Film Review
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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