Return of the Jedi (1983) - film review

Accompanied by Princess Leia, Chewbacca and his faithful droids C-3PO and R2-D2, Luke Skywalker returns to his home planet Tatooine to rescue his friend Captain Han Solo from the notorious space gangster Jabba the Hutt.  Having accomplished this minor task, Luke returns to Dagobah, hoping to complete his training to become a Jedi knight.  When he arrives, his former mentor Yoda is dying, but before he goes Yoda confirms that Darth Vader is his father, a former Jedi who was corrupted by the Dark Side of the Force.  The ghost of Ben Kenobi then appears and tells Luke that Leia is his twin sister.  Meanwhile, the Rebel Alliance has learned that the Evil Empire has begun construction on a new Death Star.  The space station is protected by a shield generator which is located on the nearby forest moon of Endor.  If the shield generator can be destroyed, the Death Star will be a sitting target for the Rebels.  Whilst Han and Leia join the Rebels in their attack on Endor, Luke returns to the Death Star to face his destiny.  There, Vader and the Emperor await him, certain that he will soon join them on the Dark Side, to become their new apprentice in evil...

The first of the Star War trilogies ends not with a bang but with what looks suspiciously like a wholesale looting of the first two Star Wars films.  If someone (anyone picked at random from the world’s population) were to perform a cut and splice job on  Star Wars and The Empire Strikes Back, the result could not be too dissimilar to Return of the Jedi.  In fact, this might actually have made a better film, since we would have been spared some of Return of the Jedi’s weakest points, particularly those ghastly Muppet-like creatures that were included, presumably, for the benefit of the younger members of the audience (i.e. those under the age of five).  Hailed by many, on its initial release, as the best of the Star Wars films, it was not long before Return of the Jedi came to be regarded as the weakest (although it lost that distinction when the second Star Wars trilogy came along sixteen years later).

It is perhaps not too hard to see why Return of the Jedi was initially so highly regarded.  The film combines the pacy gung-ho action adventure of the first Star Wars film with the dark morality tale of the second, and is an entertaining, family friendly romp with plenty of bangs and flashes.  The special effects are, as in the previous two films, exceptionally well realised, having a realism and visual impact that even today’s CGI effects struggle to match.  But the appeal of this film, like its plot and characterisation, is entirely superficial.  Watch it a second time and it is immediately apparent that it has less material substance than a balloon filled with helium.

Return of the Jedi has two basic shortcomings: a third rate screenplay and the most ludicrous collection of alien beings you can imagine.  If you thought the dialogue in the first Star Wars film was bad, just try repeating some of the lines in this film.  "If you will not fight," Vader tells his son, "then you will meet your destiny".  So, presumably, if Luke does decide to fight, then he won’t meet his destiny, in which case, what happens to him?  Does he disappear in a puff of smoke?  Does he get a job as a traffic warden?  Or maybe Yo’ure Destiny is a character we haven’t yet met, one who only shows up if a naughty Jedi refuses to get out his light sabre.  Needless to say, there are worse semantic slips than this.  And the worse the dialogue gets, the more often it is repeated.  Just try counting the number of times the phrase "Meet your/his/my destiny" crops up.  It will help to pass the time.

And then we come to the aliens.  Yes, the Muppets have clearly taken over the asylum.  You would have thought that at least some of the budget and talent that went into the special effects could have been siphoned off into the costume department so that we could have at least one alien creature that looked marginally more convincing than something that a one-armed Blue Peter presenter might have knocked up during a coffee break from a few loo rolls and an old woollen sweater.  Yes, given the size of the universe, it is possible that there is a world where the native life form looks like a child’s teddy bear that performs irritating dances with bits of wood.  Yes, there may well be planets where there are beings with annoying school girl laughs that look as if they are operated by wires and have skin that oddly resembles foam latex.   All this may be possible, but, when they go to the cinema, most audiences on planet Earth expect something a little bit more sophisticated than the kind of thing their four year olds watch on TV when they come home from playschool.

For all its faults and misdemeanours, Return of the Jedi still manages to have something of the old Star Wars magic, although Leia’s improbable conversion from Mistress Strop to Madame Charmante is to be lamented.  The plot may be a complete mess – badly structured, muddled and drenched in the kind of idiotic contrivances that were once the preserve of tacky Australian soap operas.  The characters may be shallow and generally uninteresting (except for C-3PO, who really does deserve his own spin-off series).   The alien beings are, without exception, badly realised (even Chewbacca has begun to look like Fozzie Bear’s twin  – the one inane plot twist that George Lucas evidently missed).  Yet, for all this, Return of the Jedi was still worth waiting for.  We got to discover Luke Skywalker’s entire family tree, we saw what was under Darth Vader’s mask (Sebastian Shaw, not Dave Prowse), and we had the satisfaction of seeing Han Solo linking up with Princess Leia, a fate worse than Jabba, methinks.  The Star Wars saga was over, and, for many, so was the dream.  It was time to grow up, go to University, get a job, and spend the rest of our lives in offices pressing buttons on a computer to pay the mortgage.  How we pine for those distant days when we first encountered that alluring phrase:  A long time ago, in a galaxy far, far away...

© James Travers 2009

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