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A pretty common criticism of ROTJ (other than Ewoks) is that the first Act (Jabba’s palace) has no connection to the rest of the film - apart from explaining why Han is back. This breaks an unwritten “rule” of film making, which is that each plot development should be caused by prior events. There’s a famous talk from the South Park creators that expounds on this: a movie should not be written such that Event A happens and then Event B happens. Rather, the movie should be written so that Event A happens, which causes Event B.
Now, this is pretty subjective. But I think everyone would at least agree you don’t want your film to be an arbitrary series of disconnected events (unless you’re going for some experimental sort of filmmaking). You want prior events to cause future events. A New Hope does this perfectly. You can follow a clear causality chain backwards from the last scene to the first scene. The Rebels attack the Death Star because they have the plans, because Leia brought the plans, because Luke rescued Leia, because Luke met Ben Kenobi, because R2 and C3PO escaped to Tatooine, because Vader attacked the Tantive IV. There is a CLEAR, direct chain of causality throughout A New Hope.
But ROTJ completely breaks this rule. In ROTJ, there is no causality chain. They rescue Han, and then a completely unrelated plot takes over.
Again, whether or not this bothers you is subjective - and many films break this “rule”. But it started to bother me, so as a thought experiment I started thinking about ways this could have been fixed. It’s really hard to come up with a way to connect Jabba’s palace with the Battle of Endor.
Ideally, you’d want something that happens in Jabba’s palace to later have relevance to the Death Star attack. Maybe among the criminal denizens of Jabba’s palace they stumble upon a hacker who provides them with the clearance codes for Shuttle Tyderium? Nah… that’s kind of stupid.
Then I realized there’s actually already an organic, built-in connection between the world of Jabba the Hutt and the Rebel/Empire (or Luke/Vader) conflict. That connection is Boba Fett. He works for BOTH Jabba and Vader.
It’s already a bit of a plot hole that Boba Fett never recognizes Lando in Jabba’s place (even with Lando’s silly mask). And while not an actual plot hole, it’s kind of weird that Boba Fett fights Luke but there’s no acknowledgement in the script that Boba Fett surely must know that Vader is still searching for Luke. You’d think when Luke showed up at Jabba’s palace, Boba Fett would take notice and perhaps contact Vader.
It seems like the connective tissue between Act I and the rest of the film was right there all along, in the form of Boba Fett - but the writers just didn’t seem to take advantage of this.
Of course, I still don’t know exactly how this Boba Fett link would help connect Act I with the rest of the film. It still doesn’t lend itself to some obvious causal link between the events in Jabba’s palace and Endor. But it could provide a partial link, if Boba Fett was somehow rewritten to be the connective tissue that causes Luke to ultimately get captured by Vader (instead of just turning himself in randomly on Endor - arguably another violation of the South Park rule).
Anyway, I don’t have it worked out, but to me it seems the best way to provide a causal through-line in ROTJ is to leverage the one link between Jabba and Vader, which is Boba Fett. Perhaps instead of killing him off unceremoniously, he could have been leveraged to create a much tighter, causality-driven story. I’m just not sure exactly how.
Thoughts?
