How to do ROTJ: Exactly as it was done. Except maybe leave out Leia holding hands with Wicket, because that just shouted "Here's a little cute teddy bear". Great film, no need to make more changes.
And that is why Return feels, to me, out of place in the trilogy (and why I wanted to walk out of the theater in 83). It's a full-on children's film. Star Wars was a serious science fiction\outer space adventure. Return isn't even remotely serious. It's comedy & cute stuffed animal marketing tie-ins.
ROTJ is plenty serious. How anybody can watch all the stuff that goes on with Vader and Luke and the Emperor and say it's not serious I don't know. ROTJ is not a full-on children's film. Like Star Wars, it's a children's film designed to appeal to adults. Or at least to adults who aren't allergic to ewoks. ROTJ is certainly not comedy overall. I don't know where you get that idea from. It had comical elements, but then so did Star Wars. ROTJ is darker than Star Wars. And the cute teddy bears were a savage little bunch of fuckers who were quite happy to eat Han and Luke and Chewie. It was only in the merchandise and the spinoffs that they became totally safe cuddly teddy bears. In ROTJ, the ewoks are red in tooth and claw.
In Star Wars, Luke's aunt & uncle are killed (complete with close up of the burned bodies), his mentor is killed, the princess is tortured & her family killed, and Luke's best friend is killed. Star Wars isn't a children's film. Lucas moved away from the seriousness almost as soon as the franchise got going. Even Empire shows signs of the comedy\cute feel that was fully realized in Return.
In ROTJ, the princess is sexually assaulted (or at least it's implied) and kills her assaulter. Her assaulter even has a huge phallic tail. (And she kills him with a chain -kinky or no?) Luke fights his father and comes close to killing him. Luke's father and mentor die.
The first film was intended as a kids' film, just one that could appeal to adults. Return of the Jedi is the same, except for those people who can't stand ewoks, and those people are certainly not all adults. Empire Strikes Back and ROTJ have plenty of seriousness. I'd say the stuff with Luke on the Death Star (starting with his capture on Endor and continuing on down to Vader's death and the funeral pyre) is some of the most serious stuff in Star Wars.
Btw, Lucas calling Star Wars for kids isn't just a recent thing. He does it back in the 1977 Rolling Stone interview.
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Deckard2 said:ROTJ feels like all of the main actors are winking at the camera and not really taking the movie seriously.
It definitely feels that way to me, and it's not at all surprising. If the story is no longer serious, why would the actors have even bothered with trying to continue playing the characters seriously?
I don't get that at all. There are humorous bits, but there's plenty of that in the first film. Star Wars (the saga, not the film) was never supposed to be deadly serious, and thank god for that. I don't see that ROTJ is any more "winking at the camera" than the other two films. The serious parts of ROTJ are very much serious.
For me - if a science fiction story starts out like this;
...then there's no way it can successfully morph into this:
As a 15-year-old who sat in the theater in 1977 (at least once a week) and was very moved by Star Wars, the series' transition to children's bed time story was a transition I wasn't able to make.
But it didn't morph from that to that. The ewoks in the movie weren't unthreatening plush toys. They were nasty little fuckers with spears and fangs who nearly ate Luke, Han and Chewie.
And Leia's costume in Jabba's palace certainly wasn't something for an exclusively kids' film. Contrast that with how covered up she was in Star wars.
Star Wars always had elements of children's bed time story, from the first film, but it never became purely that, in any of the films.
skyjedi2005 said:He knows kids don't want to see the hero die.
And that is why Return feels, to me, out of place in the trilogy (and why I wanted to walk out of the theater in 83). It's a full-on children's film. Star Wars was a serious science fiction\outer space adventure. Return isn't even remotely serious. It's comedy & cute stuffed animal marketing tie-ins.
In Star Wars, Luke's aunt & uncle are killed (complete with close up of the burned bodies), his mentor is killed, the princess is tortured & her family killed, and Luke's best friend is killed. Star Wars isn't a children's film. Lucas moved away from the seriousness almost as soon as the franchise got going. Even Empire shows signs of the comedy\cute feel that was fully realized in Return.
Show me one younger character of importance who dies in the first film. There's none. Biggs is a minor character. Kenobi dies in the film but Yoda dies in ROTJ. Owen and Beru die but Anakin dies in ROTJ. There's NOTHING like Han dying in the first film. The film had a purely happy ending, just like a kids' story. Whereas ROTJ's ending is more bittersweet, because of the focus on Vader's funeral pyre.