Post by nobody on Apr 7, 2006 9:05:45 GMT -5
you have to read this, weather you like return of the jedi or not, its hilarious! it is long, but entirely worth it!
(and NO, i did not write this.)
50 Reasons Why "Jedi" Sucks
By Dan Vebber and Dana Gould
From The Unauthorized Star Wars Compendium
On its own, Return of the Jedi has a lot of problems. But compared with Star Wars and The Empire Strikes Back, it's just plain bad. Search your feelings -- you know it to be true. Like most of you out there, we love Star Wars more than words can say and will always respect and thank George Lucas for providing a generation of moviegoers with the most significant mythos of the last twenty-five years.
But also, like most of you out there, whenever we watch the trilogy, the awed reverence with which we watch Wars and Empire is replaced during Jedi by laughing, moaning, and shouted insults that make MST3K look tame by comparison. Fifteen years after its release, it's become sadly evident that Jedi hasn't aged well at all, while Wars and Empire increasingly gain acceptance as cinema classics. (We could just as easily have made a list of one hundred reasons Star Wars and The Empire Strikes Back are two of the greatest films ever made, but where's the fun in that?)
It would be easy to put the blame for Jedi's failure squarely on the shoulders of its director, the late Richard Marquand. But while few would argue that Marquand was the greatest choice to inherit the franchise, the fact remains that it was executive producer George Lucas who hired him, who told him how to handle the material, and who always had the final say. So we'll let Marquand rest in peace; chances are he did the best he could.
What Lucas was thinking is another story. Whether Jedi's faults are a result of his sincere artistic vision or of something more sinister (read: "marketable") may never truly be known. But by comparing the genesis of each of the three films, we can make a pretty good educated guess. When Star Wars was conceived, no one had any idea how much money it would eventually pull in. Empire was still a risk, as successful sequels were rare at that point. When it came time to do Jedi, however, the machinery was fully in place to sell it to the hilt. Lucas knew he could make far more money from merchandise than from theater grosses, so it's likely that the question "How easily will this translate into a Kenner toy?" figured more prominently in many of his Jedi decisions than it did in those that formed the first two Star Wars films. (And honestly, who can blame him? If we had the chance to build a ranch estate and media empire as vast as those owned by Lucas, we'd sell out in less time than it takes to shut one of those pressure doors on the Death Star.)
There are plenty of fervent fans who argue that by the mere fact of its being part of the trilogy, Jedi should be above criticism. We'd ask those people whose initial response to this list is one of anger to apply the fifty points below to their next Jedi viewing and join us in hoping that Jedi was a freak occurrence and not the beginning of a downward trend that will continue into the new films.
1. EWOKS, EWOKS, EWOKS: One of the miracles of the Star Wars trilogy is that Lucas's bizarre and ever present fascination with little people didn't hurt the first two films. The Jawas were cool. But George had to push his luck. The Ewoks are not cool. Period. In circles of die-hard Star Wars fans, to say you hate the Ewoks is like saying you enjoy breathing air. The Ewoks are the primary example of many of the points on this list: their unapologetic cuddliness is uncharacteristic and unwelcome; they look fake; they engage in constant physical comedy; their teddy bear design is wholly uninteresting; they live in boring surroundings; several of the film's dumbest scenes revolve around them; they were originally supposed to have been Wookies; and they sing that damn song at the end (well, at least until the Special Edition). But aside from what we see on-screen, the Ewoks are miserable little creatures for a completely different reason: they are the single clearest example of Lucas's willingness to compromise the integrity of his trilogy in favor of merchandising dollars. How intensely were the Ewoks marketed? Consider this: Ewok is a household word, despite the fact that it's never once spoken in the film.
2. THE TONE IS INCONSISTENT: The Rebellion is in ruins, Darth Vader is Luke's father, and Han is frozen. Why Lucas decided to smother these ambitious plot elements under a load of feel-good clichés and textbook plot structure is anyone's guess (it's our theory that he was infected with the same mania that caused Spielberg to make Hook eight years later). Jedi never has any idea of what it's trying to be. Throughout, the mood and pacing is herky-jerked back and forth between dramatic and lighthearted. The scenes with Vader look and feel like they're taking place in a different film from those with our heroes, and no amount of special effects or nostalgia for Wars and Empire can make the pieces fit together. Lacking any consistent driving force (pun intended), Jedi is impossible to take seriously and has little to none of the mythic, transporting feel of its predecessors. We're always aware we're watching a big-budget movie.
3. THE LOOK IS ALL WRONG: After the second film, did the Empire celebrate its trouncing of the Rebellion by going through the galaxy with a big bottle of Windex? Everything in Jedi looks clean and polished, from the ships to the costumes to the backgrounds. One of the triumphs of the first two films was the fact that it was next to impossible to imagine they were filmed right here on Earth. In contrast, Jedi's sets look like sets. We can picture cameras, plywood, and the key grip eating a sandwich just out of the frame. Marquand never seems to know where to put the camera and is constrained by the space his scenes inhabit instead of inspired by it. In the end, it's surprising that Jedi doesn't have any cardboard tombstones falling over or a brief appearance by Vampira as the ghoul's wife.
4. IT'S JUST A BUNCH OF MUPPETS!: Admittedly, Wars had its share of fake-looking aliens in the Mos Eisley cantina scene, but many of them were genuinely innovative at the time (Hammerhead is still impressive) and none of them crossed the not-so-thin line between costume and (shudder) Muppet. Even Yoda in Empire was constructed, filmed, and voiced well enough that we never thought to look for the hand up his rear. Don't get us wrong -- we love Muppets, just not in the Star Wars universe. And Jedi's Gamorrean guards (only slightly less realistic than a Tor Johnson Halloween mask), Salacious Crumb (it's good to see the Great Gonzo is still getting work) and Max Rebo (the blue piano-playing elephant with the oft-visible wire controlling his trunk) are proof that you can take the Henson studio out of Sesame Street but you can't take Sesame Street out of the Henson studio. Will the Criterion Edition laser disc include the deleted footage of Statler and Waldorf cracking wise from the balcony?
5. PAINFUL LACK OF INNOVATION: When it comes to scavenging, Lucas could teach even the Jawas a thing or two. Jedi borrows from Wars on levels ranging from conceptual to minute. There's another opening scene with a Star Destroyer (though this time it isn't even permitted to finish its awesome crawl across the top of the screen). There's another Imperial stronghold to infiltrate and another energy beam to turn off. And of course, there's another Death Star to blow up for the film's climax (though at least the Emperor had enough brains to plug up that pesky exhaust port). Most of the creatures and droids seen on Tatooine in Wars make background appearances in Jabba's court -- even Greedo's alive and well! (Okay, maybe it's a different Rodian. They all look the same to us). Finally, little thought seems to have been given to developing or maturing any of the main characters in a realistic manner. Han and Threepio suffer most, coming across as catch-phrase-spouting caricatures of their previous selves.
6. WITTY BANTER: Note to writer Lawrence Kasdan: If you must fill your script with witty banter, at least try to make it, well, witty. With one or two exceptions, the humor in Wars and Empire was subtle, based around throwaway lines and the personality quirks of well-written characters. Jedi's overly contrived "humor" too often seems inspired by the setup-to-punch line wordplay found in a typical episode of Three's Company. In what is probably the film's single most painful moment, Solo requests Threepio to do a number of chores. After continually tapping him on the shoulder and preventing him from leaving to complete his duties, Solo quips, "Hurry up, will ya? I haven't got all day." Har-dee-har-har. Based on witticisms like that, it's amazing that Luke never rebuked the Emperor by stating "Up your nose with a rubber hose."
7. PHYSICAL COMEDY: This is a galactic rebellion, for heaven's sake! Yet an Ewok clocks himself with his own slingshot. Threepio's legs point skyward after he falls off the skiff into the sand. Countless adorable Muppets zanily cover their eyes or flip-duck off their perches when faced with tense situations. Worst of all, there are two solid instances where burps are used for cheap laughs. Burps! And where are the fart jokes? Well, maybe in the next film. Jedi is as good a parody of the trilogy as one could hope for; there was really no need for Mel Brooks to make Spaceballs.
8. UNINTERESTING LOCALES: Wars and Empire took us to locales that many of us have never been to in real life, namely a vast desert, a run-down spaceport, an enormous space battle station, a planet of ice and snow, a dense, slithering swamp, and a floating cloud city. Jedi just rehashes what we've already seen (though Jedi's Tatooine looks significantly less exotic than it did in Wars, having been filmed in California instead of Tunisia), adding only one new biome: the woods (oh, so that's what trees look like). If this pattern continues, expect the next Star Wars film to be set on the mysterious planet of sidewalks and suburban ranch homes.
9. THE FOREST BATTLE ON ENDOR: If we wanted to see improbable jungle shenanigans, we'd have rented Battle for the Planet of the Apes. The myriad traps and offensive weapons constructed by the Ewoks (apparently over the course of one night) work with such predictable precision against the Imperials that the "battle" is little more than scene after predictable scene of sticks and stones taking out high-tech weaponry and forest-trained stormtroopers. Jedi may be a fantasy film, but the Ewoks' victory still flies in the face of all reason, logic, and precedent. It's a cute little war in which dozens of human stormtroopers are beaten to death and we're treated to only one dead Ewok. Happily, audiences have always responded to the stupidity of this imbalance: in screening after screening, the Ewok's groaning demise is typically met with more cheers and applause than the destruction of the Death Star.
10. SOLO: In Empire, Threepio states that the carbonite would keep Solo safe, provided he survived the freezing process. Safe, yes, but Threepio said nothing about the side effects. Namely, that people in carbon-freeze gain twenty pounds and take on the demeanor of Ward Cleaver on Quaaludes. Wars and Empire established Solo as a braggart, pirate, and all-around scoundrel. In Jedi, he's just a good-hearted, slack-jawed simp whose comments and actions are almost exclusively played for laughs. In not a single scene does Solo have the same acerbic edge he possessed in the previous films. Harrison Ford does nothing to help the situation (perhaps to his credit), acting with a boredom rarely paralleled as he kills time waiting for another Indiana Jones installment.
11. MUSIC: The soundtrack to Wars is an unquestioned classic. Empire's soundtrack gave us the trilogy's best piece of music: "The Imperial March." What does Jedi have to offer? Some playful Peter and the Wolf-esque Ewok tunes and Jabba's foam-and-latex band. The song "Lapti Nek' was translated into English for an MTV video, and we learned that "Lapti Nek" actually means "workin' out." That whole Flashdance craze was certainly popular back in 1983, but now it's just embarrassing. Jabba's band is a pale imitation of Wars' cantina musicians. The Muppets look fake, and the music they play is truly wretched. (Yet one of the scenes added to the Special Edition Jedi is another song by the band!) Even more insipid, though, is the Ewoks' celebratory "Yub-yub" number at the end (now cut from the Special Edition), which sounds suspiciously as if it's sung not by Ewoks but by humans. The theme to the Alien Nation TV show sounded more authentic.
12. THREEPIO: Threepio was bearable in Wars because he and Artoo played an integral role in the unfolding of the plot. He got on our nerves in Empire, but we could at least sympathize with the human characters, who were more or less stuck with him and expressed their irritation. In Jedi, Threepio's along by choice, and everyone just loves chuckling at the way he screws everything up. They decide to bring him along to Endor for no good reason, and we're all forced to endure another barrage of predictable outbursts highlighting the shiny droid's cowardice, ego, and annoying verbosity. Shut him up or shut him down!
13. OBI-WAN'S APPEARANCE TO LUKE: In case you missed the first two films, Obi-Wan Kenobi is supposed to be dead. In Wars and Empire, he made himself known to Luke through an occasional voice in the head or in a floating vision. In Jedi, all of Obi-Wan's street credibility as a wizened spiritual guide is thrown out the window when he appears on Dagobah and shuffles around like Fred G. Sanford in a coat of glow paint. Rather than floating in one place, he fades in twenty feet away and walks up to Luke, eventually resting his non-corporeal butt on a rock. The ensuing two-way conversation scrambles to tie up too many loose ends at once, made worse by the fact that the character saying it all shouldn't even be there on such a literal level. And unlike his similarly flawed Dagobah appearance in Empire, Obi-Wan never fades back into oblivion once his message is delivered in Jedi. For all we know, he and Luke could have spent hours hanging out and gossiping like housewives.
14. LUKE: We like Mark Hamill, really. But though he was perfectly cast as the wet-behind-the-ears student in the first two films, he simply lacks the dignity to pull off a believable Jedi Knight. To top things off, he has Aunt Beru's haircut from the first film. We forget, was Jedi released before or after the advent of the Supercuts salon chain?
15. SURPRISE! THEY'RE BROTHER AND SISTER: After Jedi came out, Lucas would routinely go on record stating that in his mind, Star Wars was always first and foremost a story about a brother and a sister. Does anybody really buy this? Wars and Empire both had sexually charged scenes that play significantly creepier when watched with the knowledge that Luke and Leia are siblings. It seems unlikely that Lucas would have included those scenes if he knew that one day people would be seeing them from such a different perspective. What seems likely, however, is that when Jedi came around, Lucas was grasping at straws, searching desperately for a plot revelation to equal Empire's classic father/son moment. Oh well -- even if Lucas is telling the truth (Yoda did, after all, say in Empire that there was "another"), the issue could have been handled in a less clumsy manner. Having Luke and Leia learn about their relationship through means other than spur-of-the-moment (albeit Force-guided) guesses would have been a start.
16. UNFORGIVABLE DIALOGUE: Threepio approaching Jabba's palace: "I have a bad feeling about this"; Han Solo, when confronted by Ewoks: "I have a bad feeling about this"; Leia, after releasing Solo from carbon freeze: "I gotta get you outta here"; Leia, after being freed from Jabba's chains: "We gotta get outta here"; Leia, after she and an Ewok are ambushed on Endor: "Let's get outta here." With dialogue like this, it seems Lucas finally put that "million monkeys at a million typewriters" theory to the test.
17. HORRIBLE EXPOSITION: "Artoo, look! It's Captain Solo -- and he's still in carbonite!" Lines like this are for those people who somehow missed the first two movies. Threepio is the main offender throughout, even going so far as to offer a long, Ewokese summary of the trilogy's plot thus far (with sound effects, no less). Of course, Lucas would probably say that scene was to show "the entrancing magic of storytelling." Call us cynical, but entrancing magic makes us want to puke.
18. JABBA THE MUPPET: Er -- Hutt. Jabba isn't all that scary. It seems Lucas became so enamored of his technology that he forgot humans are far more ominous than any shop-built alien life-form could ever hope to be. Remember Grand Moff Tarkin? Now there was a creepy villain. We're so busy trying to figure out where all the puppeteers were hiding beneath Jabba's frame that we're never able to accept him as a living, breathing character. And no matter how you cut it, his eyelids still look fake. If only they hadn't lost the phone number of that fat Irish guy who originally played him in that deleted Wars scene.
19. STUPID COINCIDENCES: "We have been without an interpreter since our master got angry with our last protocol droid and disintegrated him." Pan over to said droid being pulled apart in a machine, to allow for a startled reaction shot by Threepio. Numerous scenes like this further damage Jedi's ability to convince us this stuff is really happening. Jabba and his minions sit silently behind the Let's Make a Deal curtain, and the fact that the escape skiff just happens to have two magnetic retrieval devices to pluck the fallen droids out of the sand are further examples of this problem. None of these scenes needed to center around such ridiculous leaps in logic; more often than not they're simply indicative of lazy screenwriting or are inserted for excessive rim-shot-ready moments.
20. BOBA FETT'S DEATH: It's inexcusable that such an imposing figure as Boba Fett -- the one bounty hunter good enough to capture Solo -- flies clumsily to his death in the Sarlacc pit while screaming like Shemp from the Three Stooges. Any Star Wars geek worth his weight in trading cards will tell you that Boba Fett is the trilogy's most underused character. His brief but badass appearance in Empire had us all anxiously awaiting the next film, assuming his role would be greatly expanded by the events surrounding what we then thought would be an incredible escape by Han. Not only does Fett have nothing to do in Jedi, but in the ultimate indignity, he's killed off without ceremony or honor for no better reason than another damn burp joke. According to the novels and comics, Fett survived. But that's not what's implied in the film itself, and it doesn't make the scene any less shameful.
21. TERRIBLE, TERRIBLE POSTPRODUCTION LOOPING: In about half of Jedi's scenes, little attempt is made to match the dialogue with the characters' lip movements -- it's almost like watching a Mothra flick. If Lucas were smart, he'd blame this on the film's being dubbed from its original language. You know -- the one they spoke a long time ago in a galaxy far, far away.
22. SUBPAR SPECIAL EFFECTS: It's strange that the film that gave us sci-fi's most intricate and well-choreographed space battle to date also gave us so many effects that look just plain silly. The rancor aside (see below), consider Han's light-streaming release from the carbonite, the seemingly Magic Markered shadow under Jabba's sail barge, and the explosion of the shield generator on Endor (in which Han and his team, about twenty feet from the bunker, aren't affected in the slightest by an explosion that, from our viewpoint, engulfs several square miles of forest).
23. THE RANCOR EFFECTS: In quite probably the worst use of a blue screen in the history of big-budget film, the rancor looks so awful it deserves its own separate mention. Planning this sequence, the ILM team seems to have been inspired by old episodes of Lidsville, as the admittedly well-designed puppet appears at all times either flat or two-dimensional or surrounded by an unearthly glow. This is one effect we won't mind seeing cleaned up.
24. LEIA AND HAN'S RELATIONSHIP: It's A Galaxy Far, Far Away 90210! The subtle, repressed passion of Empire is simplified to high school relationship levels in Jedi. They kiss, they say "I love you," Han throws a hissy fit and gets jealous of Luke. The couple play off each other in such obvious ways that we're reminded of the Screenwriting 101 rule of "show, don't tell." Han and Leia never look or act like two adults in love -- and no amount of gushy language can cover up that fact.
25. CARRIE FISHER'S "ACTING": Han: "Who are you?" Leia: "Someone who loves you." When Carrie Fisher isn't staring vacantly into space, she's emoting to degrees previously seen only in Mexican soap operas. At least today she's cool enough to admit that she was zoned out on coke the entire time.
(and NO, i did not write this.)
50 Reasons Why "Jedi" Sucks
By Dan Vebber and Dana Gould
From The Unauthorized Star Wars Compendium
On its own, Return of the Jedi has a lot of problems. But compared with Star Wars and The Empire Strikes Back, it's just plain bad. Search your feelings -- you know it to be true. Like most of you out there, we love Star Wars more than words can say and will always respect and thank George Lucas for providing a generation of moviegoers with the most significant mythos of the last twenty-five years.
But also, like most of you out there, whenever we watch the trilogy, the awed reverence with which we watch Wars and Empire is replaced during Jedi by laughing, moaning, and shouted insults that make MST3K look tame by comparison. Fifteen years after its release, it's become sadly evident that Jedi hasn't aged well at all, while Wars and Empire increasingly gain acceptance as cinema classics. (We could just as easily have made a list of one hundred reasons Star Wars and The Empire Strikes Back are two of the greatest films ever made, but where's the fun in that?)
It would be easy to put the blame for Jedi's failure squarely on the shoulders of its director, the late Richard Marquand. But while few would argue that Marquand was the greatest choice to inherit the franchise, the fact remains that it was executive producer George Lucas who hired him, who told him how to handle the material, and who always had the final say. So we'll let Marquand rest in peace; chances are he did the best he could.
What Lucas was thinking is another story. Whether Jedi's faults are a result of his sincere artistic vision or of something more sinister (read: "marketable") may never truly be known. But by comparing the genesis of each of the three films, we can make a pretty good educated guess. When Star Wars was conceived, no one had any idea how much money it would eventually pull in. Empire was still a risk, as successful sequels were rare at that point. When it came time to do Jedi, however, the machinery was fully in place to sell it to the hilt. Lucas knew he could make far more money from merchandise than from theater grosses, so it's likely that the question "How easily will this translate into a Kenner toy?" figured more prominently in many of his Jedi decisions than it did in those that formed the first two Star Wars films. (And honestly, who can blame him? If we had the chance to build a ranch estate and media empire as vast as those owned by Lucas, we'd sell out in less time than it takes to shut one of those pressure doors on the Death Star.)
There are plenty of fervent fans who argue that by the mere fact of its being part of the trilogy, Jedi should be above criticism. We'd ask those people whose initial response to this list is one of anger to apply the fifty points below to their next Jedi viewing and join us in hoping that Jedi was a freak occurrence and not the beginning of a downward trend that will continue into the new films.
1. EWOKS, EWOKS, EWOKS: One of the miracles of the Star Wars trilogy is that Lucas's bizarre and ever present fascination with little people didn't hurt the first two films. The Jawas were cool. But George had to push his luck. The Ewoks are not cool. Period. In circles of die-hard Star Wars fans, to say you hate the Ewoks is like saying you enjoy breathing air. The Ewoks are the primary example of many of the points on this list: their unapologetic cuddliness is uncharacteristic and unwelcome; they look fake; they engage in constant physical comedy; their teddy bear design is wholly uninteresting; they live in boring surroundings; several of the film's dumbest scenes revolve around them; they were originally supposed to have been Wookies; and they sing that damn song at the end (well, at least until the Special Edition). But aside from what we see on-screen, the Ewoks are miserable little creatures for a completely different reason: they are the single clearest example of Lucas's willingness to compromise the integrity of his trilogy in favor of merchandising dollars. How intensely were the Ewoks marketed? Consider this: Ewok is a household word, despite the fact that it's never once spoken in the film.
2. THE TONE IS INCONSISTENT: The Rebellion is in ruins, Darth Vader is Luke's father, and Han is frozen. Why Lucas decided to smother these ambitious plot elements under a load of feel-good clichés and textbook plot structure is anyone's guess (it's our theory that he was infected with the same mania that caused Spielberg to make Hook eight years later). Jedi never has any idea of what it's trying to be. Throughout, the mood and pacing is herky-jerked back and forth between dramatic and lighthearted. The scenes with Vader look and feel like they're taking place in a different film from those with our heroes, and no amount of special effects or nostalgia for Wars and Empire can make the pieces fit together. Lacking any consistent driving force (pun intended), Jedi is impossible to take seriously and has little to none of the mythic, transporting feel of its predecessors. We're always aware we're watching a big-budget movie.
3. THE LOOK IS ALL WRONG: After the second film, did the Empire celebrate its trouncing of the Rebellion by going through the galaxy with a big bottle of Windex? Everything in Jedi looks clean and polished, from the ships to the costumes to the backgrounds. One of the triumphs of the first two films was the fact that it was next to impossible to imagine they were filmed right here on Earth. In contrast, Jedi's sets look like sets. We can picture cameras, plywood, and the key grip eating a sandwich just out of the frame. Marquand never seems to know where to put the camera and is constrained by the space his scenes inhabit instead of inspired by it. In the end, it's surprising that Jedi doesn't have any cardboard tombstones falling over or a brief appearance by Vampira as the ghoul's wife.
4. IT'S JUST A BUNCH OF MUPPETS!: Admittedly, Wars had its share of fake-looking aliens in the Mos Eisley cantina scene, but many of them were genuinely innovative at the time (Hammerhead is still impressive) and none of them crossed the not-so-thin line between costume and (shudder) Muppet. Even Yoda in Empire was constructed, filmed, and voiced well enough that we never thought to look for the hand up his rear. Don't get us wrong -- we love Muppets, just not in the Star Wars universe. And Jedi's Gamorrean guards (only slightly less realistic than a Tor Johnson Halloween mask), Salacious Crumb (it's good to see the Great Gonzo is still getting work) and Max Rebo (the blue piano-playing elephant with the oft-visible wire controlling his trunk) are proof that you can take the Henson studio out of Sesame Street but you can't take Sesame Street out of the Henson studio. Will the Criterion Edition laser disc include the deleted footage of Statler and Waldorf cracking wise from the balcony?
5. PAINFUL LACK OF INNOVATION: When it comes to scavenging, Lucas could teach even the Jawas a thing or two. Jedi borrows from Wars on levels ranging from conceptual to minute. There's another opening scene with a Star Destroyer (though this time it isn't even permitted to finish its awesome crawl across the top of the screen). There's another Imperial stronghold to infiltrate and another energy beam to turn off. And of course, there's another Death Star to blow up for the film's climax (though at least the Emperor had enough brains to plug up that pesky exhaust port). Most of the creatures and droids seen on Tatooine in Wars make background appearances in Jabba's court -- even Greedo's alive and well! (Okay, maybe it's a different Rodian. They all look the same to us). Finally, little thought seems to have been given to developing or maturing any of the main characters in a realistic manner. Han and Threepio suffer most, coming across as catch-phrase-spouting caricatures of their previous selves.
6. WITTY BANTER: Note to writer Lawrence Kasdan: If you must fill your script with witty banter, at least try to make it, well, witty. With one or two exceptions, the humor in Wars and Empire was subtle, based around throwaway lines and the personality quirks of well-written characters. Jedi's overly contrived "humor" too often seems inspired by the setup-to-punch line wordplay found in a typical episode of Three's Company. In what is probably the film's single most painful moment, Solo requests Threepio to do a number of chores. After continually tapping him on the shoulder and preventing him from leaving to complete his duties, Solo quips, "Hurry up, will ya? I haven't got all day." Har-dee-har-har. Based on witticisms like that, it's amazing that Luke never rebuked the Emperor by stating "Up your nose with a rubber hose."
7. PHYSICAL COMEDY: This is a galactic rebellion, for heaven's sake! Yet an Ewok clocks himself with his own slingshot. Threepio's legs point skyward after he falls off the skiff into the sand. Countless adorable Muppets zanily cover their eyes or flip-duck off their perches when faced with tense situations. Worst of all, there are two solid instances where burps are used for cheap laughs. Burps! And where are the fart jokes? Well, maybe in the next film. Jedi is as good a parody of the trilogy as one could hope for; there was really no need for Mel Brooks to make Spaceballs.
8. UNINTERESTING LOCALES: Wars and Empire took us to locales that many of us have never been to in real life, namely a vast desert, a run-down spaceport, an enormous space battle station, a planet of ice and snow, a dense, slithering swamp, and a floating cloud city. Jedi just rehashes what we've already seen (though Jedi's Tatooine looks significantly less exotic than it did in Wars, having been filmed in California instead of Tunisia), adding only one new biome: the woods (oh, so that's what trees look like). If this pattern continues, expect the next Star Wars film to be set on the mysterious planet of sidewalks and suburban ranch homes.
9. THE FOREST BATTLE ON ENDOR: If we wanted to see improbable jungle shenanigans, we'd have rented Battle for the Planet of the Apes. The myriad traps and offensive weapons constructed by the Ewoks (apparently over the course of one night) work with such predictable precision against the Imperials that the "battle" is little more than scene after predictable scene of sticks and stones taking out high-tech weaponry and forest-trained stormtroopers. Jedi may be a fantasy film, but the Ewoks' victory still flies in the face of all reason, logic, and precedent. It's a cute little war in which dozens of human stormtroopers are beaten to death and we're treated to only one dead Ewok. Happily, audiences have always responded to the stupidity of this imbalance: in screening after screening, the Ewok's groaning demise is typically met with more cheers and applause than the destruction of the Death Star.
10. SOLO: In Empire, Threepio states that the carbonite would keep Solo safe, provided he survived the freezing process. Safe, yes, but Threepio said nothing about the side effects. Namely, that people in carbon-freeze gain twenty pounds and take on the demeanor of Ward Cleaver on Quaaludes. Wars and Empire established Solo as a braggart, pirate, and all-around scoundrel. In Jedi, he's just a good-hearted, slack-jawed simp whose comments and actions are almost exclusively played for laughs. In not a single scene does Solo have the same acerbic edge he possessed in the previous films. Harrison Ford does nothing to help the situation (perhaps to his credit), acting with a boredom rarely paralleled as he kills time waiting for another Indiana Jones installment.
11. MUSIC: The soundtrack to Wars is an unquestioned classic. Empire's soundtrack gave us the trilogy's best piece of music: "The Imperial March." What does Jedi have to offer? Some playful Peter and the Wolf-esque Ewok tunes and Jabba's foam-and-latex band. The song "Lapti Nek' was translated into English for an MTV video, and we learned that "Lapti Nek" actually means "workin' out." That whole Flashdance craze was certainly popular back in 1983, but now it's just embarrassing. Jabba's band is a pale imitation of Wars' cantina musicians. The Muppets look fake, and the music they play is truly wretched. (Yet one of the scenes added to the Special Edition Jedi is another song by the band!) Even more insipid, though, is the Ewoks' celebratory "Yub-yub" number at the end (now cut from the Special Edition), which sounds suspiciously as if it's sung not by Ewoks but by humans. The theme to the Alien Nation TV show sounded more authentic.
12. THREEPIO: Threepio was bearable in Wars because he and Artoo played an integral role in the unfolding of the plot. He got on our nerves in Empire, but we could at least sympathize with the human characters, who were more or less stuck with him and expressed their irritation. In Jedi, Threepio's along by choice, and everyone just loves chuckling at the way he screws everything up. They decide to bring him along to Endor for no good reason, and we're all forced to endure another barrage of predictable outbursts highlighting the shiny droid's cowardice, ego, and annoying verbosity. Shut him up or shut him down!
13. OBI-WAN'S APPEARANCE TO LUKE: In case you missed the first two films, Obi-Wan Kenobi is supposed to be dead. In Wars and Empire, he made himself known to Luke through an occasional voice in the head or in a floating vision. In Jedi, all of Obi-Wan's street credibility as a wizened spiritual guide is thrown out the window when he appears on Dagobah and shuffles around like Fred G. Sanford in a coat of glow paint. Rather than floating in one place, he fades in twenty feet away and walks up to Luke, eventually resting his non-corporeal butt on a rock. The ensuing two-way conversation scrambles to tie up too many loose ends at once, made worse by the fact that the character saying it all shouldn't even be there on such a literal level. And unlike his similarly flawed Dagobah appearance in Empire, Obi-Wan never fades back into oblivion once his message is delivered in Jedi. For all we know, he and Luke could have spent hours hanging out and gossiping like housewives.
14. LUKE: We like Mark Hamill, really. But though he was perfectly cast as the wet-behind-the-ears student in the first two films, he simply lacks the dignity to pull off a believable Jedi Knight. To top things off, he has Aunt Beru's haircut from the first film. We forget, was Jedi released before or after the advent of the Supercuts salon chain?
15. SURPRISE! THEY'RE BROTHER AND SISTER: After Jedi came out, Lucas would routinely go on record stating that in his mind, Star Wars was always first and foremost a story about a brother and a sister. Does anybody really buy this? Wars and Empire both had sexually charged scenes that play significantly creepier when watched with the knowledge that Luke and Leia are siblings. It seems unlikely that Lucas would have included those scenes if he knew that one day people would be seeing them from such a different perspective. What seems likely, however, is that when Jedi came around, Lucas was grasping at straws, searching desperately for a plot revelation to equal Empire's classic father/son moment. Oh well -- even if Lucas is telling the truth (Yoda did, after all, say in Empire that there was "another"), the issue could have been handled in a less clumsy manner. Having Luke and Leia learn about their relationship through means other than spur-of-the-moment (albeit Force-guided) guesses would have been a start.
16. UNFORGIVABLE DIALOGUE: Threepio approaching Jabba's palace: "I have a bad feeling about this"; Han Solo, when confronted by Ewoks: "I have a bad feeling about this"; Leia, after releasing Solo from carbon freeze: "I gotta get you outta here"; Leia, after being freed from Jabba's chains: "We gotta get outta here"; Leia, after she and an Ewok are ambushed on Endor: "Let's get outta here." With dialogue like this, it seems Lucas finally put that "million monkeys at a million typewriters" theory to the test.
17. HORRIBLE EXPOSITION: "Artoo, look! It's Captain Solo -- and he's still in carbonite!" Lines like this are for those people who somehow missed the first two movies. Threepio is the main offender throughout, even going so far as to offer a long, Ewokese summary of the trilogy's plot thus far (with sound effects, no less). Of course, Lucas would probably say that scene was to show "the entrancing magic of storytelling." Call us cynical, but entrancing magic makes us want to puke.
18. JABBA THE MUPPET: Er -- Hutt. Jabba isn't all that scary. It seems Lucas became so enamored of his technology that he forgot humans are far more ominous than any shop-built alien life-form could ever hope to be. Remember Grand Moff Tarkin? Now there was a creepy villain. We're so busy trying to figure out where all the puppeteers were hiding beneath Jabba's frame that we're never able to accept him as a living, breathing character. And no matter how you cut it, his eyelids still look fake. If only they hadn't lost the phone number of that fat Irish guy who originally played him in that deleted Wars scene.
19. STUPID COINCIDENCES: "We have been without an interpreter since our master got angry with our last protocol droid and disintegrated him." Pan over to said droid being pulled apart in a machine, to allow for a startled reaction shot by Threepio. Numerous scenes like this further damage Jedi's ability to convince us this stuff is really happening. Jabba and his minions sit silently behind the Let's Make a Deal curtain, and the fact that the escape skiff just happens to have two magnetic retrieval devices to pluck the fallen droids out of the sand are further examples of this problem. None of these scenes needed to center around such ridiculous leaps in logic; more often than not they're simply indicative of lazy screenwriting or are inserted for excessive rim-shot-ready moments.
20. BOBA FETT'S DEATH: It's inexcusable that such an imposing figure as Boba Fett -- the one bounty hunter good enough to capture Solo -- flies clumsily to his death in the Sarlacc pit while screaming like Shemp from the Three Stooges. Any Star Wars geek worth his weight in trading cards will tell you that Boba Fett is the trilogy's most underused character. His brief but badass appearance in Empire had us all anxiously awaiting the next film, assuming his role would be greatly expanded by the events surrounding what we then thought would be an incredible escape by Han. Not only does Fett have nothing to do in Jedi, but in the ultimate indignity, he's killed off without ceremony or honor for no better reason than another damn burp joke. According to the novels and comics, Fett survived. But that's not what's implied in the film itself, and it doesn't make the scene any less shameful.
21. TERRIBLE, TERRIBLE POSTPRODUCTION LOOPING: In about half of Jedi's scenes, little attempt is made to match the dialogue with the characters' lip movements -- it's almost like watching a Mothra flick. If Lucas were smart, he'd blame this on the film's being dubbed from its original language. You know -- the one they spoke a long time ago in a galaxy far, far away.
22. SUBPAR SPECIAL EFFECTS: It's strange that the film that gave us sci-fi's most intricate and well-choreographed space battle to date also gave us so many effects that look just plain silly. The rancor aside (see below), consider Han's light-streaming release from the carbonite, the seemingly Magic Markered shadow under Jabba's sail barge, and the explosion of the shield generator on Endor (in which Han and his team, about twenty feet from the bunker, aren't affected in the slightest by an explosion that, from our viewpoint, engulfs several square miles of forest).
23. THE RANCOR EFFECTS: In quite probably the worst use of a blue screen in the history of big-budget film, the rancor looks so awful it deserves its own separate mention. Planning this sequence, the ILM team seems to have been inspired by old episodes of Lidsville, as the admittedly well-designed puppet appears at all times either flat or two-dimensional or surrounded by an unearthly glow. This is one effect we won't mind seeing cleaned up.
24. LEIA AND HAN'S RELATIONSHIP: It's A Galaxy Far, Far Away 90210! The subtle, repressed passion of Empire is simplified to high school relationship levels in Jedi. They kiss, they say "I love you," Han throws a hissy fit and gets jealous of Luke. The couple play off each other in such obvious ways that we're reminded of the Screenwriting 101 rule of "show, don't tell." Han and Leia never look or act like two adults in love -- and no amount of gushy language can cover up that fact.
25. CARRIE FISHER'S "ACTING": Han: "Who are you?" Leia: "Someone who loves you." When Carrie Fisher isn't staring vacantly into space, she's emoting to degrees previously seen only in Mexican soap operas. At least today she's cool enough to admit that she was zoned out on coke the entire time.