ROTJ is the best Star Wars film... discuss! — Page 3

I have to say that I agree in essence with everything Bingowings just wrote, yet still personally enjoy ROTJ.  Not as much as the other two, but I still enjoy it.  What I like is: the score (not my favorite, but still strong), the sets/models/environments, strong performances from... some of the cast, and it closes the story started by the other films in a somewhat satisfying way.  But yeah, the script is thin, the Lucas-cutesy-humor is off-putting, and certain cast members just phoned in their performances.  But it is still undeniably a Star Wars film, something that I can't really honestly say about the prequels.

Bingowings said:

It's insanely cheap story telling.

Everything else is just by the numbers (just like the PT).

These two sentence (while I understand they are being your opinion) make no sense at all. Care to elaborate on them? And please if you could go a little deeper than the usual insignificant Ewok stuff.

Also I didn't get the reply on the "ROTJ indicating the SE" thing. I would be happy if you could reply on that.

Ryan McAvoy said:

I've been reading alot of the fanedit forum's chat about proposed changes to ROTJ, dissatisfaction with the film and about the prequels being better.

I guess I'm in the minority but by the slimest of margins I rate ROTJ as superior to ESB and the notion that ROTJ is inferior to the visual abortions that are the theatrical cuts of the PT seems like mass insanity.

I can't think of any moments in ESB or ANH that have me grinning like a kid again as some of the sequences in ROTJ. I know on paper ESB is technicaly a better film but the tingles down my spine, wide eyed joy and warm fuzzy feeling elicited by ROTJ tell me different.

So I wanna hear from you ROTJ haters as to why you do hate it and I also wanna hear from those like me who love it. Importantly I wanna hear why you love it because honestly I'm not 100% sure why I love it so much!

You state that you know that ESB is technically a better film but you are not 100% sure why you love ROTJ so much but I think you pretty much explain why you favor ROTJ over ESB - it's called Nostalgia.

Personally I consider it to be a piss poor continuation and sequel to ESB but I can't say that I hate it, I just don't watch it. In my mind it just wasn't the sequel that a film like ESB demanded. In my mind we never got the true continuation, just a wrap up party in the woods that treated all the great narrative, set up and plotting of ESB as something of a chore Lucas now had to deal with. I still to this day cannot understand how some found ROTJ to be a satisfying sequel and at the same time attacked Phantom Menace.

Bingowings said:

You got the bit where I said it was my opinion right?

I believe you are a hipster and are following some sort of a trend. ;)

Bingowings said:

If you want to talk soap the whole Leia, Han, Luke triangle is pure soap.

I've actually seen daytime soap operas with much better drama and acting than what is seen in the Leia/Luke conversation in the Ewok village. :)

Deja vu... similar thread here: http://originaltrilogy.com/forum/topic.cfm/Since-when-did-ROTJ-become-less-highly-regarded-than-even-Episodes-II-or-III/topic/14909/

Thx for the link msycamore:

Deja vu... similar thread here: http://originaltrilogy.com/forum/topic.cfm/Since-when-did-ROTJ-become-less-highly-regarded-than-even-Episodes-II-or-III/topic/14909/

Will check it out.

I guess by "technicaly a better film" I mean that ESB runs smooth from start to finish, flawless at every point. Where as ROTJ has highs and some lows. But the highs are so very, very high. i.e.

Sarlac pit / Speeder chase / Greatest space battle ever commited to celuloid / Throne room sequence

ESB has no momments to touch the exhileration of the first 3 of these sequences. Vader and Luke in cloud city is on a par with the end of ROTJ though.

Plus ROTJ introduces us to great characters like Jabba and The Emperor who are easily as good as ESB new characters (Lando and Boba).

Baronlando said:

There was a line cut out where they get into the Death Star and Wedge sees the big reactor thing and says the x wing torpedoes won't even hurt it. But the Falcon and its tricked out gunnery can. In essence it would not have worked if the unconventional Falcon hadn't been there. If that line had been left in it might have alleviated the idea that the same mistake had been made twice. (And made good use of the "character" of the Falcon as well and adding weight to Han's insistence on it being used. 

Interesting...  fascinating how much a minor line of dialogue like that can alter the final results, the power of editing. Whose brilliant idea was it to junk that?

Ryan McAvoy said:

I guess by "technicaly a better film" I mean that ESB runs smooth from start to finish, flawless at every point. Where as ROTJ has highs and some lows. But the highs are so very, very high. i.e. 

Sarlac pit / Speeder chase / Greatest space battle ever commited to celuloid / Throne room sequence

ESB has no momments to touch the exhileration of the first 3 of these sequences. Vader and Luke in cloud city is on a par with the end of ROTJ though.

I see, you find the setpieces more impressive than in ESB. IMO both the opening batttle on Hoth and the chase through the asteroid field beat all three of those examples, not only in technical achievements but more importantly in drama. That's also why I think the greatest space battle ever committed to celuloid is still Star Wars '77.

Ryan McAvoy said:

Plus ROTJ introduces us to great characters like Jabba and The Emperor who are easily as good as ESB new characters (Lando and Boba).

Jabba is a fantastic creation and I liked Ian's Emperor but I would much have preferred a less Disney-esque cackling sorcerer, after the original mysterious and calculating Emperor we got a glimpse of in ESB I expected something else but Ian is great.

Ryan, you seem to be looking at specific set-pices from each film rather than the films as a whole. The speeder-bike chase and sarlac pit are very exciting scenes, but they lack the drama and tension of the previous films trench run and asteroid chase because the tone of the film is so different.

I'm not tryin' to change your mind or anything though. Just somethin' I noticed in your posts and thought ya might find this food for thought.

And msycamore, I have to say (well... I don't have to, but I'm gonna say) that I love the whole "Emperor as cackling sorcerer" thing! As someone else recently said, the juxtaposition of the sword and sorcery of the throne room and the giant space battle going on outside is fantastic! And Ian is amazing!!1!!

msycamore said:

I still to this day cannot understand how some found ROTJ to be a satisfying sequel and at the same time attacked Phantom Menace.

If it helps...

I don't find ROTJ to be entirely satisfying, so maybe I don't love it enough to be qualified to answer this, but...

ROTJ dealt with characters that I already knew and loved.  Maybe they weren't at their best in this film, but they were present and I cared about what happened to them.  TPM dealt with characters that I didn't care to know (even though some of them were purportedly the same people as in the OT, the resemblance was superficial at best).  Story-wise, ROTJ took the existing storyline that I loved and brought it to a close.  TPM tried to create a new storyline that I never wished to see before, and having seen it, confirmed that I was right.  On that scale, part of the love of ROTJ is sentimental bleed-over from the other films, I admit it.

But there were also good performances in ROTJ.  Hamill and McDiarmid, for example.  There wasn't a single good performance in TPM.  Not one.  Not only that, but the "bad" performances in ROTJ eclipsed the best performances from TPM.  At least Ford and Fisher managed to make eye contact with one another when talking, if not much else.

The environments and such, models, sets, etc, in ROTJ, weren't as well integrated, or honestly even necessary in many cases, into the film as they were in the other films.  But they were never the sterile, boring dreck from TPM.  I'd rather have indulgent than dull.  And sometimes over-the-top just plain worked: case in point, the Emperor's arrival with an obvious Riefenstahl rip-off just plain worked.  The space battle, yes, not as gripping as the asteroid chase in ESB, but just compare that to the dreadful pod race--I rest my case.

The score for ROTJ is pretty solid too (again, I don't like it quite as well, but I like it).  I certainly owe part of my love of Star Wars to John Williams.  Again, TPM showed that John Williams could produce uninteresting dreck as well.

That said, there are bits of ROTJ that plumb the depths that we saw later with TPM.  The humor is certainly one thing: the droid torture, the burps, the slapstick, the tongue-in-cheek but dumb classic adventure tropes (Chewie does a Tarzan yell?  Lord).  I can make no excuses here.

ROTJ was a disappointment in many ways.  But there were some good things about it and I enjoy watching it from time to time.  I thought TPM was pretty much a trainwreck of everything bad that could possibly be put into a film--that is, until I saw AOTC and ROTS and saw it could get even worse.  I can certainly say that there are enough differences between ROTJ and TPM that I can like one and despise the other.  But ultimately it's all subjective.

Re "Emperor as cackling sorcerer". I agree this is why I love him as a character. Star Wars was never meant to be subtle, Lucas set out to play with our ingrained cultural tropes (Deviating from this is partly why the PT struggled).  For example...

Han's look isn't inspired by the cowboy look, it is the cowboy look! You could wear Hans costume in an authentic western and you wouldn't bat an eye.

Leia is dressed as a medieval princess. Same costume as an english princess from a forties swashbuckler.

Stormtroopers are wearing medieval Knight armour sprayed white. Spray it silver and helmetless stormtroopers would make fine extras in any arthurian movie.

Obi-Wan is dressed as a scruffy Ronin. That costume would be fine in any Jidaigeki film that Toho studios made.

Vader is the black knight of legend in armour and cloak with the addition of a helmet based on German WWII stormtroopers.

The Empire look and act like Nazis.

The dogfighting is straight out of WWII films like 663 squadron and of course the trench run is the dambusters.

These are all genres and styles that evoke instant reactions and instant understanding from us all. So like I say Star Wars works BECAUSE it's totally unsubtle!

Maybe why the Podracing was the only bit of TPM that absolutely nailed the fun of starwars.  It's flying race cars simple and easy to understand.

Ryan McAvoy said:

 

Plus ROTJ introduces us to great characters like Jabba and The Emperor who are easily as good as ESB new characters (Lando and Boba).

Disagree with you there... the best new character in ESB is YODA, the best of the bunch.

CatBus said:

If it helps...

I completely agree with you on TPM, it was a giant turd but like you described it tried to tell a new story, it felt pretty much like a crappy reboot to me. But it's also a movie you can easily just disregard if you didn't like it. ROTJ on the other hand is technically supposed to be ESB part 2 and the drop in quality and shift in tone is huge IMO. The disinterest of the people behind the camera is up there on the screen. ESB is certainly not an easy act to follow up or top, they had basically captured lightning in a bottle twice with SW and ESB, and you cannot expect a miracle every time but you can at least expect that they treat the great story material they had with respect for this final act. IMO it was impossible to screw it up but in some way they managed to do it.

"They took the existing storyline that we loved and brought it to a close." Yes, but in what way did they do it? To me all the great buildup in ESB was basically for nothing, they tied up all the loose ends in a very very hamfisted way. I personally don't care if the film contains the characters we knew and loved when they have ceased to be dynamic and interesting, on the contrary it hurts me, much much more than anything Mcgregor, Portman and Neeson did in that new prequel movie.

In retrospect it's easy to see that there never was any intention to bring the same level of effort into a SW sequel again after the tough shoot that was ESB. Everything that followed was bound to be a huge success no matter the quality, everything hinged on ESB. And it certainly didn't help that 4 planned films now was reduced to 1, so much lost potential...

Bingowings said:

imperialscum said:

Bingowings said:

It's insanely cheap story telling.

Everything else is just by the numbers (just like the PT).

These two sentence (while I understand they are being your opinion) make no sense at all. Care to elaborate on them? And please if you could go a little deeper than the usual insignificant Ewok stuff.

Also I didn't get the reply on the "ROTJ indicating the SE" thing. I would be happy if you could reply on that.

I only mentioned the Ewoks in the sense that they point to Jar-Jar and don't make sense in their current form (I like the idea of them but not it's execution).

If they were only obeying their God on the day where did all the traps come from?

They must have been fighting the Empire for months but we see no evidence of it and why be spooked by Threepio?

A gold man in a flying chair is not more startling than white plastic men in flying chairs and giant metal chicken things or a new moon growing in the sky.

By cheap storying telling I mean ticking off and clearing every possible hanging thread.

That never happens in real life and when it happens all in the last chapter it's clunky, unsophisticated and rubbish.

By by the numbers I mean almost everyone other than Mark and Ian just winging it.

Waiting for the paycheck.

In the first two films the actors played characters in Jedi most of them are just guest stars in a spoof playing themselves.

The thing looks cheap and nasty too for the reasons I've already mentioned.

It's propelled mostly on the momentum of nostalgia for the earlier films which told a story with people in.

About the Threepio thing, it could be that the Ewoks had a specific mythology involving the coming of a golden being that was preceded by the evil forces of darkness in their mechanical creatures, wearing the false armor of white.

Granted that explanation doesn't spring easily to the mind, but if Earth was invaded by aliens tomorrow, I bet that some Christians would have an eye out for the coming of their savior along with the forces of evil.

Bingowings said:

By cheap storying telling I mean ticking off and clearing every possible hanging thread.

That never happens in real life and when it happens all in the last chapter it's clunky, unsophisticated and rubbish.

Now when you should provide some actual examples you seem to fail to do so. Instead of going on about the useless Ewok stuff half of your post, you should be providing examples of this. At this moment, I might remind you that SW and ESB have those kind of unrealistic scenarios too.

Bingowings said:

By by the numbers I mean almost everyone other than Mark and Ian just winging it.

Well Luke, Vader and Emperor character development is the main storyline of this film. Other stuff (such as Han and Leia) is secondary. And Ewoks (which seems to be your personal focus of the film) are irrelevant. You are actually contradicting yourself. You stated that Luke/Emperor stuff is good and on the other hand you say the film story is bad. How can it be bad if you stated that its core is good?

About Han and Liea. Well yes Ford wanted to avoid the film before they even started it and he didn't do his best. But more importantly, Lucas' completely exhausted Han and Leia character potential in ESB. So it was little left for ROTJ. All he could go for was this "love triangle" stuff.

minor note: Could you please improve your usage of paragraphs. It is hard for people to understand the main points and reply to your post. No offence. :)

Hey, it's me. said:

Are you all that opinionated and arrogant? 

I can't speak for the others, but I certainly am. ;)

I didn't respond to your posts because I didn't disagree with anything you said, and I didn't feel anything you said required further elaboration from me.  So basically you're just going to have to be wronger and/or vaguer if you're fishing for responses.  Sorry, those are the breaks.

Contentious or incomplete, but contentious is admittedly more fun.  Welcome aboard!