Sorry, Richard Marquand. Sorry, Bib Fortuna. But when it
comes to assessing the original Star Wars
trilogy, your episode tends to come out on bottom. There are multiple reasons
why Return of the Jedi is a lesser
movie than Star Wars and The Empire Strikes Back. It lacks the
freshness of the first movie, even resorting to duplicating a lot of Star Wars’ beats (most blatantly in
flying the heroes back to Tattooine and rebuilding the Death Star). It lacks
the relative depth of Empire largely
because George Lucas was adamant about not overtaxing his fans’ brains, which he
apparently assumed were fairly puny. Lucas was mainly concerned with drawing in
a new audience of toddlers, whom he assumed would bully their parents into
buying everything on the Ewok shelf at the local Toys R Us.
Despite the issues with Return
of the Jedi, it would take sixteen years for there to be a Star Wars movie that genuinely sucked.
Here are ten reasons why it may not be fair to say that about Return of the Jedi.
1. The Ultimate Monster
Menagerie
Although Star Wars
is likely the most popular movie ever made, it has a sloppy legacy because
George Lucas is notoriously dissatisfied with it (hence those terrible Special
Editions). One of the biggest bugs up his butt is the fact that the assortment
of Bug Eyed Monsters populating the Mos Eisley Cantina weren’t up to his
standards. This zany sequence still managed to become one of the film’s most
beloved, but one has to admit that there is a slapdash quality to some of the
rubber-masked aliens. And if this is not apparent upon viewing Star Wars for the first time, it will
become apparent after seeing Return of
the Jedi because that sequel’s menagerie of monsters is so markedly
superior. In crafting the Jabba’s palace sequence, a creature design team that
included Joe Johnston, Phil Tippett, and Chris Walas redecorated our fantasies
and nightmares with aliens bizarre (Squid Head, Ree-Yees), comical (Salacious
Crumb, Sy Snootles), genuinely frightening (Bib Fortuna), or a combination of
all those qualities (the Gamorrean Guards). And one creation was so stunning
that he warrants an entry on this list all to himself…
2. Jabba the Hutt
…The most impressive new member of the Star Wars monster menagerie had to be that sleazy gangster we’d
been hearing about since Han Solo blasted Greedo in a shady nook of the Mos
Eisley Cantina. It’s a good thing that Jabba the Hutt’s sequence was scrapped
from the first film, because it is highly unlikely that the limited budget and
creature design team of Star Wars would
have produced anything as impressive as Phil Tippett’s immense puppet that
required three operators. No impractical effect could ever convey the fearsome
girth of Jabba the Hutt, and inventive sound design using a subharmonic
generator to overload the low end on voice actor Larry Ward’s bellow makes
Jabba sound as massive as he looks. No creature in a Star Wars movie has ever been so impressively designed or
executed.
3. Act I
Before moving on from the Tattooine-centric first act of Return of the Jedi, let’s just give a
cheer to the whole damn sequence. Yes, it’s fairly irrelevant to anything but
the need to defrost Han Solo. Yes, the heroes’ plan to accomplish that doesn’t
make a lot of sense. But there’s no question that it provides the film’s
highest concentration of fun action and visuals. It allows all of the heroes to
have wacky introductions. R2-D2 and C-3PO are sold into slavery for some
reason. Leia and Lando masquerade as scum and villains as if they’re in some
sort of intergalactic episode of Mission:
Impossible. Luke gets to sashay through the shadows and assume his role as way cool Jedi, and when this does not go quite as planned, he gets to face off
against the film’s second most impressive monster during the exciting and
tightly choreographed Rancor Pit sequence. The melee aboard the desert skiff
is a lot more chaotic, and features one of the film’s sloppiest blunders by
dispatching Boba Fett so unceremoniously, but it is the film’s jolliest,
slap-happiest fight sequence—the closest a Star
Wars movie ever came to morphing into The
Cannonball Run.
4. Luke Grows Up
We’ve already touched on the coolness of Luke in his Jedi
guise, but let’s give it a little more attention, because really, without it, there’s not much to the rest of Return of
the Jedi. Luke was a bit of a whiney teen in Star Wars and Empire, but
he matures in Return of the Jedi
(having your aunt and uncle burned alive, learning your dad is Space Hitler,
and Frenching your sister will do that to a person). Luke was the main character
in the first two movies, but he doesn’t really become the most interesting one
until Jedi. Unfortunately, this is
partially due to the way Leia (once so fearless and fierce), Han (once so
charming yet morally conflicted), and Lando (ditto) are reduced to cardboard
support beams this time around. Luke more than pulls his weight, though, by
slaying the Rancor, “masterminding” the weird escape mission at Jabba’s joint
(good thinking hiding your light saber in R2D2’s head, Luke!), and facing his
bad dad amidst an ethical crisis of tremendous consequence for the galaxy. Mark
Hamill’s performance has aged well too, though it probably helps that he wasn’t
forced to whine shit like “Awwww, you’re makin’ a mess!”
5. Admiral Ackbar
Another of the movie’s best performances comes from what is
essentially a giant red snapper puppet. Yet Admiral Ackbar unfailingly conveys
strength and leadership when he could have just begged for a sprinkle of Old
Bay Seasoning. After such nondescript specimens as General Dodonna, General
Rieeken, and his own dull-as-sawdust costar General Madine, Ackbar is the first
Rebel military leader who makes a strong impression, getting into the fray
during the Death Star attack, expressing panic when famously discovering that
he has led his fleet into a trap, and arguably providing the sincerest emotion
in the film when he flops back into his command chair with a small exhalation
of relief near the completion of a very tense mission. But I guess it’s tough to
not make a strong impression when you look like a big fish.
6. The Speeder Bike
Chase
Two of the defining characteristics of Return of the Jedi are chaos and illogic, and these two elements
reach a dizzy height in the thrilling speeder bike chase. Why the Empire
thought it was a good idea to have its soldiers navigate the massive and
unpredictably positioned trees of Endor on flimsy, super high-speed hover bikes
is anyone’s guess. Maybe their victory at the end of The Empire Strikes Back left them feeling insensibly arrogant. While the Empire’s main conveyance for the surface of the Sanctuary
Moon makes little sense, it is unquestionably exciting to watch those awesomely
attired Biker Scouts zip along with Luke and Leia. It is also the last truly
exciting sequence in the film as the picture loses steam with too much intercutting of
action (the final Death Star attack would have been a lot better if presented
as a self-contained sequence like the one in Star Wars) and too many Ewoks.
7. The Emperor
Okay, there’s one other fairly entertaining element that
keeps Return of the Jedi afloat
during its final, Ewok-encrusted hour, and that thing is Ian McDiarmid’s ham-sucking
turn as the baddest baddie in the universe. He’s the guy who makes Darth Vader
quake in his ebony knee highs. He’s the Emperor: a smug, giggly, craggy old
bastard with piercing yellow eyes that drop him in the terrifying uncanny
valley. In the prequels, the makeup and McDiarmid’s performance would both go
over the top, resulting in a lot of unintended camp, but in Jedi, the actor maintains enough control
over his character to forge some fairly frightening moments. Even as a child I
never for a moment believed that Luke would ever cross over to the dark side,
but there is something seductive about the Emperor, and that’s largely due to
McDiarmid, the only actor in the movie who actually seems like he’s having a
good time (well, Anthony Daniels has his moments too).
8. Hearing Voices
John Williams ups the intensity of the Emperor’s scenes with
a new addition to a Star Wars score:
voices. What could be jarring for its seeming inappropriateness ends up powerful
as a choir of lugubrious male voices roil the dread in the Emperor’s recurring
theme (as a likely coincidental aside, the melody is almost identical to the
recurring theme of another great, ham-bone villain: Twin Peaks’ Windom Earle).
The voices reach a dramatic climax during the “Final Duel” piece. Other
uses of voices on the soundtrack are a bit more controversial, since not
everyone is a big fan of Sy Snootles’ synth-soul cheese “Lapti Nek” or the
Ewoks’ infamous “Yub Nub”, but both are infinitely preferable to their wretched
equivalents in the Special Editions.
9. The Colors! The
Colors!
While their iconic characters and hardware, soap opera
developments, and cuckoo action get the majority of the attention, Star Wars and The Empire Strikes Back are also great because they look great. Few
films made before today’s age of overused blue and orange digital filters were
easier to associate with specific palettes. Star
Wars had its earth tones, grays, and blacks. Empire was
considerably more striking, quite possibly influencing the glut of orange and
blue movies in the twenty-first century that miss the boat by cheating with
digital filters that cannot approximate the tactile aesthetic of a film that
achieves its color scheme through lighting, costuming, and set design. In a
sense, Return of the Jedi is a step
backward because it doesn’t have such a carefully considered look, but because
of what preceded it, there is an aura of liberation around its more liberal use
of color. When scribbling in your Return
of the Jedi coloring book, you really could use every Crayola in the box:
candy apple red for the Emperor’s guards and purple for his dignitaries,
cerulean blue for Bib Fortuna’s fingerless gloves and sky for Max Rebo, mustard
yellow for Jabba’s slimy skin, every shade of green in the box for Endor. As
beautiful as Star Wars and The Empire Strikes Back look, Return of
the Jedi almost makes them seem fussy in retrospect.
10. Toyetic
The expanded palette of Return
of the Jedi really got to shine when Kenner unrolled its latest crop of
action figures in 1983. Not since the quartet of cantina creatures released in
late 1978 were Star Wars toys so
vivid, and the finer attention to details and accessories was a leap over what
came before. Gone were the cheap vinyl capes and color schemes that didn’t
match the figures’ screen counterparts (what were they thinking with Boba
Fett?). In were cloth capes, accurate paint jobs, and body shapes of all sizes.
You could really get your fist around the Gamorrean Guard, Rancor Keeper, Max
Rebo, and Droopy McCool. There was no cheating when recreating Bib Fortuna’s
draping appendages. Figures such as Leia in her Boushh and Endor uniforms and
Lando in his Skiff Guard disguise had removable helmets. And for sheer number, Star Wars’ 20 different figures and
Empire’s 30 were no match for Jedi’s vast variety of 46 even if some of the
choices are bizarre (we get Prune Face but no Mon Mothma?). As for playsets, the
Ewok Village certainly wasn’t as cool as the Death Star, but its construction
was of infinitely higher quality than the Death Star’s cardboard walls and
flimsy structure. The Imperial Shuttle wasn’t as cool as Empire’s AT-AT either, but it was bigger, and if one thing defines Return of the Jedi, it’s its bigness:
bigger cast of characters, bigger characters (Jabba!), bigger line up of dizzy
action sequences, bigger visual and audio palette, and bigger choice of toys
than any Star Wars movie before it. While
bigness for the sake of bigness is among cinema’s suckiest trends, Return of the Jedi mostly uses that
bigness to its advantage, distracting its audience enough that we can walk out
of the theater as the sucky Ewoks sing the sucky “Yub Nub” and still say, “You
know…that didn’t suck.”
Return of the Jedi was released 35 years ago today.
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| Click to enlarge to Jabba size. |
