First off, I must say it’s amusing and interesting how much mileage we’ve gotten out of the words “orbital bombardment” from a single line! But I think we’ve come to a mutual understanding of sorts, we more or less agree:
- Certainly Leigh Brackett, at the least, wrote murderous intent into Darth Vader in the first half of her draft.
- Subsequent drafts show an evolution playing this aspect down.
- By the final script they’ve got it to a point where for many viewers (like me!) they’ve successfully rid the script of any overt murderous motivation…
- But Lucas and Kasdan have perhaps underestimated that many other viewers (like you!) may still take the term “orbital bombardment” to specifically reference a plan of guaranteed eradication of the rebels, including Luke.
- I think we agree that even if we go with the most uncharitable read of this scene, it’s at worst a very minor flaw in a masterpiece of genre cinema.
Works for me!
While thinking about all this, something did occur to me, though:
Channel72 said:
But I guess we just have a difference of opinion in how well they did this. I always thought Vader wanted an orbital bombardment, even before the Internet existed and I had access to earlier drafts. So it seems the earlier, original intentions of the writers have leaked into the final script.
That last sentence there got me thinking: we got on this semi-tangent in the first place due to a not-unreasonable presumption that dialing back Vader’s desire to kill Luke on Hoth in Brackett’s draft must have been done to accommodate the twist that Vader is Luke’s father.
Except now that I think about it, I don’t think we can just take that for granted at all. Here’s what Lucas told Brackett again:
- Deep down Darth Vader is still conflicted with being evil.
- Vader has a personal agenda to “get” Luke that transcends even victory over the rebellion.
The conclusion I came to in my earlier posts in this thread was that Lucas planned Empire/Jedi to basically retell Star Wars as the two-parter he’d envisioned at one point, and for them to cover as much material that he couldn’t fit into the first film as they could, and his desire for that to include “the cyborg father’s heroic death” is what ultimately inspired Lucas to bring the Father back by merging that plot point with “the black knight villain turns against the empire.”
By all accounts at that conference between Lucas and Brackett Vader was not Luke’s father, either because Lucas hadn’t thought of it at all (per fan theory) or it was something Lucas was considering but hadn’t yet pulled the trigger on (claims Lucas). And yet Vader’s character profile above isn’t really any different (though it would’ve been helpful if Lucas was more specific than “get Luke”) and the overall plot is hardly any different, either; and even at that early stage it appears the “go back and do that two-parter” plan was a go.
Basically what I’m saying is that there’s no reason at all this story wasn’t still heading toward Vader’s redemption regardless. Certainly it majorly effects the backstory, but the general sequence of events in ROTJ’s plot don’t have to be overwritten from what we know. You’d only have to make adjustments in motivations, something like Luke’s existence profoundly triggering the remorse Vader still feels for betraying Anakin Skywalker (or whatever Skywalker Sr’s name would’ve ended up being).
This probably occurred to many other people long ago (I’m aware there’s a whole other thread devoted to this specific “what if,” lol), but somehow I’d always taken it for granted that if Vader remained a separate character from Skywalker Sr. then the plot would’ve had to have taken a much different direction, but the more I think about it, the plots for both ESB and ROTJ don’t actually have to change much at all.