Admit it. You loved the Ewoks back in 1983.

Rating: 7/10 (10 October 2010)

You know what the dirty little secret of Return of the Jedi is? The Ewoks don't suck.
Wrapping up the trilogy, Luke Skywalker (Mark Hamill) and company head back to Tatooine to rescue Han Solo (Harrison Ford) from the clutches of space gangster Jabba the Hutt (Big Ass Puppet). After succeeding, they have to deal with the threat of the Empire building a new Death Star. That leads to a three-way final battle where Han and Princess Leia (Carrie Fisher) have to blow up the force field generator protecting the under-construction Death Star, Lando Calrissian (Billy Dee Williams) leads the attack to blow it up and Luke engages both Darth Vader (David Prowse, James Earl Jones) and the Emperor (Ian McDiarmid) in moral combat for Luke's life and Vader's soul.
Return is a great conclusion to the Star Wars trilogy, but it's not much more than that. Star Wars had the best story and the best character moments. Empire didn't expand much on them but did take them in a new direction and give them a different tone. Return doesn't do much more than wrap things up and taken on its own is probably the least complete Star Wars film of all, though it's still better written and acted than any of the prequels.
Return gets criticized more than the first two films and I think we all know the reason why. Ewoks. The fact that the Star Wars saga ended with pint-sized alien teddy bears playing a major role in defeating the fearsome Empire drives some folks up the wall. To you people I sayget over it. I liked the Ewoks when the movie first came out. YOU liked the Ewoks when the movie first came out. There was an Ewok Celebration song playing on the radio back in the Summer of 1983 and I remember it winning the "Best Song" contest for several weeks in a row on a local station. Widespread Ewok-hate is something that only developed years later, as the Star Wars audience aged, got a bit jaded from watching the films so many times and had to blame something for the fact that Return has some serious weaknesses as an individual film.
The fact is the Ewoks really aren't offensive or irritating (See Binks, Jar Jar) and actually fit in with the overall message of the movie. Return is all about how evil can only be defeated by good people working together. Return casts evil as acting on your own for selfish, destructive ends. Good is people joining hand to resist that kind of self-directed power. In that light, the Rebels needing the help of primitive (and cute) aliens to win the day is perfectly in line with Return's story.
I hadn't watch the original trilogy for a long time when I sat down to review them, and it's interesting how I didn't quite remember them exactly the way they are. For instance, Empire and Return do not logically flow from Star Wars. To some extent they go against many elements of the first film and you can see how the story could have legitimately gone in very different directions. I also had forgotten or not appreciated just how much Luke's story comes to dominate Empire and Return. He may be the hero of Star Wars, but many other characters play significant roles and have their own stories that unfold. But just compare Luke to Han and Leia. Over the course of the films, Luke grows from naïve young farm boy to almost otherworldly warrior-poet, and we get to see a lot of the evolution happen in front of us. Han, however, kind of devolves from the hardened, cynical, somewhat puffed up mercenary of the first film to a somewhat goofy, common man shlub who's mostly out of his depth but getting by on bravery and reckless stupidity. Leia is a tremendously strong character in Star Wars who is reduced to just Han's love interest in Empire, before getting to don a gold bikini and do a little bit more in Return. The truth is that Han and Leia don't have much in the way of stories in the later two films outside their romance, and that's largely sprung on the audience full grown.
Star Wars is genuinely one of the best films in history. Empire isn't on that level as a film, but is a bold twist on a wildly popular story. Return wraps everything up in a satisfactory way, but is a pretty thin story on its own. If you really want to understand why the Star Wars prequels sucked so very, very hard, you only have to recognize that they are all much more like Return than they are like Empire or Star Wars.