Star Wars: Return of the Jedi-The Spence Final Cut by Spence
First off, a big hand must be given to musiced921 for supplying me with this edit. I was actually looking for the one without the Ewoks in it, but obviously it didn’t satisfy Spence at the time, hence why he re-did it, and this is the edit I ended up receiving. Nevertheless, it was an interesting edit, running rather leanly at just one hour and thirty three minutes, it rearranges scenes, creating a more meaningful first scene for Luke that establishes his path.
In the original cut, he kind of acts a bit high and mighty already, almost as if he didn’t need to go to Dagobah and complete his training, but here the crawl and the scene on Dagobah is structured to follow on from Vader’s arrival, and we follow Luke on his journey to Tatoonie, not entirely sure of himself as Yoda says he must confront Vader to be fully realised. It’s a very well woven scene, and gives both Luke and the audience less detachment from what Luke had been up to in between Empire and this.
The idea of placing the Emperor on the Star Destroyer is another great touch. After all, why would the Emperor risk making himself a sitting duck on the Death Star when chances are his plan could go tits up? Being on a Star Destroyer at least gives him the chance to take off as soon as things do.
The restructuring of the battle of Endor rattles along, there is more urgency, you feel this is a costly battle as good men die and Luke feels more entrapped with the walls closing in, his fateful duel with Vader is even accompanied by familiar cues such as duel of the fates!
I’ve seen a few edits that have utilised the ending with Luke burning Anakin’s body as the fireworks rage on, but it’s still powerful imagery to end the original trilogy on. I’d still somewhat like to see the Ewok party as it gives us all a chance to see the group of friends, now very much a family, a chance to be together one last time. Luke can always bury Vader after seeing the ghosts. Maybe the ghosts could have been watching Luke burn Anakin, there’s an idea. Ah well.
And lastly the additional end credits are a hoot…though I do wonder who ‘lordsidi’ is and what he did to warrant an “absolutely no thanks to…” credit. Feels a bit weird to promote the DVD version of this in the credits when all I have of this is the MP4, but ah well…if someone could track the DVD version down, let me know what I’m missing, because it doesn’t tell you anything here.