I had time to think a bit about TROS and how it compares to ROTJ.
I’ve seen TROS only once so far, but I’m already ranking it higher than ROTJ. Btw, I also rank TFA higher than ROTJ. ROTJ feels similar to TLJ in that only the story-line between the central protagonist and antagonist is interesting. Leia, Han and Lando all feel like shells of their former selves, just like Fin, Poe and Rose are not real characters in TLJ, but robots to fill the story. Which is ironic, because TLJ was desperate to be the most inclusive Star Wars film, while TROS just focused on getting the spirit of Star Wars right and managed to be much more inclusive this way by accident. Every characters is a living and breathing human being, much more so than in both TLJ and ROTJ.
I also think that TROS takes the themes and controlling idea of ROTJ and plays with them in an interesting way. To me, ROTJ was about choosing family over power. That was the core choice that both Luke and Vader had to make. Yes, it was also about saving your friends for Luke, but that always felt like a secondary goal to me. The climax of ROTJ was all about saving your family for Luke. In TROS the choice is further muddled as Rey has to choose between her true powerful family and her friends, the surrogate family she developed along her journey. We also get to explore some of Reys darker needs, as behind her motivation to have a family lies a desire to be powerful and strong, to the point of wanting to dominate others. We see this when she stops for a moment to contemplate the offer Palpatine is making. It’s a great dilemma that really hits at the core of her character. It’s not really a family that she wants, as she already has that with the Resistance and her friends, but a hidden need to be powerful, which is probably the result of a lifetime of abuse she had to endure on Jakku.
It’s everything good storytelling is about. It’s also better than what ROTJ did, because there was never really a question about Luke’s choice. Luke never wanted to be powerful and dominate others, so the Emperor never had leverage over him. His rage when he defeated Vader was just something that came up at that moment, but was never really something that he had to struggle with during his arc. Luke always was a good guy. Rey on the other hand wants to be good, but she also has a really strong and selfish need to belong to a family, which I interpreted as a desire to be powerful. This desire to dominate came out in all her light sabre fights of the ST. You already can see it in TFA when she displays a predatory body language while defeating Kylo. It’s a weakness that can be exploited by a manipulator like Palpatine. And it’s this weakness that really makes her choice in TROS more interesting than the one Luke had to make in ROTJ. Yeah, Rey really was physically much more stronger than Luke, but it’s the psychological realm where she is much more vulnerable than Luke. Luke always was committed to the good side and his self-assured aura displayed in ROTJ is never matched by Rey, even at the end of TROS on Tatooine. Luke never really had to suffer the same kind of horrors during his childhood as he had a sheltered and protective upbringing. Luke had love during his childhood. Rey on the other hand had to survive on her own and naturally there is much more rage inside her, which results in a desire to be self-reliant, powerful and dominant, which is perfectly expressed by the writing and her acting.
So yeah, I think TROS is way better than ROTJ. Not only is it better at capturing the spirit of Star Wars, but it also has better writing and more interesting characters.
I disagree. Everything in TROS feels rushed with zero time to breath. There’s a ridiculous amount of exposition in the first half of the film, and the writing is very clunky, where the spy literally says to the audience: “I’m the spy!”, as if it wasn’t clear from what happens in the scene. The movie is full of plot holes, and a lot of it feels contrived from Palpatine’s sudden return to Ben’s sudden turn from Supreme Leader to a good guy faster than Anakin turning from a Jedi to a Sith. Almost nothing is explained:
- How is Palpatine alive?
- Where did he get such an enormous fleet, and personel?
- Why did he wait over three decades to reveal himself?
- Where did that huge rebel fleet come from, and why does Lando succeed instantly in convincing the entire galaxy to join the fight, when Leia could not after SKB had been destroyed? In the words of Han Solo: convenient…
- Why does Force lighting almost instantly kill Palpatine, when it didn’t in ROTS, and why does Palpatine not stop using it, if it kills him? He could easily jump away from Rey, as he’s done in the past. It’s not as if he was cornered like in ROTS.
- etc, etc.