Review: 'Return of the Jedi: A Visual Archive'

Return of the Jedi has its flaws, but you can't say that the final episode of the original Star Wars trilogy doesn't look fab. The creatures! The costumes! The colors! Not to mention the tie-in merchandise. Perhaps of all the Star Wars films, Return of the Jedi best lends itself to one of those visual archive type books filled with photos and pasted-in ephemera. Star Wars is a much better film, but it's a bit too drab. Empire is even better, but its winter-wear costumes aren't as groovy and it's very light in the creature department. What Return of the Jedi lacks in storytelling and acting, it makes up for with squid heads, fish heads, speeder bikes, and golden bikinis. 

So since images are the raison d'être of Return of the Jedi: A Visual Archive, the book is mostly a gas, and since J.D. Rinzler already did the making-of heavy lifting with his definitive book covering Jedi, it's okay that Kelly Knox and Clayton Sandell's text is on the light side. It mostly either illustrates the pictures or explains how some thing introduced in Jedi went on to get recycled in one of those Star Wars TV shows, movies, video games, or books that followed the film's 1983 release. So there are a lot of images culled from stuff like The Clone Wars, The Book of Boba Fett, Revenge of the Sith, The Rise of Skywalker, and the rest, for those who are into that sort of thing. There are entire sections on the made-for-TV Ewok movies and the Ewok cartoon series, even though I doubt anyone is into those things. 

Don't expect any winking tone in the discussions of any of these entertainments; Knox and Sandell are strictly non-critical, and the closest the book ever comes to giving the stink-eye to Star Wars is the occasional quote from Lucas about how he thought certain special effects in the original movie were disappointing and needed to be replaced with some digital crap for the Special Edition. 

But, to reiterate, if you want text, go straight to Rinzler, and his book does have a lot of wonderful images too. But A Visual Archive replicates little of what was in his book and features some super-cool shots of masks, behind-the-scenes work, and production stills that I'd never seen before. There are also those pasted-in concept-art booklets, mock mattes on acetate, and faux polaroids depicting rebel commandos for those who are into that sort of thing. The cover is gorgeous too.