Uhhgg!

Rating: 4/10 (6 September 2008)

Spoilers: I remember looking so forward to this as a kid after loving the first two movies. They had previews for new characters on the back of the action figures boxes I'd get at Toys-R-Us and I'd eagerly wonder what the blacked out Ewok characters would look like. Must have really been something special! I even remember how they switched the name around as "Revenge of the Jedi." This was just going to be THE movie of the summer, and waiting in line to get in while hearing the thunderous noise of the climactic battle as the audience of the screening just wrapping up applauded enthusiastically, I was just SO excited. When I saw it even as a kid I knew it was somewhat of a disappointment, watching it now as an adult...Uhgg! Now I see how Lucas went so wrong with the abomination of the prequels, all the threads started to unravel with this Turkey. (Though Return of the Jedi is still much superior to those aforementioned prequels which had a plot harder to follow than Dune.) First of all are notoriously unbearable Ewoks, even as a kid I HATED them. No adult could possibly find anything watchable about the whole Ewok sequence on Endor. The Emperor is ridiculously "comic book" evil, tyrants usually have charisma and are more like gangsters than lunatics. The choice to add another family revelation by making Leah Luke's sister is stupid and ruins the relationship from the first two movies. The original Cantina scene with the various aliens was creative, here Lucas has gone overboard with a new bizarre rubber masked actor or puppet cropping up every minute. In some respects this whole thing is nothing more than a commercial to sell action figures to eight year olds. And the Climax: Another Deathstar? Lucas, you already did that before, but considering the fecal ideas he spewed out in the prequels, perhaps a rehashing of the end of the first movie was the best we could hope for. After all, to sum up the cinematic ideas going through Lucas' head during this period: Howard the Duck. Don't even get me started on the vandalism Lucas did to the Original Trilogy with the CGI additions to the new copys of the Star Wars movies for sale. The original 1977 print is a piece of American History, to alter the imagery that swept the nation that summer is akin to someone painting over the Mona Lisa.
Still Return of the Jedi it did have it's moments. The Jabba the Hut character is ubiquitously reknown and to this day everyone knows what your talking about if you refer to any gluttonous tard as "Jabba the Hut." The chase scene through the Redwoods is also quite memorable although the excitement came to a quick end with the ridiculously infantile Ewok scenes beginning moments later. The final showdown between Luke and Vader was also a glimpse of what this movie could have been had the same people who worked on The Empire Strikes Back had control over this thing. On the whole, a disappointing, childish end to the first two movies.