ROTJ is the best Star Wars film... discuss! — Page 15

DominicCobb said:

Yep, I get it. This one's a joke. 

I really get pissed off by such arrogance.

No buddy, it is not a joke. It is an opinion on the matter which is as valid as yours. Do you think your opinion is Newton's fourth law or something?

imperialscum said:

DominicCobb said:

Yep, I get it. This one's a joke. 

I really get pissed off by such arrogance.

No buddy, it is not a joke. It is an opinion on the matter which is as valid as yours. Do you think your opinion is Newton's fourth law or something?

In Dom's defence I did put a " xD " symbol at the end of the paragraph in question.

There are plenty of great chases in the movies (Bullitt and TFC are two of them) Mad Max, Death Proof, The Driver, Drive, Tron, T2, Vanishing Point, TDK and of course the skateboard based chase from BTTF. But none of them can touch the exhileration of those trees wipping past your face in ROTJ. I find myself almost ducking and dodging the incoming trees myself. Probably 50% of the credit goes to Ben Burtt's sound design.

Another point. While it could be argued that Harrison and Carrie didn't bring their 'A game' I think too often people just see that, then assume it was the same for everyone on ROTJ. It's just not the case...

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hvDlg1My0Cc

For most people on ROTJ, they wanted to finish the saga by topping everything that had gone before.

After the recent lively debate in this thread I'm going to sit down and watch Harmy's ROTJ tonight. Haven't watched ROTJ in a while so will be fun.

What exactly did Harrison and Carrie not do? Their acting in ROTJ is A-OK by me.

Anchorhead said:

I respectfully submit the boat chase from Live And Let Die as my favorite film chase.

 

Sorry, just can't get on board with any Return discussion.  I've seen it twice for sure (the last time about fifteen years ago) and I just can't stand a single moment of it. 

You know what, that comes DAAAMNN close to the Speederbike chase!

That scene is just one of the reasons I'd put 'Live and Let Die' in my top 5 Bond movies.

AntcuFaalb said:

What exactly did Harrison and Carrie not do? Their acting in ROTJ is A-OK by me.

I actually think neither Han nor Leia as scripted in ROTJ gave them much to work with.  It's a lackluster performance IMO, but they'd turned into lackluster characters, so IMO you can't blame the actors too much for failing to make them shine.

Fisher did great in SW, switching on a dime between damsel in distress and sassy take-charge heroine.  Then in ESB, she was a respectable leader fighting with her secret passion.  In ROTJ, she was all damsel all the time, sometimes in distress, sometimes not.  Bleh, no complexity at all.  Good enough for your storybook princess, maybe, not for Leia.

Solo was the can-you-trust-him-or-not scoundrel in SW, where you weren't even sure he'd show up for the final battle.  And then in ESB he hatched brilliant escape plans one minute and complained about the hyperdrive not being his fault the next--strategic genius or overgrown child, who could tell?  In ROTJ, he... well, he leads a mission, and he does use trickery to accomplish it, yes, but he's always a good guy.  Even worse, a reliable good guy.  Yawn.  Even Lando, who pulled a shift as the can-you-trust-him-or-not scoundrel in ESB, skips straight to reliable good guy in this one.

My opinion on that anyway.  What I liked about Star Wars was that, while it certainly was based on storybook archetypes as old as dirt, it tweaked them enough to keep it interesting.  ROTJ had some good moments and I actually enjoy it, but Han and Leia were not the best parts.

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.

Bingowings said:

People go on about how fake the podrace is and how great the speeder bike race is.

Both look fake.

Both were filmed with a mixture of sped up 'real' footage and special effects.

Indeed the demented deleted scenes outfrink Frink by turning the death of an alien driver into a sick comedy moment with his tearful comedy wife and kids crying over his comedy death.

LOL! In my TPM edit I recut that bit, so that the camera cuts to their crest fallen faces the moment he dies xD

It makes me laugh a litle evil laugh everytime. But in all seriousness, I did that to show that the Podrace was actually dangerous, because that was lacking. I'd say that the Podrace was brilliantly shot but it lacked the danger that the speeder chase has, due to a lack of shots showing the racers/stromtroopers dying in gigantic fireballs.

Ryan McAvoy said:

Okay here are some unarguable facts about ROTJ...

- It has the best freaky alien creatures: Jabba, Bib, Ackbar, Salicious, Nunb etc. Nothing in the Cantina comes close and the Wampa was so bad it couldn't even be shown. The best ESB could muster is a blatant sock puppet in a hole.

- It's got the best use of the Falcon. Without the Falcon kickin' ass as the Rebel lead fighter in the battle of Endor it wouldn't be half as iconic. The camera work on the Falcon in ESB pales next to Jedi and the Falcon in ANH barely moves.

- It's got the most 'scale' of the three. Epic locations, epic battles and a huge cast of diverse background characters.

There are other points I'd be tempted to make, such as it has the best pacing but I'll admit that that could be argued against. F*ck it! It does! The opening to ANH is painfully slow and ESB is very static in the middle (Asteroid interlude while Luke is jogging round a swamp). Jedi's pace never lets up! xD

As I said (Apart from the last one) the above points are unarguable facts but let the argueing commence anyway...

I'll argue with these points...

-ESB has Yoda. This is one of the best characters in Star Wars, and he's a freaky alien creature. This is far better than the "blatant sock puppet in a hole".

-The Falcon flies around in ROTJ quite a bit, but we never see the interior like we did before, and when we do it looks more lifeless than it did in ESB. I remember hearing somewhere (perhaps here!) that the scene where the Falcon escapes from Hoth makes this ship into a real character, and this scene has two of my favorite aspects of this ship in it: the hidden machine gun, and its propensity to power failure unless given a well-aimed punch. In ROTJ it's relegated to merely a spaceship again instead of a character.

-It's been addressed, but ROTJ doesn't have the best locations. It just doesn't. Battles and characters perhaps, but not new locations.

-Yeah, not going to get into this one.

Well this is an active thread, three posts while I wrote mine.

I agree that racing through the exploding Death Star was probably the most exhilarating thing in any Star Wars movie hands down. The effects in this movie are what every Star Wars movie is judged by in my book.

Bingowings said:

Ryan McAvoy said:

Anchorhead said:

I respectfully submit the boat chase from Live And Let Die as my favorite film chase.

Sorry, just can't get on board with any Return discussion.  I've seen it twice for sure (the last time about fifteen years ago) and I just can't stand a single moment of it. 

You know what, that comes DAAAMNN close to the Speederbike chase!

That scene is just one of the reasons I'd put 'Live and Let Die' in my top 5 Bond movies.

I love it too... even the silly bits.

People go on about how fake the podrace is and how great the speeder bike race is.

If the comedy aliens

were all human children

forced into riding pods to buy their families out of slavery and not characters from the munch bunch or the wacky races  the pod race would be miles better than the bike chase.

Both look fake.

Both were filmed with a mixture of sped up 'real' footage and special effects.

ROTS and AOTC proved that Lucas isn't against showing child death in his PT movies.

The flaw with TPM is I don't care if crocodile man makes it.

Indeed the demented deleted scenes outfrink Frink by turning the death of an alien driver into a sick comedy moment with his tearful comedy wife and kids crying over his comedy death.

And I KNOW ANAKIN WILL MAKE IT!

I don't feel our heroes in mortal jeopardy in the speeder bike chase but I care about the characters enough not to want them to get hurt (which is the most possible risk in that sequence).

In the original Death Star battle I care about "They're coming in too fast" guy.

I want "Almost there: guy to survive.

And they die.

This is the flaw with ROTJ which is intensified in TPM.

The explosions are there, the speed is there but nobody I care about is in any actual risk.

In ESB everyone feels at risk and none of the main characters good or bad are killed.

In ROTJ none of the good guys (other than Luke) feel in peril, not even Wedge buys the big one but every bad guy goes ¡BANG BANG!

In all fairness, I thought Sebulba was ruthless and menacing, even if he doesn't wear pants. Unfortunately, he's lumped in with with all the comedy aliens that wouldn't cut it even in an old Space Quest game.

The old George would have had Sebulba ending up a dark splat on a canyon wall as comeuppance for all his dirty deeds though.

Exploding moustache guy has a name you know. ;)