- Post
- #1559361
- Topic
- ROTJ: Connecting Act I with the rest of the movie
- Link
- https://originaltrilogy.com/post/id/1559361/action/topic#1559361
- Time
These are minor details since Boba Fett isn’t a match for Luke.
Ehhh… maybe. Mandalorians have always been portrayed as challenging opponents for the Jedi. Even in the very earliest proto-incarnations of Mandalorians, back when they were just “Imperial Shocktroopers”, they were implied to at least be capable of giving the Jedi Knights a run for their money.
Not that Boba Fett is necessarily an actual Mandalorian, in 1983 or any time after (I can’t keep track of Boba Fett’s endless retconned origin stories), but Luke is also barely a Jedi. Maybe Boba Fett can just cheat by using some fancy tech to stun or incapacitate Luke, rather than best him in a fight.
Why is the Alliance letting their top fighters go off to save one man when such a big campaign is being fought? We never find out, and it’s odd.
One possible excuse is that Act 1 actually happened like months before Act 2 and 3. Not a great solution, but I guess it explains why the Rebels were freed up to go rescue Han.
But even worse is the fact that Luke inexplicably never returned to Yoda. He was definitely supposed to return to Dagobah to complete his training with Yoda originally. The Fourth Draft of Empire Strikes Back ends with Luke and Leia on board the medical frigate, staring out the window into space, and Luke says “I want to go with them, but I have a promise to keep. They’ll find Han. I know they will…”. This implies Luke intends to return to Yoda to finish his training. But in the actual film, Luke goes off with Lando to Tatooine, and apparently never returns to Dagobah to complete his training until ROTJ. So it’s never explained how Luke is suddenly a bad-ass Jedi with a stylish new outfit when he shows up at Jabba’s Palace. (And what were they doing on Tatooine for 3 years? I guess maybe it took 3 years for Lando to land a job in Jabba’s palace.)
I think it’s good that they didn’t go with Luke’s ‘promise to keep’ at the end of Empire because that wouldn’t really jive with his portrayed mental state at the time. At the end of Empire Luke was obviously distraught that Obi Wan (and by extension Yoda) had lied to him about his parentage, so it makes sense to me that Luke was focussed on rescuing his friend and concentrating on the present rather than going off to resume training.
Personally I think this should have carried over into RoTJ. I think Jedi’s opening crawl should’ve said something like ‘Luke Skywalker has forsaken his Jedi training and returned to Tatooine…’. This way there’s no disconnect between Empire and Jedi in terms of Luke suddenly being more or less fully trained without having returned. He could still be portrayed as a badass (choking Jabba’s guards and wearing snazzy black threads) but it would make sense because he’d still be disillusioned by the events in Empire. Better yet Luke’s actions in the finale - giving himself to the Empire and redeeming Vader in the process - could be a more organic consequential scenario rather than the (ethical suspect IMO) notion of him suddenly deciding that redeeming Anakin is the most important idea on the table.