Finished rewatching Harmy's ROTJ and its reaffirmed my belief that it's the best of the three. 2 hours of blissfully action packed entertainment. A few immediate thoughts:
On the subject of the poor standing ROTJ is held in, with regard to it's FX. I think ROTJ is hard done by on the FX front in both the GOUT DVD and the SE:
- All the FX shots in the OT look terrible on the GOUT and since ROTJ has more of them and much more advanced FX it perhaps looks worse than ANH and ESB if you view that disc.
- Out of the 3 OT films, correct if I'm wrong, but ROTJ is the only one that had no "Improvements" in the SE (When I say "Improvements", I mean FX shots that were redone purely in a (Misguided) effort to make them look better). All the changes in ROTJ are things like 'Jedi Rocks' or adding a beak to the Sarlacc that fundamentally change the movie. In ANH and ESB things like the battle of Yavin and Bespin were heavily redone. Or they had extra dynamic shots of the Falcon added to give it a bit more movement.
Even in Harmy's superb restoration, it gets a tough deal since things like the original Jabba Palace and Sarlacc pit are in SD, since those shots don't exist in anything like HD. However the matte paintings look amazing (For the most part) in Harmy's restoration and not odd like they look on the Blu-Ray.
^ Shots like these take my breath away every time.
On the subject of ROTJ's pacing: I found after the thrilling Jabba's palace opening (At 36mins in) I was actually breathless and almost exhausted from the dazzling action. Then we get about 10 minutes of respite to gather our senses while Luke visits Yoda for the last time and Palpatine arrives on the DS2. Having caught our breaths we are plunged straight into the 'assault on Endor' plot. This is the kind of perfect judging of pace that I was talking about with ROTJ. However if I was trying to be ultra-critical, I'd say the pace slackens during the night spent in the Ewok village.
Another great thing is how cool Luke is in ROTJ. Before that we'd only seen him as an inexperienced boy. But as soon as Luke strolls into Jabba's palace flicks his hood down and tells Jabba to free his friends or die, we know it isn't a threat, he means it. This is a wiser, more confident and fearless Luke than we've see before and I only wish we'd had another movie to see more of him.
On the subject of Ewoks (That I never had a problem with), they are setup as dangerous creatures from the get go. We first see one sticking a spear in Leia's face, then fearlessly attacking a Stormtrooper, followed by them capturing our heroes with a decapitated horse, then they try to cook them alive in a ceremony presided over by a Voodoo witch doctor and a chief adorned in the bones of his fallen enemies. I never found them overly cute and it seems odd to me that others do, given the way they are portrayed.
A final thing I noticed was that Harrison and Carrie's performances aren't that bad (Not Oscar bait but still okay). They don't often reach the emotional heights/depth that we see in ESB but when they have to, they deliver.
Btw Thanks Harmy for your wonderful work on this film "Yub nub!"
^ Probably my favourite moment in any film.