“We’ve almost got some of their telecommunications cracked; the front end even runs on a laptop!” The Mac that sunk a thousand ships could have been merely clunky product placement, not a bafflingly stupid tech-on-film moment.
“Senator Amidala is in a coma. Even if she recovers, she will never be the same and may not live long.” But no… George had to have his god-damned funeral scene, even if it demanded Simone Biles levels of mental gymnastics to save Carrie Fisher’s most emotionally resonant moment from ROTJ, as well as one of the more intriguing OT lore dumps.
Bonus points if a scene was scripted or filmed and got cut.
Evidently most of the fandom needs to have it beaten over their heads a bit more blatantly than that.
Another thing that would have been helpful is if it was made clearer just how monstrous the Ewoks actually are. There wouldn’t be as much shame to the Imperials for losing against them if people had only internalized a bit better that:
Is it cannibalism? It feels more like a (talking) bear eating a human.
I do feel like the Stormtooper point got lost on Lucas too by RotJ honestly. In Empire they do pretty good except when they’re, again, explicitly trying to lure the hero into a trap. RotJ has the most weirdness of the originals and probably the most EU ‘redemptions’/revisions. With stuff like “here’s what was really up with the Ewoks”, Boba not dying, etc.
“Long pig”
Replace some of the stormtroopers in ROTJ with regular army forces and it might have helped the stormtroopers’ reputation.
Conversely: Stop overthinking Star Wars. I get that people love the universe but the movies are straight up just not deep at all.
Are we really pretending George was thinking about this while making Jedi? Like in a script review some young guy pipes up: Hey George, how do the Ewoks sneak up on Luke when he has force powers? And George calmly explains, “Well son, Ewoks may look cute but they are actually deadly hunters with expert tracking and stealth skills”
The Ewoks win against the empire because the script says they do. It looks stupid because they are children/(dwarves?) in costumes who can probably barely see what’s going on.
I know I’m being a major grump but reading these comments make my eyes roll out of my sockets. It’s like watching art critics fawn over an 8 year old’s painting because they’ve been told it’s a picasso.
I say all this as someone who enjoys the OT but finds it increasingly embarrassing to admit to having any interest in the property.
Overthinking is the best kind of thinking.
No. I’m a proponent of the death of the author school of literary analysis. I don’t care what George Lucas was thinking. Indeed, he’s shown himself to not be the best at figuring this sort of stuff out.
What I’m doing here is having fun. I’m taking a work of fiction and seeing how far I can run with it. You, on the other hand, are feeling embarrassed about having fun and avoiding it. There’s a famous quote by CS Lewis that I think is apt here.