From: joshua@lclark.edu (Joshua Rochester)
Newsgroups: rec.arts.sf.starwars
Subject: Re: question + ROTJ FLAME
Date: 25 Aug 92 18:57:43 GMT
Article-I.D.: lclark.1992Aug25.185743.8303
Organization: Lewis & Clark College, Portland OR

In article <5123@blue.cis.pitt.edu.UUCP> seawasp@vm2.cis.pitt.edu (Sea Wasp) writes:
>In article <86928@netnews.upenn.edu> jmv@grip.cis.upenn.edu (Jean-Marc Vezien) writes:
>>Flat characterization, very little suspense (can you believe they're 
>>not going to blow up DS II ?)
>
>	You believed they weren't going to in the FIRST one?
>
>	Heroes win. Bad Guys lose. That's the essence of Space Opera,
>which Star Wars is. The reason TESB didn't follow that is that it was really
>just a bridge between one and another -- rather like The Two Towers in
>Lord of the Rings. It's in the middle that you hit the lows.

I don't thing that I believed that they weren't going to nail the DS in
Star Wars, but that's a lot different from being unworried about the
outcome and feeling the dramatic tension. RotJ had NO dramatic tension
about the elimination of the Death Star II. It didn't even blow up all at
once. Plus, why bother? By the time Lando got in the fatal shot, there
wasn't any Empire left. They could have kept the ghastly thing around as a
paperweight.

>, happy ending, unbelievable sequences
>>(Leia choking Jabbah,
>	
>	Unbelievable? She GAROTTED him. She had desperation, anger, leverage,
>and Jabba had not one thing he could do. he couldn't reach her and no one 
>else was helping him at the time.
>
>	Plus you could even argue that the Force was with her. But even
>without that I didn't find it any more unbelievable than some of the other
>things in the trilogy (Han Solo flying that damn freighter through the
>asteroid field...).

Maybe it isn't 'unbelievable' but Leia killing Bubba has all of the
excitement of Jello wrestling.

>> Emperor's death).
>
>	The Emperor was caught by surprise and you can BET that Vader
>was using everything Empy taught him to keep the Emperor from flying.
>Physically the Emperor was a wimp, and Luke's "feeble skills" were also
>operating to inhibit the Emperor in some small way. 
>
>	And I expect to see Empy back as well; if Ben can harrass people
>from beyond the grave, you can bet the Emperor will too.

Again, what we are talking about here isn't the plot line, but rather the
fact that watching the Emporor of the Known Galaxy and the Most Evil
Person Ever drop down a hole and disappear in a puff of smoke isn't
exactly thrilling. The boring directing (and the Ewoks) killed RotJ.

>>Just look back at TESB or ANH, there's a blatant difference of
>>style, narration and plot development. You fear for the heroes.
>
>	You do? I didn't. Star Wars (I hate this A New Hope BS. That's
>the subtitle. The title is Star Wars) was a standard Space Opera built
>around archetypes you could recognize a lightyear away, and it delivered
>precisely what was expected. After its success, it was made clear that
>it would be a trilogy, so we KNEW we'd see a "dark bridge" second movie,
>and that was what we got. The third movie had to finish off what the
>others started, and did that quite well.

Great. The Plot-LINE is consistant. But "style, narration and plot
DEVELOPMENT" bit dog in RotJ. The story was there. It was just being told
with the sense of drama, and stuttering inconsistency, of a Dan Quayle speech.

It did however have the best space-combat scenes ever.

Josh Rochester
joshua@lclark.edu

"I'll never rule the universe with YOU!" --Bill