Bingowings said:
People are different.
There are people on here who love TPM because they are young enough to be nostalgic for it.
The same goes with ROTJ.
But if you brake the film down, look at the art design, the writing the acting, the attention to detail, even the score, ROTJ is the weakest film of the OT and set the scene for almost everything wrong with the PT.
I realize which forum I'm on but while I grew up watching the OT and admiring the movies as much as the next guy, I wasn't big into Star Wars. TPM, however, is what made me a fan. It helped me put the OT in a better context and I could genuinely appreciate it. It could totally be a generation gap but I view the movies as a six part saga, not a trilogy.
As it goes for ROTJ though, that was my favorite of the bunch as a kid. Luke was pretty much a Jedi by this point, he could finally have his showdown with Darth Vader, you had the Emperor running around tearing shit up, lots of action sequences, etc. I guess it's only as you get older that you start seeing the film's shortcomings. As you say, the actors were mostly phoning it in.
But beyond that, it felt like most of the crew had no real passion for the film. Everything felt choreographed in the most negative sense of the term. Even without having the thing memorized, you can kinda start guessing what's coming. "Well, Han and Leia ain't out of the woods yet, we've still got another five or ten minutes before the traditional first act break so something gotta happen that'll... yep, there's Jabba, right on schedule." "There's no way the rebels can blow up the Death Star just yet, we've got another, what, fifteen or twenty minutes to go in the movie so something has to happen to slow them down.... oh, what do you know, the deflector shield will be quite operational when Luke's friends arrive. And I'll bet none of their ships can repel firepower of the Death Star's magnitude." And so on and so forth.
People can say whatever they want about Lawrence Kasdan basically serving as a hired gun who just did what Lucas told him to do but honestly I've never seen much after ESB from that guy that really impressed me. And even Raiders owes more to Speilberg and his vision than it does Kasdan and his writing, as far as I'm concerned. And I have to wonder how much of both of those finished products are really "his" and didn't come from other sources. One wonders how ROTJ might've turned out if a different writer had come onboard.
ROTJ has several bright spots and is worth watching but the saga deserved a stronger finish. Had Lucas and co. taken a year off or something after work finished on Raiders and found a better writer, I suspect ROTJ might've turned out quite differently.