never came back...
But most importantly, there's actually a scene where Cindel and Noa talk about the death of her family, and Noa tries to get her to remember her family for the good things about them and move past the pain. I'm actually pretty impressed that this film tries to deal with the fact that they killed off this girl's entire family. I would have expected them to kill them all off and then basically forget about it, but instead they have this scene that shows us that Cindel is trying to deal with her family's death. It's actually pretty touching?? Cindel sings everyone a song her mother used to sing to her, which is a plot point!
In my run through all of Star Wars, I've come across several dark moments: Darth Maul killing an entire village (with children!) to attract Obi-Wan's attention, Maul killing Satine while he forces Obi-Wan to watch, and of course Anakin murdering children and being burnt alive.
So when I say that "Ewoks: Battle for Endor" starts with one of the darkest moments in the Star Wars universe, I want you to know in exactly the kind of context I mean it.
The film starts off pretty much where Caravan of Courage left off: Cindel and Wicket are happily walking through the Endor woods, while her father makes the final repairs to their spaceship and the rest of her family prepare to leave the planet.
But then they return to Wicket's village to find it under attack by marauders. They find Mace desperately trying to fight them off, next to the body of his dying mother.
Mace tells Cindel and Wicket to run and save themselves, and as they do Cindel sees both Mace's and her mother's life signs fade on her wrist-bound life monitor. They're dead.
She runs to find her father at the space ship, but he's already been captured by the leader of the marauders, Terak, and his witch assistant Charal. They're looking for 'the power', which they believe to be the power core of the space ship. As Cindel's father sees her approaching, he makes his escape but is shot in the back. He only has a brief moment to tell Cindel that even though she will now be alone, she will still be OK. As Cindel runs, he dies.
I want to make this clear - there's no "you thought they died off-screen, but they're actually alive!" moment at the end of this film. Cindel's entire family - a family we just spent an entire film working to get back together - are dead. Mace, terrible actor though he may be, was one of the leads of the last film and he gets killed off in his first scene in this one.
WHAT THE FUCK?
The start of this film - aimed at children - starts with a five year old girl having to watch her entire family get killed! A family we know from a previous film! What! The! Hell?!
This film was released in 1985, which means that this film did the opening to Alien³ seven years before Alien³ did it.
This was, FYI, 100% Lucas' idea because he'd watched 'Heidi' with his daughter and thought it would be an interesting idea to have Cindel be an orphan in this film. So they killed her entire family off. Because George Lucas watched Heidi.
ANYWAY, within the nihilistic opening to this film there's a couple of interesting things to note:
The witch-buddy of the marauders, Charel, is just that: a literal witch with magic powers (fueled by a magic ring). Back in the crazy days of the old EU when someone had to make all of this nonsense fit into the wider Star Wars universe, someone came up with the retcon that she was actually a Nightsister of Dathomir, who had broken away from her sisters.
And you know what? I 100% totally buy that. If it wasn't for the fact that she didn't have grey skin, and that her magic used red effects rather than green, there's really nothing that she does in this film that wouldn't look out of place being done by Mother Talzin. To complete the "Nightsisters are basically the Bene Gesserit" circle, the actress who plays Charel - Siân Phillips - played Reverend Mother Gaius Helen Mohiam in David Lynch's Dune, only the year before!
So this film again has to tackle the "Ewoks don't speak English" problem. Instead of the narrator, they instead solve it by... having Wicket speak English. This, obviously, is the biggest problem with having these films be set before Return of the Jedi, as obviously he couldn't speak English there! The general fan-accepted retcon was that the Towani family weren't actually speaking English (or 'Basic', to give it it's Star Wars name) but some other alien language that we only hear as English as a conceit of the film, which means that the language Wicket learnt wasn't Basic so everything fits into continuity! It's a bit of a stretch, but, whatever. The upside of having Wicket actually speaking in this film is that it meant they gave his head proper mouth movement, which does a lot to make him less creepy! He still has the cold, dead eyes of a killer, but at least he moves his mouth when he talks now!
Another intesting thing to note is that the marauders ride creatures called 'blurggs'. They look like this:
You might remember blurggs from both "The Clone Wars" and "Rebels", where they were ridden by Cham Syndulla and his rebel gang!
That's a pretty neat callback!
So anyway, after witnessing the brutal murder of everyone she ever loved, Cindel along with Wicket and the other Ewoks are rounded up and taken prisoner by the marauders. Cindel and Wicket are able to escape (because they're the only two small enough to fit through a gap in the cart they're being taken away in) and they run off to hide up a mountain.
There they get attacked by some sort of stop-motion pterodactyl creature. To give this film some credit, the stop-motion in this film is way way way better than it was in Caravan of Courage - I guess they got more of a budget this time? The creature carries Cindel off into the sky, and Wicket has to use a conveniently placed Ewok glider to rescue her (I mean they had the glider prop already, so why not use it!).
After rescuing Cindel, they go to sleep in the forest only to be awakened the next morning by this asshole trying to pickpocket Wicket.
His thing is that he can run very fast! He leads them back to an old (and messy) hut in the middle of the forest, which Cindel and Wicket assume to have been abandoned. They decide this would be a great place to live now that both of their families are either dead or imprisoned, and so start to clean it up and use the stove to make some food.
This is all fine and good until the real owner of the house approaches! Oh no! Who could it be??
Oh. Oh. It's Wilford Brimley, seen here sporting his sick-ass vape rig. Brimley plays Noa, another spacer that crashed on Endor years ago and has since set up a life here. To his credit, Brimley plays the "grumpy old man who warms to the kids" role pretty damn well, and actually seems to put some effort into his performance. It's important because Noa is a really vital part of this film, essentially taking the parental role from Cindel's actual parents (who were pretty bad in the last film).
There's a whole sequence of him sending Cindel and Wicket away (and eating the food they cooked!) before slowly warming to them and letting them stay. If it wasn't for Wilform Brimley having quite a nice screen presence then these scenes would have totally failed, but again he's actually pretty good, so it all kind of works.
There's even a scene where Cindel has a nightmare about the marauders coming to attack her and Wicket (which is pretty fair after what she watched them do). Weirdly, the scene actually starts out black and white, until the marauders are revealed and it all switches to colour. It's not much, but Star Wars doesn't go full arthouse very often (a couple of the weirder episodes of Clone Wars fit the bill) so even something like this is worth noting.
Cindel and Wicket where Noa goes every day, so they follow him. As it turns out, he goes to his old crashed spaceship, which is surrounded by traps! Noa says that he crashed with a friend who went of to find a replacement power cell, and never came back...
But most importantly, there's actually a scene where Cindel and Noa talk about the death of her family, and Noa tries to get her to remember her family for the good things about them and move past the pain. I'm actually pretty impressed that this film tries to deal with the fact that they killed off this girl's entire family. I would have expected them to kill them all off and then basically forget about it, but instead they have this scene that shows us that Cindel is trying to deal with her family's death. It's actually pretty touching?? Cindel sings everyone a song her mother used to sing to her, which is a plot point!
The Tomtrek
Love Wookiee
Meanwhile, Terak and Charel are trying to work out what the hell to do with the power cell they took from Cindel's ship. Basically, the Marauders seem to be a group of people who don't really understand technology, but have found it while savaging ships on Endor and see it as basically magic. As such, the power cell is basically seen as a magic object, which Charel can't get to work with her magics.
Charel goes off to find Cindel, and does so by transforming into a bird (I could totally see Mother Talzin turn into a bird if she wanted to). She lures Cindel out by singing the same song her mother used to sing, and by appearing as a beautiful young woman, which of course totally fooled Cindel and she gets captured.
Noa and Wicket grab their gear and go to rescue Cindel, and we get a great 80's-action-movie like scene where there's dramatic close ups of him getting if equipment ready which would probably work if it wasn't, y'know, Wilford Brimley.
Terak is super mad that a five year old girl has no idea how a power cell works, and sends both her and Charel off to the dungeons with the other Ewoks. He takes Charel's ring and puts it around his neck (THIS IS IMPORTANT). I'll say this for Terak, he may be a totally two-dimensional cookie cutter kid's adventure film villain, but he's a damn sight better than Gorax! For one, he actually appears throughout the film, and also he actually talks!
Charel tells Cindel that Noa's pal actually came to Terak looking for 'the power', and Terak killed him for it and has been obsessed with finding 'the power' ever since. Terak's pretty fucking dumb but I really like the idea that somewhere in the Star Wars universe there's a bunch of primitive people who are surrounded by all this technology and have no idea what the hell it is or how to use it.
Noa, Wicket and Teek manage to get to Terak's castle (Endor is full of castles, apparently) and sneak inside to rescue Cindel and the Ewoks. Teek distracts the guards, who are playing cards (IT'S PROBABLY NOT SABBAC) by using his super-speed to put one of the cards up a guard's sleeve, causing them to fight and kill each other.
As Noa rescues Cindel, she offhandedly points to a skeleton in the prison and is like "Oh by the way Noa that's your dead friend" which, yikes Cindel, couldn't you have softened that blow a bit?
Noa and Wicket manage to rescue the Cindel and the Ewoks and take the power cell, but are followed by Charel in her bird form. This is all leading up to the big confrontation in the end: Noa, Cindel and the Ewoks vs. Terak and his marauders at Noa's crashed space ship.
So, in the Battle of Endor (which technically hasn't happened yet), the Ewoks quite famously defeated the Empire's Stormtroopers with nothing more than rocks and arrows. At the start of this battle, they fight very much the same way, and it's really very very reminiscent of that battle.
But then something magical happens. The Ewoks start to pick up the marauders blasters and use them instead.
FUCK YES. LOOK AT THIS SHIT RIGHT HERE.
And - AND - it gets better! Once Noa installs the power cell into his ship he's able to get his turret canons working, which means we get THIS:
Seeing Wilford Brimley and Ewoks mowing down fools with mounted laser canons wasn't something I thought I needed in my life, but I was wrong. Plus the Ewoks get super into it.
So yeah this final battle is kind of nuts. It has nowhere near the scale of, say, the ground portion of the Battle of Endor (because it working on a much smaller budget) but still we get to see Ewoks take up arms and go crazy shooting bad guys and it's hard not to love that. Plus it makes all of the marauders run away!
Wicket, like an idiot, goes and gets caught in one of Noa's traps. Cindel goes out to rescue him, and prompt gets taken hostage by him. Noa agrees to give the power cell over to Terak if he releases Cindel and - I'm not kidding - defeat him in single combat.
They fight. This film ends with a fight scene between Wilford Brimley - that guy from Cocoon - fighting an alien warlord.
OK, sure, it's his stunt double really. Before Noa can get horribly killed by Terak (which of course he would, look at them), Wicket throws a single stone at Terak which breaks the magic ring (REMEMBER THAT???) and turns him into a horrible charred corpse for some reason. It should be noted that Charel stays as a bird for the rest of the film and flies away and is never seen again.
Is this OK for a kids film? I mean compared to the start this is pretty tame, but it's still pretty brutal.
SO with all the bad guys dead, running away or literally a bird, and with Noa's ship now working again tanks to the power cell, they all make their goodbyes and Cindel and Noa fly off Endor.
Of course, by this time the Empire has probably moved the Death Star to Endor and is in full force around the moon, so Cindel and Noa were probably quickly captured!
So obviously, this film is a lot better than Caravan of Courage. For starters, it actually has a plot that was designed to be 90 minutes long, and as such doesn't feature any needless padding.
While ditching the family was an extremely fucked up way to start the film, in the end it paid off as it allowed for Noa to become the parental figure for Cindel. Wilford Brimley is a much much better actor than either of Cindel's parents or Mace, so this was a good move. As I said before, a lot of the scenes in this film only really work by the fact that you do actually start to care about Noa and Cindel, and a lot of that if thanks to Brimley.
Plus, yeah, kudos to this film to have a depressing as fuck start, and then actually try to address the ramifications of that later in the film. It probably would have been better had they not killed off Cindel's entire family right in front of her in such a bleak way, but I guess if they had to do that they at least did it pretty well.
Also, the effects and make up are a lot better than they were in the previous film!
And MOST IMPORTANTLY - one of the problems with Caravan of Courage is that there were so many Ewoks that Wicket, who is really the star Ewok, didn't really get a lot to do. With all of the Ewoks in prison for most of this film it meant that Wicket got a lot of screen time, which is probably good if you're a Wicket fan. PLUS it meant that Wicket and Cindel got to bond over the fact that they have both just lost their entire families and are left alone on an uncaring moon filled with creatures that want to kill them.
Ewoks: The Battle for Endor never really goes any higher than being an OK kids film, but it does do some really weird and interesting things (DID YOU SEE THAT PICTURE OF THE EWOK IN THE TURRET??) which makes it easily the best Ewok film.
Charel goes off to find Cindel, and does so by transforming into a bird (I could totally see Mother Talzin turn into a bird if she wanted to). She lures Cindel out by singing the same song her mother used to sing, and by appearing as a beautiful young woman, which of course totally fooled Cindel and she gets captured.
Noa and Wicket grab their gear and go to rescue Cindel, and we get a great 80's-action-movie like scene where there's dramatic close ups of him getting if equipment ready which would probably work if it wasn't, y'know, Wilford Brimley.
Terak is super mad that a five year old girl has no idea how a power cell works, and sends both her and Charel off to the dungeons with the other Ewoks. He takes Charel's ring and puts it around his neck (THIS IS IMPORTANT). I'll say this for Terak, he may be a totally two-dimensional cookie cutter kid's adventure film villain, but he's a damn sight better than Gorax! For one, he actually appears throughout the film, and also he actually talks!
Charel tells Cindel that Noa's pal actually came to Terak looking for 'the power', and Terak killed him for it and has been obsessed with finding 'the power' ever since. Terak's pretty fucking dumb but I really like the idea that somewhere in the Star Wars universe there's a bunch of primitive people who are surrounded by all this technology and have no idea what the hell it is or how to use it.
Noa, Wicket and Teek manage to get to Terak's castle (Endor is full of castles, apparently) and sneak inside to rescue Cindel and the Ewoks. Teek distracts the guards, who are playing cards (IT'S PROBABLY NOT SABBAC) by using his super-speed to put one of the cards up a guard's sleeve, causing them to fight and kill each other.
As Noa rescues Cindel, she offhandedly points to a skeleton in the prison and is like "Oh by the way Noa that's your dead friend" which, yikes Cindel, couldn't you have softened that blow a bit?
Noa and Wicket manage to rescue the Cindel and the Ewoks and take the power cell, but are followed by Charel in her bird form. This is all leading up to the big confrontation in the end: Noa, Cindel and the Ewoks vs. Terak and his marauders at Noa's crashed space ship.
So, in the Battle of Endor (which technically hasn't happened yet), the Ewoks quite famously defeated the Empire's Stormtroopers with nothing more than rocks and arrows. At the start of this battle, they fight very much the same way, and it's really very very reminiscent of that battle.
But then something magical happens. The Ewoks start to pick up the marauders blasters and use them instead.
FUCK YES. LOOK AT THIS SHIT RIGHT HERE.
And - AND - it gets better! Once Noa installs the power cell into his ship he's able to get his turret canons working, which means we get THIS:
Seeing Wilford Brimley and Ewoks mowing down fools with mounted laser canons wasn't something I thought I needed in my life, but I was wrong. Plus the Ewoks get super into it.
So yeah this final battle is kind of nuts. It has nowhere near the scale of, say, the ground portion of the Battle of Endor (because it working on a much smaller budget) but still we get to see Ewoks take up arms and go crazy shooting bad guys and it's hard not to love that. Plus it makes all of the marauders run away!
Wicket, like an idiot, goes and gets caught in one of Noa's traps. Cindel goes out to rescue him, and prompt gets taken hostage by him. Noa agrees to give the power cell over to Terak if he releases Cindel and - I'm not kidding - defeat him in single combat.
They fight. This film ends with a fight scene between Wilford Brimley - that guy from Cocoon - fighting an alien warlord.
OK, sure, it's his stunt double really. Before Noa can get horribly killed by Terak (which of course he would, look at them), Wicket throws a single stone at Terak which breaks the magic ring (REMEMBER THAT???) and turns him into a horrible charred corpse for some reason. It should be noted that Charel stays as a bird for the rest of the film and flies away and is never seen again.
Is this OK for a kids film? I mean compared to the start this is pretty tame, but it's still pretty brutal.
SO with all the bad guys dead, running away or literally a bird, and with Noa's ship now working again tanks to the power cell, they all make their goodbyes and Cindel and Noa fly off Endor.
Of course, by this time the Empire has probably moved the Death Star to Endor and is in full force around the moon, so Cindel and Noa were probably quickly captured!
So obviously, this film is a lot better than Caravan of Courage. For starters, it actually has a plot that was designed to be 90 minutes long, and as such doesn't feature any needless padding.
While ditching the family was an extremely fucked up way to start the film, in the end it paid off as it allowed for Noa to become the parental figure for Cindel. Wilford Brimley is a much much better actor than either of Cindel's parents or Mace, so this was a good move. As I said before, a lot of the scenes in this film only really work by the fact that you do actually start to care about Noa and Cindel, and a lot of that if thanks to Brimley.
Plus, yeah, kudos to this film to have a depressing as fuck start, and then actually try to address the ramifications of that later in the film. It probably would have been better had they not killed off Cindel's entire family right in front of her in such a bleak way, but I guess if they had to do that they at least did it pretty well.
Also, the effects and make up are a lot better than they were in the previous film!
And MOST IMPORTANTLY - one of the problems with Caravan of Courage is that there were so many Ewoks that Wicket, who is really the star Ewok, didn't really get a lot to do. With all of the Ewoks in prison for most of this film it meant that Wicket got a lot of screen time, which is probably good if you're a Wicket fan. PLUS it meant that Wicket and Cindel got to bond over the fact that they have both just lost their entire families and are left alone on an uncaring moon filled with creatures that want to kill them.
Ewoks: The Battle for Endor never really goes any higher than being an OK kids film, but it does do some really weird and interesting things (DID YOU SEE THAT PICTURE OF THE EWOK IN THE TURRET??) which makes it easily the best Ewok film.
CaptainWacky
I want to smell dark matter
I have vague memories of wondering why all the stuff from this Ewok movie wasn't in Return of the Jedi. Those guns probably would have come in handy!
CaptainWacky
I want to smell dark matter
Mesa no like dis. http://io9.gizmodo.com/the-new-star-wars-aftermath-novel-reveals-the-pitiful-1792481018
Kids love him and adults hate him, HOW SUBTLE.
Keep that meta shit out of Star Wars.
Kids love him and adults hate him, HOW SUBTLE.
Keep that meta shit out of Star Wars.
CaptainWacky
I want to smell dark matter
DAVE FILONI UNDERSTOOD JAR JAR.
The Tomtrek
Love Wookiee
Star Wars: Episode VI - Return of the Jedi
(I am watching the 'Despecialized.Edition, v2.5' of this film)
Return of the Jedi had a lot to live up to. Star Wars changed the way films were made, and The Empire Strikes Back managed to be somehow even better than Star Wars. Return of the Jedi is... not as good as either of those films. But it's not bad. But it's really not as good as the others. But it's not bad! But really, when compared to Empire, sometimes it looks kind bad.
OK so let's go over the continuity stuff, and there's a lot of it. This isn't surprising really, because as far as anyone making either the Prequels or The Clone Wars knew, this was the last part of the Star Wars story, and so this is the film everything had been leading up to.
There's a second Death Star! I guess once The Empire worked out what Galen Erso had done to the power systems they thought they might as well build another one? They do build it rather quickly when compared to the first one, but I guess that's just because they spent so long trying to get the damn thing working. Anyway, "Oh, it's another Death Star" is fine, if slightly unimaginative. Having 'Another Death Star' as the threat in your film works once, but if they did it again...
Anyway, I like how Moff Jerjerrod is kind of this spineless functionary, and makes a nice contrast to Krennic. I think it was Pablo Hidalgo who floated the idea that the Empire put Jerjerrod in in charge of the Death Star II because he wouldn't cause all the problems Krennic did due to his desire to rise through the Imperial ranks. I'd buy that.
We see Jabba the Hutt again! It's actually been a while since we saw Jabba, back in Clone Wars (YES SURE TECHNICALLY I COULD HAVE SEEN HIM IN STAR WARS BUT FUCK THAT VERSION). Having him established as a big crime boss does make his appearance from out of nowhere slightly less jarring, but what I really like is that when Jabba is telling Luke that he's not a Jedi and that those old tricks won't work on him, we now see that with the knowledge that Jabba actually met real Jedi, like Obi-Wan! ALTHOUGH WHAT HAPPENED TO ROTTA? IS HE STILL THERE? Is he grown up now? Why isn't there a story about Rotta trying to take over his father's crime empire after his death?
Yoda's back again, but now we actually get the discussions of how they were keeping Luke hidden so he can be their final hope to destroy the Emperor, something set up way back in the final Yoda arc in The Clone Wars - we even get the payoff to the "There is another Skywalker" line that Yoda hears in that arc. I like that Yoda dying is now a representation of the old Jedi Order finally dying. Yoda was (probably) the last remaining Jedi who was actually a part of the order before it collapsed, and with his passing it's now up to Luke to start being a new, different kind of Jedi.
And that's an important point, because Luke is an different kind of Jedi now. He uses his attachments (to his father in this case) to win the day and defeat the Emperor - something that would not have been possible for an old-style 'attachmentless' Jedi to do. It's interesting to note that Yoda and Obi-Wan seem to have a slightly different idea of what sort of Jedi Luke should be. Yoda tells Luke that he must confront Vader, whereas Obi-Wan seems to imply that the only thing Luke could possibly do is kill Vader. This is because Obi-Wan is still in a lot of ways stuck in the mindset of an old Jedi, and could never really imagine the idea that Luke could get through to Anakin. Yoda, on the other hand, never really seems to imply that he wants Luke to kill Vader, just confront him.
Also, when Yoda says "Do not underestimate the power of The Emperor", we now know that he is speaking from direct experience. He did underestimate the Emperor, thinking he could take him on himself, and it's what caused him to go into hiding and wait for Luke to grow up in the first place.
The Emperor! Apart from a brief appearance in Empire (where, depending on what version you're watching, he may have looked like an old woman with Orangutan eyes), this is the first time we've actually seen him since Revenge of the Sith. He's basically the same??? Okay, so he does actually look a bit more emaciated and older than he saw him in Sith, but overall his character really hasn't changed much since then. It's actually quite a credit to Ian McDiarmid that he was able to match his performance here to reprise it again in Sith (while we see Sidious in the other prequels, he isn't quite the cackling villain that we see in Sith and here). It's also a credit to the make-up department that his make-up here looks so much better than his Revenge of the Sith make up.
Oh yeah, the Ewoks are there too. I mean, I guess it's cool that we already had two films of these guying doing stuff, but it doesn't really add anything other than questions like "Why can't Wicket talk any more?" and "Why doesn't Wicket know what a hat is?" and "What happened to Teek? Did they eat him?". They probably ate him.
But the big thing that this film does, continuity-wise, is finally end Anakin's story. Throughout everything I've watched that has been the story of the saga - from the prequels and The Clone Wars, where he was a major character, to Rebels, where he was a major part of season 2, and Star Wars and Empire. Now, finally, his story - the main story of Star Wars - is finished. I say this now because with this sense of closure it would be really awkward if they were to, say, try and continue on the story from here!
Way way way way way back in The Phantom Menace, we were introduced to the concept that Anakin would be the one to 'bring balance to the force'. Now this is the end of his story, has he actually done that? There's a lot of different interpretations as to what 'balancing the force' actually means, but in my opinion he totally does balance it - first by wiping out all of the old order of Jedi (barring a few, who are all dead by the end of this film anyway), and then by wiping out the last two Sith (The Emperor and himself), leaving only Luke - a new type of Jedi not based on the inflexible dogma of the old order - left. I'd call that being 'in balance'.
OK, so, the film itself. It's kind of weird that this film spends about 45 minutes - about a third of it's run-time - dedicated just to wrapping up the plot points of The Empire Strikes Back. We spend 35 minutes on Tatooine, just because Han got put into carbonite at the end of the last film. And that's the entire reason we're there, to get him back! The weird thing is it probably didn't need to be as long as that, but the film decides to really draw it out by introducing our characters one by one: The droids, Luke (as a hologram), Chewie, Lando, Leia, Han and then Luke for real. I don't know why they decided to give each person their own entrance like this, because the only character that's actually changed at all between Empire and here is Luke. Giving him his own entrance makes sense, as it's a way of showing how he's developed in his powers and also seemingly introduce the idea that he's slightly turned to the dark side... although they don't really do anything with that idea as soon as he reveals himself properly.
The rancor sequence, too, really has no reason to be there. It doesn't really add anything to the plot, it doesn't develop Luke as a character, and it doesn't even show off his new powers. I mean, we literally saw Luke train to use the force by lifting rocks in the previous film, but instead of showing a development and control over his powers by, oh I don't know, using the force to throw a rock at the door controls or something, he just throws it normally.
But at the same time, even though it is over-long and kind of meaningless in the grand scheme of things, the whole Jabba sequence is pretty fun! It's nice to see the whole group work together, something we never really saw in Empire, the action scenes are well done and Jabba's palace is filled with some amazing looking aliens (INCLUDING MY BOY, MAX REBO, THE BEST STAR WARS ALIEN). I really like how in the Sail Barge fight the only people who actually do anything useful are Luke and Leia. Han spends the whole time flaying around blind (accidentally killing Boba Fett!), Chewie gets shot and doesn't really do anything and Lando falls of the skiff almost right away. Which makes sense, I guess, because what would Lando know about fighting like that? He's a business man!
ALSO does it make sense that Han would trust Lando right away? The last time he saw Lando he was putting him in carbonite and handing Chewie and Leia over to Vader. But now they're friends again!
The whole Jabba's palace sequence almost harks back to the serial-like structure of Star Wars, making this just another adventure for our intrepid Star Warriors. It almost does that, but one of the problems of this film is that it tries to be both Star Wars and The Empire Strikes Back and in doing so fails at being both. It tries to go for the lighter tone of Star Wars while trying to also keep the high drama of Empire, but all that means is that you get comedy scenes of Ewoks intercut with a son fighting his father in an attempt to redeem him. It's a bit weird.
After we spend 35 minutes tying up the "Han got frozen" plot point from Empire, we then spend another 10 minutes tying up the "Vader is Luke's father" plot point! This one was actually worth spending the time on, though, as not only did they have to make absolutely sure that everyone in the audience knew that Vader was telling the truth, they also had to do a whole bunch of retconning to explain why the nice story Obi-Wan told Luke about his father in Star Wars is now a pack of lies. "A certain point of view" is a bullshit excuse, by the way.
Once the film has finally finished wrapping up The Empire Strikes Back, we actually get on to the plot of the film - i.e., destroying the Death Star, and with it the Emperor. It's cool to see the Rebel Alliance finally all together, and hey Mon Mothma's back! And Ackbar! Now that we've seen the Rebel Alliance in it's early stages during Rebels, Rogue One and Star Wars it's actually pretty cool to see everyone together. I like to imagine that all of the new-EU characters who were totally at the Battle of Endor, like Shara Bey, Thane Kyrell and Norra Wexley, are just offscreen and are probably mad that Luke just walks into the briefing like "HEY I'M HERE" and UGH I guess it's all about Luke Skywalker again.
The Ewoks. The Ewoks are fine? I guess? They're the first obviously "this is for kids to buy toys of" thing in Star Wars. I mean, yes, everything in Star Wars is in one way or another designed to to be sold as a toy, but this is the first time it's actually obvious. The fact that they're these cute teddy bears who would totally eat our heroes if it weren't for the fact that they believe C-3PO to be a god is crazy enough to be Star Wars. And it does mirror what we see with both the Gungans in The Phantom Menace and the Wookiees in Revenge of the Sith, where we see a seemingly primitive race take on a technologically advanced one - but this time the Ewoks win! Even though they're obviously using the same costumes that they would later use in the Ewok films, they look at lot better here. This is mainly because the only Ewok we really see in close-up for an extended period of time is Wicket, and his costume looks fine.
The second half of the film is obviously much stronger than the first, if only because it's actually progressing the story forward... but only for Luke. Han and Leia's story doesn't really get to do anything interesting. Leia finds out that Luke's her brother and Vader's her father but we never really see her start to react and process that information. In fact, she accepts the idea that Luke is her brother really really easily for someone who was at least 6 months ago sticking her tongue down his throat. This is, of course, a side-effect of the Luke & Leia thing being a last minute "oh fuck we need to pay off the 'there is another' line and George doesn't want to do any more films so FUCK IT it's Leia because she's literally the only female character we have" moment, which is why they just sort of have to accept it and move on. BUT it does give us John Williams' "Luke & Leia" theme which is amazing and actually a crime that it only ever plays twice in this film (WHY WASN'T IT IN REVENGE OF THE SITH IT WOULD HAVE BEEN PERFECT THERE FUCK).
Han gets basically forgotten. I sort of has an arc whereby he accepts his feelings for Leia and gets a bit jealous over Luke, and even does the honourable thing and tells Leia that she should be with Luke - although again her saying "He's my brother" should really have been met with "BUT YOU KISSED HIM" - but it never really gets any time to be worthwhile. Han is just sort of there and you can kind of tell that Harrison Ford is getting bored with it. He's not Holiday Special levels of zoned-out, but he's clearly not as interested as he was in Empire.
Luke's story, though, is obviously where the best story stuff is happening. He's getting goaded by The Emperor, fighting his father and we see Anakin finally returns to defeat Palpatine. All of that stuff is great! It's a really great payoff to plot threads that started in The Phantom Menace and Mark Hamill is actually really impressive. When you compare the naïve farmboy we saw in Star Wars with the calmer, more confident Jedi we see here, it really shows how much effort Hamill put into showing Luke's growth and maturity.
While all the interesting story and character stuff is happening on the Death Star, we're left with two sections that are just there to be action sequences: The battle on Endor, and the battle above it. And boy, are they amazing. This is because the effects in Return of the Jedi are still amazing to this day. What film made today captures something with the same level of kineticism and speed that, say, the shot where the Falcon enters the Death Star does?
ILM was a company that was founded to make space ships do really cool things, and over their first six years they have very obviously honed their craft into an art. A lot of the reasons I think Jedi is so fondly remembered is because of the amazing effects during the Battle of Endor - and rightly so! It's kind of impressive that for a giant space battle where we only really know two of the people in it (Lando and Wedge), it's still fun to watch and actually quite tense as we go into the claustrophobic interiors of the Death Star.
A long time ago in a galaxy far, far away.
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.
Little does Luke know that the GALACTIC EMPIRE has secretly begun construction on a new armored space station even more powerful than the first dreaded Death Star.
When completed, this ultimate weapon will spell certain doom for the small band of rebels struggling to restore freedom to the galaxy...
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.
Little does Luke know that the GALACTIC EMPIRE has secretly begun construction on a new armored space station even more powerful than the first dreaded Death Star.
When completed, this ultimate weapon will spell certain doom for the small band of rebels struggling to restore freedom to the galaxy...
(I am watching the 'Despecialized.Edition, v2.5' of this film)
Return of the Jedi had a lot to live up to. Star Wars changed the way films were made, and The Empire Strikes Back managed to be somehow even better than Star Wars. Return of the Jedi is... not as good as either of those films. But it's not bad. But it's really not as good as the others. But it's not bad! But really, when compared to Empire, sometimes it looks kind bad.
OK so let's go over the continuity stuff, and there's a lot of it. This isn't surprising really, because as far as anyone making either the Prequels or The Clone Wars knew, this was the last part of the Star Wars story, and so this is the film everything had been leading up to.
There's a second Death Star! I guess once The Empire worked out what Galen Erso had done to the power systems they thought they might as well build another one? They do build it rather quickly when compared to the first one, but I guess that's just because they spent so long trying to get the damn thing working. Anyway, "Oh, it's another Death Star" is fine, if slightly unimaginative. Having 'Another Death Star' as the threat in your film works once, but if they did it again...
Anyway, I like how Moff Jerjerrod is kind of this spineless functionary, and makes a nice contrast to Krennic. I think it was Pablo Hidalgo who floated the idea that the Empire put Jerjerrod in in charge of the Death Star II because he wouldn't cause all the problems Krennic did due to his desire to rise through the Imperial ranks. I'd buy that.
We see Jabba the Hutt again! It's actually been a while since we saw Jabba, back in Clone Wars (YES SURE TECHNICALLY I COULD HAVE SEEN HIM IN STAR WARS BUT FUCK THAT VERSION). Having him established as a big crime boss does make his appearance from out of nowhere slightly less jarring, but what I really like is that when Jabba is telling Luke that he's not a Jedi and that those old tricks won't work on him, we now see that with the knowledge that Jabba actually met real Jedi, like Obi-Wan! ALTHOUGH WHAT HAPPENED TO ROTTA? IS HE STILL THERE? Is he grown up now? Why isn't there a story about Rotta trying to take over his father's crime empire after his death?
Yoda's back again, but now we actually get the discussions of how they were keeping Luke hidden so he can be their final hope to destroy the Emperor, something set up way back in the final Yoda arc in The Clone Wars - we even get the payoff to the "There is another Skywalker" line that Yoda hears in that arc. I like that Yoda dying is now a representation of the old Jedi Order finally dying. Yoda was (probably) the last remaining Jedi who was actually a part of the order before it collapsed, and with his passing it's now up to Luke to start being a new, different kind of Jedi.
And that's an important point, because Luke is an different kind of Jedi now. He uses his attachments (to his father in this case) to win the day and defeat the Emperor - something that would not have been possible for an old-style 'attachmentless' Jedi to do. It's interesting to note that Yoda and Obi-Wan seem to have a slightly different idea of what sort of Jedi Luke should be. Yoda tells Luke that he must confront Vader, whereas Obi-Wan seems to imply that the only thing Luke could possibly do is kill Vader. This is because Obi-Wan is still in a lot of ways stuck in the mindset of an old Jedi, and could never really imagine the idea that Luke could get through to Anakin. Yoda, on the other hand, never really seems to imply that he wants Luke to kill Vader, just confront him.
Also, when Yoda says "Do not underestimate the power of The Emperor", we now know that he is speaking from direct experience. He did underestimate the Emperor, thinking he could take him on himself, and it's what caused him to go into hiding and wait for Luke to grow up in the first place.
The Emperor! Apart from a brief appearance in Empire (where, depending on what version you're watching, he may have looked like an old woman with Orangutan eyes), this is the first time we've actually seen him since Revenge of the Sith. He's basically the same??? Okay, so he does actually look a bit more emaciated and older than he saw him in Sith, but overall his character really hasn't changed much since then. It's actually quite a credit to Ian McDiarmid that he was able to match his performance here to reprise it again in Sith (while we see Sidious in the other prequels, he isn't quite the cackling villain that we see in Sith and here). It's also a credit to the make-up department that his make-up here looks so much better than his Revenge of the Sith make up.
Oh yeah, the Ewoks are there too. I mean, I guess it's cool that we already had two films of these guying doing stuff, but it doesn't really add anything other than questions like "Why can't Wicket talk any more?" and "Why doesn't Wicket know what a hat is?" and "What happened to Teek? Did they eat him?". They probably ate him.
But the big thing that this film does, continuity-wise, is finally end Anakin's story. Throughout everything I've watched that has been the story of the saga - from the prequels and The Clone Wars, where he was a major character, to Rebels, where he was a major part of season 2, and Star Wars and Empire. Now, finally, his story - the main story of Star Wars - is finished. I say this now because with this sense of closure it would be really awkward if they were to, say, try and continue on the story from here!
Way way way way way back in The Phantom Menace, we were introduced to the concept that Anakin would be the one to 'bring balance to the force'. Now this is the end of his story, has he actually done that? There's a lot of different interpretations as to what 'balancing the force' actually means, but in my opinion he totally does balance it - first by wiping out all of the old order of Jedi (barring a few, who are all dead by the end of this film anyway), and then by wiping out the last two Sith (The Emperor and himself), leaving only Luke - a new type of Jedi not based on the inflexible dogma of the old order - left. I'd call that being 'in balance'.
OK, so, the film itself. It's kind of weird that this film spends about 45 minutes - about a third of it's run-time - dedicated just to wrapping up the plot points of The Empire Strikes Back. We spend 35 minutes on Tatooine, just because Han got put into carbonite at the end of the last film. And that's the entire reason we're there, to get him back! The weird thing is it probably didn't need to be as long as that, but the film decides to really draw it out by introducing our characters one by one: The droids, Luke (as a hologram), Chewie, Lando, Leia, Han and then Luke for real. I don't know why they decided to give each person their own entrance like this, because the only character that's actually changed at all between Empire and here is Luke. Giving him his own entrance makes sense, as it's a way of showing how he's developed in his powers and also seemingly introduce the idea that he's slightly turned to the dark side... although they don't really do anything with that idea as soon as he reveals himself properly.
The rancor sequence, too, really has no reason to be there. It doesn't really add anything to the plot, it doesn't develop Luke as a character, and it doesn't even show off his new powers. I mean, we literally saw Luke train to use the force by lifting rocks in the previous film, but instead of showing a development and control over his powers by, oh I don't know, using the force to throw a rock at the door controls or something, he just throws it normally.
But at the same time, even though it is over-long and kind of meaningless in the grand scheme of things, the whole Jabba sequence is pretty fun! It's nice to see the whole group work together, something we never really saw in Empire, the action scenes are well done and Jabba's palace is filled with some amazing looking aliens (INCLUDING MY BOY, MAX REBO, THE BEST STAR WARS ALIEN). I really like how in the Sail Barge fight the only people who actually do anything useful are Luke and Leia. Han spends the whole time flaying around blind (accidentally killing Boba Fett!), Chewie gets shot and doesn't really do anything and Lando falls of the skiff almost right away. Which makes sense, I guess, because what would Lando know about fighting like that? He's a business man!
ALSO does it make sense that Han would trust Lando right away? The last time he saw Lando he was putting him in carbonite and handing Chewie and Leia over to Vader. But now they're friends again!
The whole Jabba's palace sequence almost harks back to the serial-like structure of Star Wars, making this just another adventure for our intrepid Star Warriors. It almost does that, but one of the problems of this film is that it tries to be both Star Wars and The Empire Strikes Back and in doing so fails at being both. It tries to go for the lighter tone of Star Wars while trying to also keep the high drama of Empire, but all that means is that you get comedy scenes of Ewoks intercut with a son fighting his father in an attempt to redeem him. It's a bit weird.
After we spend 35 minutes tying up the "Han got frozen" plot point from Empire, we then spend another 10 minutes tying up the "Vader is Luke's father" plot point! This one was actually worth spending the time on, though, as not only did they have to make absolutely sure that everyone in the audience knew that Vader was telling the truth, they also had to do a whole bunch of retconning to explain why the nice story Obi-Wan told Luke about his father in Star Wars is now a pack of lies. "A certain point of view" is a bullshit excuse, by the way.
Once the film has finally finished wrapping up The Empire Strikes Back, we actually get on to the plot of the film - i.e., destroying the Death Star, and with it the Emperor. It's cool to see the Rebel Alliance finally all together, and hey Mon Mothma's back! And Ackbar! Now that we've seen the Rebel Alliance in it's early stages during Rebels, Rogue One and Star Wars it's actually pretty cool to see everyone together. I like to imagine that all of the new-EU characters who were totally at the Battle of Endor, like Shara Bey, Thane Kyrell and Norra Wexley, are just offscreen and are probably mad that Luke just walks into the briefing like "HEY I'M HERE" and UGH I guess it's all about Luke Skywalker again.
The Ewoks. The Ewoks are fine? I guess? They're the first obviously "this is for kids to buy toys of" thing in Star Wars. I mean, yes, everything in Star Wars is in one way or another designed to to be sold as a toy, but this is the first time it's actually obvious. The fact that they're these cute teddy bears who would totally eat our heroes if it weren't for the fact that they believe C-3PO to be a god is crazy enough to be Star Wars. And it does mirror what we see with both the Gungans in The Phantom Menace and the Wookiees in Revenge of the Sith, where we see a seemingly primitive race take on a technologically advanced one - but this time the Ewoks win! Even though they're obviously using the same costumes that they would later use in the Ewok films, they look at lot better here. This is mainly because the only Ewok we really see in close-up for an extended period of time is Wicket, and his costume looks fine.
The second half of the film is obviously much stronger than the first, if only because it's actually progressing the story forward... but only for Luke. Han and Leia's story doesn't really get to do anything interesting. Leia finds out that Luke's her brother and Vader's her father but we never really see her start to react and process that information. In fact, she accepts the idea that Luke is her brother really really easily for someone who was at least 6 months ago sticking her tongue down his throat. This is, of course, a side-effect of the Luke & Leia thing being a last minute "oh fuck we need to pay off the 'there is another' line and George doesn't want to do any more films so FUCK IT it's Leia because she's literally the only female character we have" moment, which is why they just sort of have to accept it and move on. BUT it does give us John Williams' "Luke & Leia" theme which is amazing and actually a crime that it only ever plays twice in this film (WHY WASN'T IT IN REVENGE OF THE SITH IT WOULD HAVE BEEN PERFECT THERE FUCK).
Han gets basically forgotten. I sort of has an arc whereby he accepts his feelings for Leia and gets a bit jealous over Luke, and even does the honourable thing and tells Leia that she should be with Luke - although again her saying "He's my brother" should really have been met with "BUT YOU KISSED HIM" - but it never really gets any time to be worthwhile. Han is just sort of there and you can kind of tell that Harrison Ford is getting bored with it. He's not Holiday Special levels of zoned-out, but he's clearly not as interested as he was in Empire.
Luke's story, though, is obviously where the best story stuff is happening. He's getting goaded by The Emperor, fighting his father and we see Anakin finally returns to defeat Palpatine. All of that stuff is great! It's a really great payoff to plot threads that started in The Phantom Menace and Mark Hamill is actually really impressive. When you compare the naïve farmboy we saw in Star Wars with the calmer, more confident Jedi we see here, it really shows how much effort Hamill put into showing Luke's growth and maturity.
While all the interesting story and character stuff is happening on the Death Star, we're left with two sections that are just there to be action sequences: The battle on Endor, and the battle above it. And boy, are they amazing. This is because the effects in Return of the Jedi are still amazing to this day. What film made today captures something with the same level of kineticism and speed that, say, the shot where the Falcon enters the Death Star does?
ILM was a company that was founded to make space ships do really cool things, and over their first six years they have very obviously honed their craft into an art. A lot of the reasons I think Jedi is so fondly remembered is because of the amazing effects during the Battle of Endor - and rightly so! It's kind of impressive that for a giant space battle where we only really know two of the people in it (Lando and Wedge), it's still fun to watch and actually quite tense as we go into the claustrophobic interiors of the Death Star.
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The Tomtrek
Love Wookiee
While the effect sequences are - without a doubt - the best in the Original Trilogy (and in many ways better to look at than some of the stuff in the prequels and The Force Awakens) - the live action photography is not great. It's pretty mediocre. I'll say it: I think that - SFX aside - Return of the Jedi is the worst looking Star Wars film. It's not that it's really ever bad, but it's just kind of boring - especially as a follow up from Empire.
Richard Marquand's direction is pretty pedestrian, and the lighting thorughout the entire film is pretty flat and uninteresting. I mean, take a look at this shot from The Empire Strike Back:
It's pretty iconic, and it works because it reduces the amount of visual information in the frame to make it very clear what we're supposed to be looking at: The characters are in silhouette, making it easy to see them against the background and also showing the clear difference between Luke's human form and Vader's armour. The lightsabers are the central focus of the shot, with the set either side of the two characters leading the viewers eye into the centre of the frame. None of this is super-advanced stuff, but it's an easy way to make what you want to see in the frame clear, while at the same time making it aesthetically pleasing to look at.
Now let's take a look at a similar shot from Jedi:
It's just plain not as good. Even though now both Luke and Vader are both dressed in black, they don't really stand out from their background, because the background of the set is lit just as much as the foregound: the walls behind Palpatine seem to have bright lights pointed directly at them, and we have those weird control panel things on either side of the frame for no real reason. The design of the set has the lines pointing towards Palpatine, and while that does give a nice 'centre of the spider's web' image, it's not really what we want to look at in the frame. Also there's those random bits of metal hanging down, again for no apparent reason. Because of the lighting and costumes, Vader and Luke have because two indistinct black blobs, and your eye really doesn't know where to look because there's so much stuff in the frame.
It's not a bad shot, it's just not as good as Empire.
The worst crime, direction-wise, of Return of the Jedi is the final shot. Every main Star Wars film has ended on a tableaux of our central characters, often reflecting the events that happened in that film and where our characters are at the end of it, and all five of them have been pretty amazing so far.
But then there's this.
What the shit is this? All of our main characters are in an awkward group slightly left of centre frame, they're all looking in totally different directions, there's random Ewoks both on the left of the frame and walking through the shot and R2 is just randomly plonked right in front of Han, so he's just a tiny head in the middle of the group. For some reason Chewbacca - the tallest of the group - is shorter than Han when sitting down. Is Han sitting on Chewie's knee? Not to mention the fact that the background is so over-lit not only does it look like an obvious backdrop but it makes the entire image look flat and uninteresting.
It's really telling that when they came to revisit this moment for the cover of the Shattered Empire comic they totally redid the positions of the characters and it looks so much better.
At least Richard Marquand (if he were still alive) could thank J.J. Abrams for taking the "worst final shot of a Star Wars film" title away from him.
I have to wonder if the reason why the effects shots look so good and the live action shots look so boring is because ILM was more in charge of what the effects shots were going to look like, and they were just better at it than Marquand. The same thing happens again the following year in Star Trek III: The Search for Spock where Nimoy's direction of the live action is also pretty pedestrian, but the effects shots (also by ILM) look gorgeous.
Return of the Jedi is a very flawed film, and while I have spent quite a large part of this review talking up it's flaws I do want to say that I do like this film a lot. Part of it (a lot of it) is nostalgia. This was actually the first Star Wars film I ever saw, when I would have been about maybe 4 or 5, so a lot of the moments in this film really do hark back to my childhood. It's hard to separate that feeling of nostalgia from the actual film, but really - why should I? I'm aware of the film's flaws, and as I watch it now they're all the more apparent to me, but it's still full of amazing moments. I love the Battle of Endor, I love Max Rebo, I love the entire ending sequence (preferrably with Ewoks singing, thank you very much) and I really really love the shot of Luke seeing his rather joining Yoda and Obi-Wan as a ghost. Heck even that terrible last shot has Lando clapping, which is great.
Return of the Jedi is the worst film in the original trilogy, but it's still a fine end to it, and to the series a whole, really. Anakin's story is complete, he's turned evil, overthrown the Empire and rejoined Obi-Wan and Yoda as part of the living force. The bad guys are defeated, the good guys won. Really, what more story is there to tell after this?
Richard Marquand's direction is pretty pedestrian, and the lighting thorughout the entire film is pretty flat and uninteresting. I mean, take a look at this shot from The Empire Strike Back:
It's pretty iconic, and it works because it reduces the amount of visual information in the frame to make it very clear what we're supposed to be looking at: The characters are in silhouette, making it easy to see them against the background and also showing the clear difference between Luke's human form and Vader's armour. The lightsabers are the central focus of the shot, with the set either side of the two characters leading the viewers eye into the centre of the frame. None of this is super-advanced stuff, but it's an easy way to make what you want to see in the frame clear, while at the same time making it aesthetically pleasing to look at.
Now let's take a look at a similar shot from Jedi:
It's just plain not as good. Even though now both Luke and Vader are both dressed in black, they don't really stand out from their background, because the background of the set is lit just as much as the foregound: the walls behind Palpatine seem to have bright lights pointed directly at them, and we have those weird control panel things on either side of the frame for no real reason. The design of the set has the lines pointing towards Palpatine, and while that does give a nice 'centre of the spider's web' image, it's not really what we want to look at in the frame. Also there's those random bits of metal hanging down, again for no apparent reason. Because of the lighting and costumes, Vader and Luke have because two indistinct black blobs, and your eye really doesn't know where to look because there's so much stuff in the frame.
It's not a bad shot, it's just not as good as Empire.
The worst crime, direction-wise, of Return of the Jedi is the final shot. Every main Star Wars film has ended on a tableaux of our central characters, often reflecting the events that happened in that film and where our characters are at the end of it, and all five of them have been pretty amazing so far.
But then there's this.
What the shit is this? All of our main characters are in an awkward group slightly left of centre frame, they're all looking in totally different directions, there's random Ewoks both on the left of the frame and walking through the shot and R2 is just randomly plonked right in front of Han, so he's just a tiny head in the middle of the group. For some reason Chewbacca - the tallest of the group - is shorter than Han when sitting down. Is Han sitting on Chewie's knee? Not to mention the fact that the background is so over-lit not only does it look like an obvious backdrop but it makes the entire image look flat and uninteresting.
It's really telling that when they came to revisit this moment for the cover of the Shattered Empire comic they totally redid the positions of the characters and it looks so much better.
At least Richard Marquand (if he were still alive) could thank J.J. Abrams for taking the "worst final shot of a Star Wars film" title away from him.
I have to wonder if the reason why the effects shots look so good and the live action shots look so boring is because ILM was more in charge of what the effects shots were going to look like, and they were just better at it than Marquand. The same thing happens again the following year in Star Trek III: The Search for Spock where Nimoy's direction of the live action is also pretty pedestrian, but the effects shots (also by ILM) look gorgeous.
Return of the Jedi is a very flawed film, and while I have spent quite a large part of this review talking up it's flaws I do want to say that I do like this film a lot. Part of it (a lot of it) is nostalgia. This was actually the first Star Wars film I ever saw, when I would have been about maybe 4 or 5, so a lot of the moments in this film really do hark back to my childhood. It's hard to separate that feeling of nostalgia from the actual film, but really - why should I? I'm aware of the film's flaws, and as I watch it now they're all the more apparent to me, but it's still full of amazing moments. I love the Battle of Endor, I love Max Rebo, I love the entire ending sequence (preferrably with Ewoks singing, thank you very much) and I really really love the shot of Luke seeing his rather joining Yoda and Obi-Wan as a ghost. Heck even that terrible last shot has Lando clapping, which is great.
Return of the Jedi is the worst film in the original trilogy, but it's still a fine end to it, and to the series a whole, really. Anakin's story is complete, he's turned evil, overthrown the Empire and rejoined Obi-Wan and Yoda as part of the living force. The bad guys are defeated, the good guys won. Really, what more story is there to tell after this?
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CaptainWacky
I want to smell dark matter
YEAH this is how I feel. I know I've mentioned that before, but I remember rewatching the Jabba's Palace sequence so many times on VHS that my tape snapped. I loved that stuff! Bib Fortuna was my favourite. I loved the Ewok battle too and obviously the space battle. I was quite shocked when I first found out that some people didn't like the movie (probably when I first heard someone moaning about Ewosk.) Now years later I can obviously see all the valid complaints but I still like it a lot. However...
I think this always struck me as weird even from an early age. It's when Luke, Han, Leia and Chewie are walking through the forest and I'm always thinking "Hang on, this is it? The big climax is going to be in a forest? Why aren't Luke, Han and Leia going to fight the Death Star!" Now I always liked Lando a lot but I never quite got why he was the one who got to destroy the Death Star. Was Han really such an expert in forst combat that he was essential to the Endor mission and couldn't fly the Falcon himself? And then there's Luke, the only person to ever successfully a Death Star before, and he's down on the planet too! Why the fuck wouldn't the Rebels send Luke to attack the Death Star in his X-Wing? I mean I get why for story reasons but there's no reason at all given in the movie to say "well, let's send Luke, Han and Leia all together on the less important mission just because they put their hands up!"
It's also weird how Yoda really draws out the "there is another Skywalker" line as if it's a big deal then in the very next scene Obi-Wan just shows up and says "oh, it's Leia."
I have defended the new ending music in the past (it's really good music!) and I really like te new closing montage showing all the planets ("WESA FREE!") but given how The Force Awakens basically says that all our heroes completely fucked up the galaxy and ruined everything...yeah. Change it back to the Ewoks singing. These losers deserve a silly comedy Ewok song.
He's searching the galaxy for his mother Ashoka.
SAUSAGEMAN
Registered User
wait where's the hayden christensen ghost
The Tomtrek
Love Wookiee
I didn't watch the version with his ghost in it!
The Tomtrek
Love Wookiee
This sucks but at least Lumpy is canon again!
http://screenrant.com/star-wars-aftermath-empires-end-chewbacca-son/
CaptainWacky
I want to smell dark matter
Does that mean Bea Arthur is canon again?
The Tomtrek
Love Wookiee
I'M SO SORRY IT'S TAKEN THIS LONG BUT HERE WE GO
Star Wars: Episode VII - The Force Awakens
So what they decided to do was have it be a clean break. This isn't a direct sequel to Return of the Jedi, it's something new. It's something that just happens to be set after Return of the Jedi, but very much a new story filled with new people. It introduces a hot young cast of characters (Rey, Finn, Poe and BB-8) to take the reigns of the story. But at the same time this film is desperate to let the audience know that it's "proper Star Wars" again. It's not like that stuff in the prequels, which was different and scary, it's just the same as the films you remember from your childhood! X-Wings! TIE Fighters! Han! Chewie! They're all here!
And this is the main problem of The Force Awakens, it has no idea if it wants to be a loving tribute to the original trilogy, or a fresh new start for Star Wars, and tries to do both. The result of which is a film that feels disjointed and kind of messy in places, most notably the story.
The Force Awakens spends a lot of it's time trying to tug on the audience's feelings of nostalgia, as it really really really really wants you to know that this is "proper" Star Wars again, and one of the main ways it does this is to effectively ignore the events of Return of the Jedi. Remember the end of Return of the Jedi? The Empire was destroyed, the Rebels won, Han & Leia's relationship was cemented, Darth Vader redeems himself, and Luke becomes a Jedi? Remember that? You do? WELL TOUGH, BECAUSE THIS FILM DOESN'T.
Now there's "The First Order". Who are they? They look basically like the Empire, are they the Empire? I thought the Empire was destroyed, so where did these guys come from? This film has no interest in answering these questions, it just wants the bad guys to be Stormtroopers and TIE Fighters, because that's how Star Wars did it.
What's "The Resistance"? Is that like the Rebellion? I thought they won? What's the Republic, is that like the prequels? Is that what the Rebellion became? Are they in charge, or is it the First Order? Again, no answers, but it doesn't matter because GOOD GUYS IN X-WINGS, LIKE STAR WARS. REMEMBER STAR WARS??
Where's Luke? Isn't he a Jedi now? Weren't the Jedi going to return? Why are there Dark Side users again, wasn't Palpatine destroyed? NOT TELLING, BUT THE BAD GUYS HAVE RED LIGHTSABERS.
This isn't the first time we've had a major jump in time between Star Wars films, as there's also the 19 year gap between Revenge of the Sith and Star Wars. But Revenge of the Sith went out of it's way to make sure that nothing major actually happened in the period between films. At the end of Sith, Anakin is Darth Vader, the Empire is in control, Luke is on Tatooine with Obi-Wan watching over him, Leia is on Alderaan and Yoda has gone into hiding. At the start of Star Wars none of this has changed so it's easy to pick up the story. The Force Awakens, on the other hand, is trying to reset the state of the universe to something familiar but isn't interested in doing the work to make that reset seem logical. So instead it just skips a whole mess of really important events and either thinks that the audience won't notice or care, or that they'll read the mass of books and comics that will fill in the gap.
This doesn't just result in a film that feels totally disjointed with the ending of the previous one, but also means that moments that should be really important and dramatic totally fall flat. The big example of this is the destruction of the Republic planets by Starkiller Base.
We see Starkiller Base fire on and destroy several planets. But we have no idea what planets they are, they've never actually been mentioned before in the film and we have no idea what relevance they have to the plot. The only thing the film tells us about these planets is that they're where the "Republic" lives, but the film gives us absolutely no information about the "Republic" whatsoever, so it doesn't matter. While the scene looks visually interesting it falls totally flat, because we have no idea what the destruction of these planets actually means to the story, the characters or the universe at large. It's just planets being blown up.
Compare that to the scene it desperately wants to be, the destruction of Alderaan in Star Wars. Like with The Force Awakens, we don't actually see Alderaan before the scene in which it gets destroyed, and indeed we never actually get to see anyone actually on the planet. But up to that point "Alderaan" has been the main focus of both Leia and Luke's journeys - we know Leia comes from there, and her father lives there, which makes us care about the planet because we care about Leia. More importantly, we know that Obi-Wan and Luke have to get to Alderaan to deliver the Death Star plans, so it's vitally important to the plot. When it's then destroyed, it has impact both because it effects a character we already know (Leia) and because it totally disrupts the course of the plot (Obi-Wan and Luke). The Force Awakens does none of this.
So why didn't they tell us about the Republic? Why weren't there scenes establishing the importance of those planets (the Hosnian system)? Basically, this film is terrified of having anything to do with the prequels. I don't think this is JJ Abrams or Lawrence Kasdan or anyone making a comment on their own personal opinion of the prequels (and yeah, I don't think "This will begin to make things right" is them commenting on the prequels, that's such a fucking dumb idea I don't even know where to start with that) but a more simple marketing move: People generally don't like the prequels because they were "boring" and "not proper Star Wars", so don't do anything they did. The prequels spent a lot of time discussing galactic politics so this film must never do that! Even if the film really needs it. Even if the film is totally confusing without it.
While the film is trying so hard not to be the prequels, it's also trying too hard to be the original trilogy. There's so much in this film that doesn't really seem to be there other than "Star Wars did it". Why does it start with a droid getting secret data while stormtroopers attack? Star Wars did it. Why is a large part of the first act on a desert planet? Star Wars did it. Why does the film end with theRebel Resistance fleet destroying the Death Star Starkiller base? Star Wars did it. It very much feels like cargo cult Star Wars - there's no real reason for the film do to these things, but if it worked in 1977 it must work now, right!
I really hope that now we've had the big "THIS IS PROPER STAR WARS PRACTICAL EFFECTS WE'RE SHOOTING ON FILM YOU KNOW" push in this film The Last Jedi can actually be free to tell a proper story, instead of trying to Make Star Wars Great Again.
When George Lucas made Star Wars, he drew inspiration from the things he loved in his youth. In that case it was stuff like the John Ford westerns, WWII films, the Flash Gordon serials of the 1930's, the artwork of Mœbius, books such as Dune, the John Carter series and the Lensman series, and the films of Akria Kurosawa. He took all these elements and put them together to make something that was both new and timeless. J.J. Abrams is basically doing the same thing - using what he liked as a child as inspiration - only in his case his inspiration is the 1977 film "Star Wars". Star Wars is starting to eat itself.
OK, so that's a lot about the problems of this film. When this film actually tried to do something new, when it's not obsessed with wishing it was Star Wars, when it really is the fresh new start this film needs to be... it's actually pretty good?
The new characters - Rey, Finn, Poe, BB-8 and Kylo Ren - are all good, and all given great performances by their actors (Daisy Ridley has some moments where she's a bit over the top but that's it).
Rey is interesting because it would have been very easy for her to be just a female Luke, but instead of her being someone yearning for excitement and adventure, she just wants somewhere to belong. Daisy Ridley acts every scene like she's the most excited five-year old in the world, but it works for her character. Her "hero's journey" isn't as strong as Luke's (for most of the film there's not actually a very clear reason why she's doing anything she does), but the sheer amount of enthusiasm Rey has for everything she's doing pretty much makes that work. When she finally takes the lightsaber at the end, it feels like a natural thing for the character to do at that point (to the point where it was actually kind of weird that Finn was using it against Kylo Ren at all) and shows her accepting her place as a force user and potential Jedi.
On paper, Finn is a really interesting character. Someone who was conditioned to fight for the first order, but starts to sees the horrors in the things he does and leaves to become his own person. The trouble is as soon as Finn arrives on Jakku that part of his character is basically totally forgotten, and he becomes a generic male lead. The only reason Finn works as a character at all is because John Boyega is really fucking good. He breathes live into a character that could otherwise have been really flat.
Same with Poe Dameron, really. Oscar Issac oozes so much charisma that I really wonder how interesting "very good pilot" would be as a character if he wasn't playing him.
BB-8 is great! A great design that easily says "Star Wars, but in the future", and although he's basically just a teenage R2-D2 he's still cool and cute! I'd go as far as saying that BB-8 is a great representation of everything this film gets right.
Not only are these characters interesting in their own right, but they also have great chemistry with each other. Finn and Rey bounce of each other well, and the sexual tension between Finn and Poe is pretty legendary at this point.
But in my opinion the most interesting character in this film is Kylo Ren. His character is doing exactly what this film should be doing - instead of being a boring retread of something we've seen before in an attempt to invoke nostalgia, he is instead building on what's come before, and ends up being something totally new and different that could only exist in a post-Return of the Jedi story.
The idea of someone who looks to Darth Vader as an inspiration, but just simply isn't as impressive or intimidating as him is really interesting. The moment when he takes off his helmet and reveals a dorky looking dude is great, as it's a great way to show just how kind of pathetic Kylo Ren is. Instead of a bad guy who starts off being awesome and badass, like Vader in Star Wars, we see Kylo Ren struggle with living in Vader's shadow, and only really becomes a threat when he finally goes all the way kills his father.
In the same way, the only reason why The First Order works at all is because they all seem to be comprised of young people. It very much feels like a whole bunch of young people got together and thought "LET'S BE COOL, LIKE THE EMPIRE". The idea of the First Order just being a bunch of kids playing at being The Empire is the only thing that makes the First Order anything other than 'The Empire, But Shinier'.
There's a couple of new characters that totally fall flat - I really think Unkar Plutt is a terrible character (he's the worst character Simon Pegg has played in Star Wars!) and fuck Maz Kanata for being the blandest, most boring Yoda-lite there is - but on the whole all of the new characters work really well. They work so well that when the film focuses on the returning characters, it feels kinda weird.
Don't get me wrong, it's really impressive they managed to get Harrison Ford back and were able to get him to give a performance that looked like he at least gave a shit (UNLIKE CRYSTAL SKULL, IS WHAT I'M SAYING), but Han feels really out of place in this film. Take the whole scene with the gangsters on Han's new stupid-looking ship. It's a set-up that feels very modern, and wouldn't feel out of place in things like Guardians of the Galaxy or the new Star Trek films, but having Han Solo in the middle of it cracking wise like every male lead has to do now just feels wrong. They've taken this character written in the 70's and put him into a modern film and he doesn't quite fit any more.
Also the Rathtars are fucking stupid and are as bad OR WORSE than anything from the prequels.
Likewise, the weird running joke about Han using Chewie's bowcaster just feels weird.
Han's death scene should be the emotional climax of the film. This character, whom we've grown to love over three classic film, approaches his son and tries to turn him back to the light, only to be murdered by him as he finally falls to the dark. It should be powerful. It should be shocking. But it just feels boring.
As soon as Han steps on to that catwalk, we know he's dead. We know. We know because it's obvious that was the only way Harrison Ford would ever come back to Star Wars. We know because it's the most obvious dramatic twist this film could do at that point. We know because there's really nothing left for Han to do in this story. So this moment that should be amazing just sort of happens, almost like it's checking a box.
[X] RETURNING MEMBER OF CAST KILLED
Leia is... there? Yeah, it's sad that Carrie Fisher is dead, but I never really felt like Leia got to do anything interesting in this film. She's there for Han to bounce off of, she's there to stand looking worried next to control panels, and she's there to hug Rey at the end. That's it. ALSO Leia saying "Snoke" is hilarious.
J.J. Abrams shot this film in the exact same way he shoots literally everything: everything is fast. Quick camera movements, quick cutting, there's a constant sense of pace that keeps everything moving. This is pretty much the opposite to how every other Star Wars film is shot, where Lucas' style (which Irvin Kershner used a more refined version of, and Richard Marquand used a more boring version of) focused mainly on wide shots with little camera movement and longer takes. This is both a blessing and a curse - Abrams' style works when the film is being the fresh new Star Wars film it wants to be, but totally fails whenever it tries to hit that nostalgia button. I really don't know why they spent so much time harping on about the "practical effects" and "shooting on film" parts of this film when Abrams' just goes and shoots it like any other modern blockbuster. The worst example of this - and it's a part of this film I actually hate (probably a bit too much) - is the final shot.
Look, Star Wars films end in a certain way. It's part of their language, in the same way an opening crawl and a panning first shot is. Every Star Wars film ends with a shot of our characters standing in a tableau, representing where they are at the end of the film, and they're all pretty amazing shots (apart from Jedi, obviously). The Force Awakens ends in a way that sets itself up beautifully for that exact kind of shot: Rey holding out Luke's old lightsaber to him, Luke unsure of whether or not to take it. So what do we get to represent this, and end the film? A helicopter shot. A shaky-ass helicopter shot.
Look how tiny the lightsaber (which should be the focal point of the shot!) looks! We can't even see Luke's face! It just makes the ending of the film feel so abrupt, as it just doesn't feel like the right shot to iris out on. This film really wants us to take it seriously as Proper Star Wars but then fails with one of the most important parts of it's visual language.
But it's not all bad. I really like the shots early on in the film of Rey exploring and driving through the wreckage of old Original Trilogy ships. It's a quick and easy way of showing the passage of time and provides us with some great visuals.
The only way these visuals would be stronger if these were the only times we saw the classic ships. The whole concept of "the ships you're familiar with are old and useless now" would work so much better if this film wasn't filled with TIE-Fighters and X-Wings and Star Destroyers all working fine.
There's some incredibly wonky stuff with the plot (outside of the fact they don't explain anything because The Phantom Menace did). Most of the film has Rey trying to get the map to Luke to the Resistance as fast as possible... only for that to be totally forgotten when Starkiller Base happens. It's very unfocused. And yeah, R2-D2 waking up at the end JUST AT THE RIGHT TIME is so bad I can't believe it even made it into the final version of the script.
The entire third act is actually pretty great! J.J.'s sense of kineticism works really well with the Starkiller Base battle, and the lightsaber fight is one of the best in the series. The visual fidelity of the effects films this a lot, and we even get stuff like lightsabers generating proper light like they should do! It's not quite the crazy fun of Return of the Jedi's battles, or the tense excitement of Star Wars, but it's pretty great.
The Force Awakens isn't a bad film. It's actually a really competent film. But that's all it is. It never does anything unexpected, it never moves out of it's comfort zone, and it gets so bogged down with trying to convince the audience to take it seriously as a Star Wars film that it really damages the film. The trick to making a good Star Wars film isn't filling it with things we already know, it's just making a good film. That's it!
The good parts of this film are really good. The bad parts of pretty damn bad. I hope The Last Jedi takes the good and is able to stand with confidence as a full new Star Wars film.
Star Wars: Episode VII - The Force Awakens
A long time ago in a galaxy far, far away.
Luke Skywalker has vanished. In his absence, the sinister FIRST ORDER has risen from the ashes of the Empire and will not rest until Skywalker, the last Jedi, has been destroyed.
With the support of the REPUBLIC, General Leia Organa leads a brave RESISTANCE. She is desperate to find her brother Luke and gain his help in restoring peace and justice to the galaxy.
Leia has sent her most daring pilot on a secret mission to Jakku, where an old ally has discovered a clue to Luke's whereabouts....
Picking up the story of Star Wars several decades after the end of Return of the Jedi was always going to be tricky, because Return of the Jedi was the end of the story. I mean it, it really was. Everything I've watched - everything - has been to do with the fall and redemption of Anakin Skywalker. That's what the entirety of the prequels, Clone Wars and the original trilogy were about. The two outliers - Rebels and Rogue One - were all about the Rebellion, something that's also entirely done with by the end of Return of the Jedi (and Rebels had a whole load of Vader stuff in season 2 as well).Luke Skywalker has vanished. In his absence, the sinister FIRST ORDER has risen from the ashes of the Empire and will not rest until Skywalker, the last Jedi, has been destroyed.
With the support of the REPUBLIC, General Leia Organa leads a brave RESISTANCE. She is desperate to find her brother Luke and gain his help in restoring peace and justice to the galaxy.
Leia has sent her most daring pilot on a secret mission to Jakku, where an old ally has discovered a clue to Luke's whereabouts....
So what they decided to do was have it be a clean break. This isn't a direct sequel to Return of the Jedi, it's something new. It's something that just happens to be set after Return of the Jedi, but very much a new story filled with new people. It introduces a hot young cast of characters (Rey, Finn, Poe and BB-8) to take the reigns of the story. But at the same time this film is desperate to let the audience know that it's "proper Star Wars" again. It's not like that stuff in the prequels, which was different and scary, it's just the same as the films you remember from your childhood! X-Wings! TIE Fighters! Han! Chewie! They're all here!
And this is the main problem of The Force Awakens, it has no idea if it wants to be a loving tribute to the original trilogy, or a fresh new start for Star Wars, and tries to do both. The result of which is a film that feels disjointed and kind of messy in places, most notably the story.
The Force Awakens spends a lot of it's time trying to tug on the audience's feelings of nostalgia, as it really really really really wants you to know that this is "proper" Star Wars again, and one of the main ways it does this is to effectively ignore the events of Return of the Jedi. Remember the end of Return of the Jedi? The Empire was destroyed, the Rebels won, Han & Leia's relationship was cemented, Darth Vader redeems himself, and Luke becomes a Jedi? Remember that? You do? WELL TOUGH, BECAUSE THIS FILM DOESN'T.
Now there's "The First Order". Who are they? They look basically like the Empire, are they the Empire? I thought the Empire was destroyed, so where did these guys come from? This film has no interest in answering these questions, it just wants the bad guys to be Stormtroopers and TIE Fighters, because that's how Star Wars did it.
What's "The Resistance"? Is that like the Rebellion? I thought they won? What's the Republic, is that like the prequels? Is that what the Rebellion became? Are they in charge, or is it the First Order? Again, no answers, but it doesn't matter because GOOD GUYS IN X-WINGS, LIKE STAR WARS. REMEMBER STAR WARS??
Where's Luke? Isn't he a Jedi now? Weren't the Jedi going to return? Why are there Dark Side users again, wasn't Palpatine destroyed? NOT TELLING, BUT THE BAD GUYS HAVE RED LIGHTSABERS.
This isn't the first time we've had a major jump in time between Star Wars films, as there's also the 19 year gap between Revenge of the Sith and Star Wars. But Revenge of the Sith went out of it's way to make sure that nothing major actually happened in the period between films. At the end of Sith, Anakin is Darth Vader, the Empire is in control, Luke is on Tatooine with Obi-Wan watching over him, Leia is on Alderaan and Yoda has gone into hiding. At the start of Star Wars none of this has changed so it's easy to pick up the story. The Force Awakens, on the other hand, is trying to reset the state of the universe to something familiar but isn't interested in doing the work to make that reset seem logical. So instead it just skips a whole mess of really important events and either thinks that the audience won't notice or care, or that they'll read the mass of books and comics that will fill in the gap.
This doesn't just result in a film that feels totally disjointed with the ending of the previous one, but also means that moments that should be really important and dramatic totally fall flat. The big example of this is the destruction of the Republic planets by Starkiller Base.
We see Starkiller Base fire on and destroy several planets. But we have no idea what planets they are, they've never actually been mentioned before in the film and we have no idea what relevance they have to the plot. The only thing the film tells us about these planets is that they're where the "Republic" lives, but the film gives us absolutely no information about the "Republic" whatsoever, so it doesn't matter. While the scene looks visually interesting it falls totally flat, because we have no idea what the destruction of these planets actually means to the story, the characters or the universe at large. It's just planets being blown up.
Compare that to the scene it desperately wants to be, the destruction of Alderaan in Star Wars. Like with The Force Awakens, we don't actually see Alderaan before the scene in which it gets destroyed, and indeed we never actually get to see anyone actually on the planet. But up to that point "Alderaan" has been the main focus of both Leia and Luke's journeys - we know Leia comes from there, and her father lives there, which makes us care about the planet because we care about Leia. More importantly, we know that Obi-Wan and Luke have to get to Alderaan to deliver the Death Star plans, so it's vitally important to the plot. When it's then destroyed, it has impact both because it effects a character we already know (Leia) and because it totally disrupts the course of the plot (Obi-Wan and Luke). The Force Awakens does none of this.
So why didn't they tell us about the Republic? Why weren't there scenes establishing the importance of those planets (the Hosnian system)? Basically, this film is terrified of having anything to do with the prequels. I don't think this is JJ Abrams or Lawrence Kasdan or anyone making a comment on their own personal opinion of the prequels (and yeah, I don't think "This will begin to make things right" is them commenting on the prequels, that's such a fucking dumb idea I don't even know where to start with that) but a more simple marketing move: People generally don't like the prequels because they were "boring" and "not proper Star Wars", so don't do anything they did. The prequels spent a lot of time discussing galactic politics so this film must never do that! Even if the film really needs it. Even if the film is totally confusing without it.
While the film is trying so hard not to be the prequels, it's also trying too hard to be the original trilogy. There's so much in this film that doesn't really seem to be there other than "Star Wars did it". Why does it start with a droid getting secret data while stormtroopers attack? Star Wars did it. Why is a large part of the first act on a desert planet? Star Wars did it. Why does the film end with the
I really hope that now we've had the big "THIS IS PROPER STAR WARS PRACTICAL EFFECTS WE'RE SHOOTING ON FILM YOU KNOW" push in this film The Last Jedi can actually be free to tell a proper story, instead of trying to Make Star Wars Great Again.
When George Lucas made Star Wars, he drew inspiration from the things he loved in his youth. In that case it was stuff like the John Ford westerns, WWII films, the Flash Gordon serials of the 1930's, the artwork of Mœbius, books such as Dune, the John Carter series and the Lensman series, and the films of Akria Kurosawa. He took all these elements and put them together to make something that was both new and timeless. J.J. Abrams is basically doing the same thing - using what he liked as a child as inspiration - only in his case his inspiration is the 1977 film "Star Wars". Star Wars is starting to eat itself.
OK, so that's a lot about the problems of this film. When this film actually tried to do something new, when it's not obsessed with wishing it was Star Wars, when it really is the fresh new start this film needs to be... it's actually pretty good?
The new characters - Rey, Finn, Poe, BB-8 and Kylo Ren - are all good, and all given great performances by their actors (Daisy Ridley has some moments where she's a bit over the top but that's it).
Rey is interesting because it would have been very easy for her to be just a female Luke, but instead of her being someone yearning for excitement and adventure, she just wants somewhere to belong. Daisy Ridley acts every scene like she's the most excited five-year old in the world, but it works for her character. Her "hero's journey" isn't as strong as Luke's (for most of the film there's not actually a very clear reason why she's doing anything she does), but the sheer amount of enthusiasm Rey has for everything she's doing pretty much makes that work. When she finally takes the lightsaber at the end, it feels like a natural thing for the character to do at that point (to the point where it was actually kind of weird that Finn was using it against Kylo Ren at all) and shows her accepting her place as a force user and potential Jedi.
On paper, Finn is a really interesting character. Someone who was conditioned to fight for the first order, but starts to sees the horrors in the things he does and leaves to become his own person. The trouble is as soon as Finn arrives on Jakku that part of his character is basically totally forgotten, and he becomes a generic male lead. The only reason Finn works as a character at all is because John Boyega is really fucking good. He breathes live into a character that could otherwise have been really flat.
Same with Poe Dameron, really. Oscar Issac oozes so much charisma that I really wonder how interesting "very good pilot" would be as a character if he wasn't playing him.
BB-8 is great! A great design that easily says "Star Wars, but in the future", and although he's basically just a teenage R2-D2 he's still cool and cute! I'd go as far as saying that BB-8 is a great representation of everything this film gets right.
Not only are these characters interesting in their own right, but they also have great chemistry with each other. Finn and Rey bounce of each other well, and the sexual tension between Finn and Poe is pretty legendary at this point.
But in my opinion the most interesting character in this film is Kylo Ren. His character is doing exactly what this film should be doing - instead of being a boring retread of something we've seen before in an attempt to invoke nostalgia, he is instead building on what's come before, and ends up being something totally new and different that could only exist in a post-Return of the Jedi story.
The idea of someone who looks to Darth Vader as an inspiration, but just simply isn't as impressive or intimidating as him is really interesting. The moment when he takes off his helmet and reveals a dorky looking dude is great, as it's a great way to show just how kind of pathetic Kylo Ren is. Instead of a bad guy who starts off being awesome and badass, like Vader in Star Wars, we see Kylo Ren struggle with living in Vader's shadow, and only really becomes a threat when he finally goes all the way kills his father.
In the same way, the only reason why The First Order works at all is because they all seem to be comprised of young people. It very much feels like a whole bunch of young people got together and thought "LET'S BE COOL, LIKE THE EMPIRE". The idea of the First Order just being a bunch of kids playing at being The Empire is the only thing that makes the First Order anything other than 'The Empire, But Shinier'.
There's a couple of new characters that totally fall flat - I really think Unkar Plutt is a terrible character (he's the worst character Simon Pegg has played in Star Wars!) and fuck Maz Kanata for being the blandest, most boring Yoda-lite there is - but on the whole all of the new characters work really well. They work so well that when the film focuses on the returning characters, it feels kinda weird.
Don't get me wrong, it's really impressive they managed to get Harrison Ford back and were able to get him to give a performance that looked like he at least gave a shit (UNLIKE CRYSTAL SKULL, IS WHAT I'M SAYING), but Han feels really out of place in this film. Take the whole scene with the gangsters on Han's new stupid-looking ship. It's a set-up that feels very modern, and wouldn't feel out of place in things like Guardians of the Galaxy or the new Star Trek films, but having Han Solo in the middle of it cracking wise like every male lead has to do now just feels wrong. They've taken this character written in the 70's and put him into a modern film and he doesn't quite fit any more.
Also the Rathtars are fucking stupid and are as bad OR WORSE than anything from the prequels.
Likewise, the weird running joke about Han using Chewie's bowcaster just feels weird.
Han's death scene should be the emotional climax of the film. This character, whom we've grown to love over three classic film, approaches his son and tries to turn him back to the light, only to be murdered by him as he finally falls to the dark. It should be powerful. It should be shocking. But it just feels boring.
As soon as Han steps on to that catwalk, we know he's dead. We know. We know because it's obvious that was the only way Harrison Ford would ever come back to Star Wars. We know because it's the most obvious dramatic twist this film could do at that point. We know because there's really nothing left for Han to do in this story. So this moment that should be amazing just sort of happens, almost like it's checking a box.
[X] RETURNING MEMBER OF CAST KILLED
Leia is... there? Yeah, it's sad that Carrie Fisher is dead, but I never really felt like Leia got to do anything interesting in this film. She's there for Han to bounce off of, she's there to stand looking worried next to control panels, and she's there to hug Rey at the end. That's it. ALSO Leia saying "Snoke" is hilarious.
J.J. Abrams shot this film in the exact same way he shoots literally everything: everything is fast. Quick camera movements, quick cutting, there's a constant sense of pace that keeps everything moving. This is pretty much the opposite to how every other Star Wars film is shot, where Lucas' style (which Irvin Kershner used a more refined version of, and Richard Marquand used a more boring version of) focused mainly on wide shots with little camera movement and longer takes. This is both a blessing and a curse - Abrams' style works when the film is being the fresh new Star Wars film it wants to be, but totally fails whenever it tries to hit that nostalgia button. I really don't know why they spent so much time harping on about the "practical effects" and "shooting on film" parts of this film when Abrams' just goes and shoots it like any other modern blockbuster. The worst example of this - and it's a part of this film I actually hate (probably a bit too much) - is the final shot.
Look, Star Wars films end in a certain way. It's part of their language, in the same way an opening crawl and a panning first shot is. Every Star Wars film ends with a shot of our characters standing in a tableau, representing where they are at the end of the film, and they're all pretty amazing shots (apart from Jedi, obviously). The Force Awakens ends in a way that sets itself up beautifully for that exact kind of shot: Rey holding out Luke's old lightsaber to him, Luke unsure of whether or not to take it. So what do we get to represent this, and end the film? A helicopter shot. A shaky-ass helicopter shot.
Look how tiny the lightsaber (which should be the focal point of the shot!) looks! We can't even see Luke's face! It just makes the ending of the film feel so abrupt, as it just doesn't feel like the right shot to iris out on. This film really wants us to take it seriously as Proper Star Wars but then fails with one of the most important parts of it's visual language.
But it's not all bad. I really like the shots early on in the film of Rey exploring and driving through the wreckage of old Original Trilogy ships. It's a quick and easy way of showing the passage of time and provides us with some great visuals.
The only way these visuals would be stronger if these were the only times we saw the classic ships. The whole concept of "the ships you're familiar with are old and useless now" would work so much better if this film wasn't filled with TIE-Fighters and X-Wings and Star Destroyers all working fine.
There's some incredibly wonky stuff with the plot (outside of the fact they don't explain anything because The Phantom Menace did). Most of the film has Rey trying to get the map to Luke to the Resistance as fast as possible... only for that to be totally forgotten when Starkiller Base happens. It's very unfocused. And yeah, R2-D2 waking up at the end JUST AT THE RIGHT TIME is so bad I can't believe it even made it into the final version of the script.
The entire third act is actually pretty great! J.J.'s sense of kineticism works really well with the Starkiller Base battle, and the lightsaber fight is one of the best in the series. The visual fidelity of the effects films this a lot, and we even get stuff like lightsabers generating proper light like they should do! It's not quite the crazy fun of Return of the Jedi's battles, or the tense excitement of Star Wars, but it's pretty great.
The Force Awakens isn't a bad film. It's actually a really competent film. But that's all it is. It never does anything unexpected, it never moves out of it's comfort zone, and it gets so bogged down with trying to convince the audience to take it seriously as a Star Wars film that it really damages the film. The trick to making a good Star Wars film isn't filling it with things we already know, it's just making a good film. That's it!
The good parts of this film are really good. The bad parts of pretty damn bad. I hope The Last Jedi takes the good and is able to stand with confidence as a full new Star Wars film.
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CaptainWacky
I want to smell dark matter
I rewatched it a few weeks ago. I'll start by saying something positive: I like the scene where Rey and Finna are escaping Jakku in the Falcon. It's a good mix of the old and the new, it has the "it's the Falcon, I remember that!" factor but it's a great scene for Rey and Finn's characters as they bond over their shared enthusiam (having characters bond during an action scene is something Rogue One could have learned from!) and it's a fun action scene with the Falcon doing stuff we wouldn't have been able to see in the original trilogy but still seems like stuff the Faclon could do. It's the best action setpiece in the movie really though it's still too short compared to the action setpieces of the original trilogy.
I agree that the new characters are pretty well done (if underwritten) and likable and the casting is good. It does deserve credit for that and it's obvious they took extra care to have more natural character interactions after the prequels.
BUT YEAH the story's the big problem. WHY is the MacGuffin a map to Luke Skywalker's house? Why is everyone desperately trying to find Luke Skywalker in the first half of the movie like it's super important they find him NOW and he's going to DO SOMETHING to change things? Then suddenly over an hour into the movie they introduce Starkiller Base literally out of nowhere. That fucking briefing scene where they show a hologram of how much bigger it is than the Death Star feels like something out of Spaceballs. Finn just comes out with "oh yeah, I worked there!" but surely he should have mentioned this huge planet destroying weapon before now? Why not show him working there at the start of the movie to establish it?
Compare that to ANH where everything is about the Death Star. The whole movie is about getting the plans to the Death Star to the Rebellion, we see the Death Star from early on in the movie, the climax of the movie is Luke destroying the Death Star. Seriously ANH was so much better written than this.
And the actual space battle at Starkiller Base is pretty shit. Obviously it hurts that Rogue One has come out since then and did a really great looking space battle, but I'm not saying TFA's battle had to be as good as that. But it should have been at least better than the space battle from the end of TPM and it wans't really! It just feels like an afterthought: they even throw in the most forgettable trench run ever.
Then R2 randomly wakes up and says "beep beep here's where Luke lives!" (how did Not Wedge even have a map if Luke didn't want to be found?) and they finally go to see Luke and...he does nothing. So why was this map so desperately important?
I KNOW this sounds really snobby but it feels like a movie designed for people who haven't seen Star Wars in thirty years. Obviously I'm someone who's never stopped watching Star Wars over the last thirty years, I've watched all the movies (ALL of them (that was a Palpatine quote)) multiple times, I've watched all the animated stuff, I've read the comics, I played that Gamecube game...so I'm not someone who's going to orgasm over seeing the Falcon or Admiral Ackbar again because it hasn't been thirty years for me.
And fuck them for cutting Constable Zuvio.
I agree that the new characters are pretty well done (if underwritten) and likable and the casting is good. It does deserve credit for that and it's obvious they took extra care to have more natural character interactions after the prequels.
BUT YEAH the story's the big problem. WHY is the MacGuffin a map to Luke Skywalker's house? Why is everyone desperately trying to find Luke Skywalker in the first half of the movie like it's super important they find him NOW and he's going to DO SOMETHING to change things? Then suddenly over an hour into the movie they introduce Starkiller Base literally out of nowhere. That fucking briefing scene where they show a hologram of how much bigger it is than the Death Star feels like something out of Spaceballs. Finn just comes out with "oh yeah, I worked there!" but surely he should have mentioned this huge planet destroying weapon before now? Why not show him working there at the start of the movie to establish it?
Compare that to ANH where everything is about the Death Star. The whole movie is about getting the plans to the Death Star to the Rebellion, we see the Death Star from early on in the movie, the climax of the movie is Luke destroying the Death Star. Seriously ANH was so much better written than this.
And the actual space battle at Starkiller Base is pretty shit. Obviously it hurts that Rogue One has come out since then and did a really great looking space battle, but I'm not saying TFA's battle had to be as good as that. But it should have been at least better than the space battle from the end of TPM and it wans't really! It just feels like an afterthought: they even throw in the most forgettable trench run ever.
Then R2 randomly wakes up and says "beep beep here's where Luke lives!" (how did Not Wedge even have a map if Luke didn't want to be found?) and they finally go to see Luke and...he does nothing. So why was this map so desperately important?
I KNOW this sounds really snobby but it feels like a movie designed for people who haven't seen Star Wars in thirty years. Obviously I'm someone who's never stopped watching Star Wars over the last thirty years, I've watched all the movies (ALL of them (that was a Palpatine quote)) multiple times, I've watched all the animated stuff, I've read the comics, I played that Gamecube game...so I'm not someone who's going to orgasm over seeing the Falcon or Admiral Ackbar again because it hasn't been thirty years for me.
And fuck them for cutting Constable Zuvio.
CaptainWacky
I want to smell dark matter
Also: thank you for posting this thread, I have enjoyed reading it. Other people should read it too.
It's lucky there's never going to be any more Star Wars ever again!
It's lucky there's never going to be any more Star Wars ever again!
SAUSAGEMAN
Registered User
strong thread,
The Tomtrek
Love Wookiee
THANKS GUYS. IT TOOK ME 8 FUCKING MONTHS BUT I WATCHED A LOT OF STAR WARS.
After watching everything there's some interesting things to note:
After watching everything there's some interesting things to note:
- Thanks to Clone Wars there is a lot of prequel content, to the point that when you hit The Original Trilogy you can pretty much breeze through it.
- The prequels aren't the worst thing in the world but they do have their flaws.
- Clone Wars does so much to make everything involving Anakin better, it's insane. It's really sad that so many people will just watch the films and never touch the TV shows because they're getting a much inferior version of the story.
- Ahsoka Tano is still the best.
- I really like Clone Wars, guys.
- THAT SAID The Empire Strikes Back is still the best Star Wars thing but I think we all knew this
- The Force Awakens really stands out like a sore thumb as being something totally disconnected from the main Anakin/Vader story.
- It will be really interesting to see how much Star Wars being the story of Darth Vader will stick now we're getting a new film every year.
- There's a lot of Star Wars
- There's probably going to be a lot more of it.
- None of that will probably be as good as The Empire Strikes Back.
- Star Wars is pretty cool. I like it.
SAUSAGEMAN
Registered User
I think the best Star Wars thing is the X-Wing series of video games, tyvm