The Good, the Bad and the Totally Unnecessary

Rating: 8/10 (23 June 2010)

This, the first film ever to use Lucasfilm's now pervasive THX sound technology, is both a seasoned movie and a fresh one, not only as the one 1997 Special Edition that I did not see theatrically and recently saw (!) but also as the initial film. It ends the chronicles of the pivotal human characters in the series, mainly Skywalker, Han Solo, Princess Leia and Darth Vader. It brings back other characters who seem either more or less than human, including Obi-Wan Kenobi, Yoda, Chewbacca, and the darling robots C-3PO and R2-D2. I wonder how fascinating it would've been for Chewy, 3PO and R2 to have arcs the way the humans did. After all, humans seem to be the minority in this galaxy: In this sixth and consummate episode in the Star Wars saga, we meet various inimitable characters, including the implacable Jabba the Hutt, who is like a goiter that was possessed with a life of its own and grew and took control as an evil leader of other strange beasts; the adorable, fuzzy Ewoks, the mammalian aborigines of the forest moon of Endor; a terrifying desert monster made of sand and teeth, and obnoxious little rodent creatures that hasten across the corners of the frame. And there is an admiral for the Alliance who's like a sapient dinosaur who began a career as a general and statesman. These are the most intriguing characters, to me, anyway, which is never more apparent to me in the original trilogy than in Jedi, with its overtly trite soap opera passages between Han, Luke and Leia that resemble General Hospital more than anything else.
Regardless, one thing this film and its two predecessors never do is blow much time on establishing first acquaintances. Unlike countless visual effects and monster movies, where new creatures are introduced with elaborate entrance moments, each of these films immerses its alien creatures into the heart of the action right away. That's possibly why the film has such visual ebullience. Jabba's throne room, for instance, is peopled with countless oddball creatures, some of them just half-gleaned in the periphery of frame. The camera in this massive soap opera coasts nonchalantly past organisms that would supply the highlight for other movies.
There's a whirlwind chase through a forest, aboard airborne motorcycles. After many of the bad guys have run into trees and gotten pulverized, you find yourself wondering why they couldn't have just flown above the treetops, but never mind, it wouldn't have been as much fun that way. You could probably guess that my favorite Star Wars film is Empire based on what I name as my favorite sequence, where Jabba and the bounty hunters take our heroes into the desert on his hover-barge to be fed to that terrifying sand and teeth monster, because I find great inherent tension in any scene where the characters are hovering above a depression in desert sand inhabited by this creature, in whose belly "you will find a new definition of pain and suffering as you are slowly digested over a thousand years." The director is Richard Marquand, whose previous film was the wonderful dramatic thriller Eye of the Needle which, aside from mainly being a great character-driven performance piece, evinced his deft hand for suspense.
Now that I've discussed the initial film, I will close by discussing the Special Edition, the turning of a 134-minute movie into a 135-minute movie by means of a solid minute of garbage. I'm speaking mainly of two features that likely aren't news to anyone reading, the first being the awful dance sequence in Jabba's throne room early on. I cannot comprehend why one would wedge in a set piece that drags the pace and provides brainless shots of aliens doing modern pop dances. Maybe I'm a purist, but a film that was an unheard-of spectacle fresh to the technological vanguard in 1983 should not delude itself with modern-day trivialities. The second objectionable annex is the ridiculous Hayden Christensen superimposition in place of the original elder Anakin Skywalker's spirit. Why in hell would Luke see a vision of his father that he never knew? Other than that Lucas wanted to merge the external chronology of a series of films spanning several decades, it has no other purpose but to annoy me personally. My own little opinion of Lucas' career and what he's done to and for the film industry could be boiled down to this: Just because you opened the door for the next generation of filmmakers doesn't mean you have to hinge your career on opening more doors, because some or most or all of those doors will be Pandora's boxes.