I love ROTJ and Luke’s story in it, but his “temptation to the dark side” is one of it’s most poorly handled elements. Maybe on paper his actions at Jabba’s palace seem like he might be slipping to the dark side, but they ultimately play the sequence as completely heroic. His “temptation” is never explicitly a struggle for him until the throne room, and by then he’s been the hero for so long the idea that he might turn has strains credibility.
I disagree. I feel like Luke’s first appearance at Jabba’s palace shows very explicitly that Luke is being tempted by the dark side, and it helps set up his struggle in the throne room. The sail barge scene was a heroic moment, but Luke’s earlier actions are explicitly dark.
I mean I’m happy for you that it plays that way, but to me it never did. The fact that none of this is mentioned at all, especially in Luke’s discussions with Yoda and Ben really drive home how poorly it was handled for me. It’s essentially ambiguous, which doesn’t accomplish anything.
TROS is a much worse film, but at least they show moments where the darkness explicitly gets the better of Rey. It’s one of the few ways that film works much better than ROTJ.
When do they show those moments? Whenever Rey in TROS does something dark, it’s because she lost control. She didn’t mean to blow up that transport, and she didn’t mean to stab Kylo in the chest. When Luke in ROTJ does something dark, he does it on purpose. He force choked those guards on purpose, and he almost killed his father on purpose. You need to show that the protagonist is consciously turning to the darkness before you show them rejecting the darkness, and I feel like that’s something ROTJ does very well.
I mean, first of all that’s just your interpretation that Luke is consciously turning to the darkness. For me, I see a movie where throughout the runtime Luke says he won’t kill Vader because he sees the good in him, and that he will not turn to the dark side. It’s only while facing Vader that he loses his cool and control. He’s not consciously turning to the dark, in fact he’s doing the exact opposite. The whole point of the scene is that he’s not trying to kill his father on purpose.
Rey fares better because we see multiple moments where she loses her cool and slips towards that dark power, which is a more believable path - like Luke, we already saw Rey reject the offer to join the dark side. We know that they both know consciously that the dark side is the bad side. But TROS and ROTJ are supposed to be about both protagonists slipping towards the dark despite their best intentions. In that regard, ROTJ does not fare as nearly as well.
I will give you this, Rey would have been better served if they had given her a black or near black outfit. But that hardly makes or breaks this.