Recently came across an interview with Gary Kurtz. There’s a specific section from that interview that caught my eye, which I thought I’d share.
Gary Kurtz said:
The one story thread that got totally tossed out the window, which was really pretty important I think, was the one of Vader trying to convince Luke to join him to overthrow the Emperor. That together they had enough power that they could do that, and it wasn’t him saying I want to take over the world and be the evil leader, it was that transition. It was Vader saying, “I’m looking again at what I’ve done and where my life has gone and who I’ve served and, very much in the Samurai tradition, and saying if I can join forces with my son, who is just as strong as I am, that maybe we can make some amends.”
Also found this:
Reconstructing Star Wars: Revenge of the Jedi
Not a perfect reconstruction — Fett’s expanded role, in particular, is iffy — but it hits many of the right thematic notes for me.
SW '77 is a pretty straightforward “black-vs-white” morality tale. Aside from Han, the heroes were perfectly virtuous, the villains umambiguously & unrepentantly evil. But with TESB, a potential game changer was introduced to the mythos with the revelation that Vader was Luke’s father. No longer was he just the ex-student who turned out the bad egg; he was the “good friend” Obi-Wan had waxed wistful for. And while an argument can be made that Vader’s interest in his son began and ended with Luke’s usefulness as a pawn, I got the sense by movie’s end that Vader felt a strong yearning to be a father to his newfound child. So where once was only clear-cut black & white now existed an element of gray. The ideal ROTJ would’ve taken that gray element and expanded upon it, cemented it as an intrinsic attribute of the SW Universe. I find that ideal ROTJ in the links above.
This was an awesome post Duracell. You put my thoughts on ROTJ into words there. It just had so many missed opportunities. And the crazy thing to me is that most people say “Yeah, ewoks suck and Han was written poorly, but the Luke/Vader stuff is golden”. But it really isn’t. There are some really great isolated scenes (Luke rages on Vader, Vader saves Luke) but the writing is really over simplistic and hokey. Luke just blatantly says “There is good in you. Come to the light.” Vader then just says “Noooo, the dark side I must stick to.” It has no complexity. And as much as I love Ian McDiarmid eating up the scenery, I wanted something more like what we saw in the theatrical hologram scene in ESB, someone with a far more understated and subdued presence.
And shopping Maul made a great point about how people forget that the problems with Star Wars didn’t start with the sequel trilogy or even the prequel trilogy. They started all the way back in 1983. We are lucky to have two perfect movies from the whole saga. So when folks ask if I am a big Star Wars fan, I don’t even say “Nah, just an OT fan”, it’s something more like “I think the first two films are classics”.