The first trilogy ends with a movie only kids should love.
Last week:None of the special effects are working.
Next week: Jabba goes to the races.
Lucasfilm Ltd.
For kids, the appeal is visceral.
This is ace dialogue for anyone still learning their first language.
Bibs quite a visual: A palefaced henchmen with head-tails swooping round his neck into a vaguely Parisian skinscarf.
Hes one of many background figures who look cooler than anything happening in the foreground.
Buy yourself the Ewok village: A whole city in a treehouse!
Or get a Royal Guard, one of those crimson cape-troopers wielding dangerstaffs behind cool dispositions.
Plotwise, the red Guardsmen dont rescue theirEmperor (Ian McDiarmid), fight anyone, or do anything.
The franchise had made Lucas a very rich man working on his first divorce.
with an eye on Q3 toy sales.
Its excessive visibly 80s but maybe Lucas was just bored.
The second Death Star is a memorable image, resembling the head of a cyclops smiling through busted chompers.
Still: Another Death Star, really?
All the fearsome possibilities of a galaxy, and the sagas final act turns to Xerox.
I know there are viewers grooving onto the, like, philosophical resonance of this first finale.
The oft-discussed good in him!
Meanwhile, anyone hunting allegories will parrot how the Ewoks symbolize the Viet Cong.
You never think for a millisecond that Luke would turn evil, though.
Credit McDiarmid for giving the gothsnake Emperor a seductive purr.
Luke by this point is sexless and undesiring, a politicians notion of Young Heroism.
His scenes with Vader and the Emperor are speechy postulations without feeling or danger.
Way harsh, though, and I had another angle going into this rewatch.
The scenes follow a repetitive structure: Character arrives, talks to Jabba,oo-oo-oo-aaa-aaa-aaaaa, repeat.
The palace shrinks the more you look.
Nobody cared who Luke Skywalker was.
Now, everyone is always paying close attention to the parade of icons.
But that wont hold.
Jabba the Hutt is id unleashed.
There is an active sub-basement designed purely for droid torture, bots exploded or branded screaming.
All crazy violent stuff, and Im a bit torn, really.
Unclear to me whether to read that scene as self-righteous revenge or a dark twisted male fantasy.
And worth pointing out thatReturn of the Jediwould be the firstStar Warstotally stripmined for spare parts by later projects.
And racing speeder bikes through the Endor forest is kinda cool.
But you know whats really cool?
Which is a positively Napoleonic ploy compared to the Emperors big gambit!
Theres a tendency for internet generations to treat all beloved childhood movies as sacred objects.
He would probably prefer to be very far away, someplace safe.
Still, he cant deny: He does love the attention.
Threepio spentEmpiregetting switched off by the good guys and disassembled by the bad guys.
His followers would be passionate, just like the Ewoks, and they would burn nonbelievers alive.
[Next:The Phantom Menace]
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