James Earl Jones Archives - The Wide Screen

June 1, 2022June 2, 2022

“Obi-Wan Kenobi” Gets Off To A Slow Start With First 2 Episodes

**SPOILERS FOR KENOBI EPISODES ONE AND TWO AHEAD!**

If Lucasfilm plans to rely on Disney+ original series’ like The Mandalorian, The Bad Batch, The Book Of Boba Fett, and now Obi-Wan Kenobi, to keep the Star Wars franchise fresh in peoples’ minds while they work out where to go with the films following the conclusion of the Skywalker Saga and the poor reception to The Rise Of Skywalker, then I’m going to need the writers and showrunners of these series’ to get some fresh ideas because I genuinely don’t know how many more world-weary middle-aged single father figures to rambunctious children I can take from a franchise that has literally all the space in the galaxy to do something different but won’t because it worked that one time in The Mandalorian.

And Pedro Pascal did it really well in The Mandalorian season one, to be fair, which is why we all fell in love with the trope in the first place and presumably why Pascal is now being typecast as world-weary middle-aged single father figures to rambunctious children even outside of Star Wars. But in the two years since The Mandalorian debuted, with the exception of The Clone Wars‘ final season, the anthology series Star Wars: Visions, and a couple of Lego holiday specials, Star Wars has shifted focus entirely to making stories about – and seemingly targeted at – middle-aged dads.

Is that necessarily a bad thing? No, of course not. It’s not even necessarily indicative of lazy storytelling, because there are many different types of middle-aged dads to be found in this world, and even more to be found amongst the stars, so it stands to reason that there should be a number of subtly different stories to be told about middle-aged dads, each one unique in its own way and worth telling. But I do think it’s worth examining why Star Wars has become…shall we say, a little bit obsessed with this trope recently, before I get into my thoughts on the first two episodes of Kenobi, specifically.

If Star Wars had a long history of telling stories about middle-aged dads/father figures with small children, it would be one thing, but discounting all of the Legends material that Disney decanonized and looking solely at the movies and series’ released prior to The Mandalorian in 2019, there really aren’t that many dads…in fact, absent fathers and the absence of fathers are two recurring themes in the Skywalker Saga, which begins with Anakin Skywalker being born out of a sci-fi Immaculate Conception, then becoming a remote and unapproachable figure in the lives of his children, then being exhumed by his grandson Ben as a stand-in father figure for Ben’s own neglectful father, Han Solo. The cycle theoretically breaks with Rey, an orphan who adopts the Skywalker name and becomes the spiritual descendant of Anakin Skywalker, but sadly we never learned enough about her as a character to say with certainty what she’d be like as a parent.

Then you’ve got the mentors like Qui-Gon Jinn, Obi-Wan Kenobi, Yoda, and Luke Skywalker, who will inevitably become the single most important person in the lives of their apprentices after about fifteen minutes of training before dying…but it’s hard to call any of these men (or in Yoda’s case, male-coded aliens) father figures. Maybe Qui-Gon Jinn, but even when Obi-Wan Kenobi (Ewan McGregor) calls out to the Force-ghost of his former Jedi master in the first two episodes of Kenobi, I don’t hear the desperation of a son needing a father’s advice, but rather a student seeking the approval of a respected teacher.

After Qui-Gon’s death in A Phantom Menace, I think Obi-Wan tried to be both a mentor and a father figure to Anakin Skywalker, but he was never able to enforce the Jedi Code because of his own complicated relationship with the damn thing, and gradually Anakin started to regard him as a lenient older brother – one whom he loved deeply, but whose guidance he rarely ever felt he needed. I don’t think it’s too much of a stretch to extrapolate from this that Obi-Wan regarded Anakin’s son Luke as a nephew, especially when you look at their interactions in A New Hope. As for Luke, his relationship with his own students appears to have always been impersonal.

What was my point again? Oh yeah, dads don’t exist in Star Wars; at least as far as the Skywalkers are concerned (in case you’re wondering, moms do exist, but they either die in childbirth like Padmé Amidala or live long enough to become silent, stoic spectators in their sons’ lives, like Shmi Skywalker and even Leia Organa). But then The Mandalorian introduced Baby Yoda into our lives, and nothing has been the same since. Now, every middle-aged man in Star Wars has a child. Crucially, they’re never the biological fathers of these children – because Star Wars is about found-family, and there is something truly touching about characters from vastly different backgrounds forming profound emotional connections.

And for the most part, the trope has worked. I’ve made it clear in the past that, despite my gripes with The Mandalorian‘s sluggish pacing, I am deeply invested in the story of disillusioned bounty hunter Din Djarin coming to care for his pint-sized sidekick Grogu over the course of two seasons. I thought it was adorable when the battle-hardened clones of the Bad Batch adopted the experimental clone Omega and made her feel at home in their tight-knit family unit. I had far bigger issues with The Book Of Boba Fett than Fett randomly taking a teeny-bopper biker gang in off the streets of Mos Eisley (I never wrote about the show because, frankly, it bored me to death).

But my issues with Kenobi, while not limited to fatigue at the overuse of this trope, stem from the showrunners’ perplexing decision to put Kenobi through the single dad filter and saddle him with a small child – a ten-year old Princess Leia Organa (Vivien Lyra Blair), to be precise, kidnapped by mercenaries in the first episode and whisked away to a remote planet in an attempt to lure Kenobi out of hiding. That could have been a unique premise for some kind of sci-fi heist thriller, but Leia stays kidnapped for maybe twenty minutes total before Kenobi locates her in a storage unit, easily incapacitates her guards, and escapes.

Episode two concludes with the two characters returning to Alderaan, crisis seemingly averted, but it’s implied that they’ll get held up or forced to take a detour so that Obi-Wan Kenobi can learn an important life-lesson from Leia before they part ways – and so that Leia has a chance to meet her biological dad and Kenobi’s pursuer, Darth Vader (Hayden Christensen & James Earl Jones). She won’t be aware she’s just met her biological father, mind you, but fans will be and that’s all that really matters to Lucasfilm; at least based on the staggering number of thoroughly pointless callbacks and namedrops in these first two episodes.

Indeed, the stage is already set for just such an encounter, with ten-year old Leia struggling to reconcile her responsibilities as an Organa with her impulsivity, relentless curiosity, and recklessness – traits apparently common to all Skywalkers. She hates being cooped up in the royal palace, and frustrates her adoptive mother Breha (Simone Kessel) by skipping out on brunches with her cartoonishly pretentious cousins to go climb trees in the forest and watch starships all day, accompanied by an annoyingly cute droid that seems purposefully designed to sell merchandise. Every one of Leia’s scenes is written as if we don’t already know and weren’t literally just reminded in the recap preceding the episode that Leia is, in fact, still a Skywalker, but how could we forget when the characters stop dead in their tracks to tell us that Leia reminds them of someone (Anakin and Padmé. Don’t bother guessing or reading into it, it’s Anakin and Padmé).

Side-note, but there’s something extremely frustrating about the implication that most of Leia’s defining character traits come from her biological parents and not her adoptive parents who actually raised her, loved her, and gave her the life Anakin Skywalker was never going to be able to provide for her. Bail Organa (Jimmy Smits) has a lovely little monologue in the first episode to the general effect of “family is the people you choose, not the people chosen for you”, but his words are undermined by all the callbacks to the Skywalkers that serve only to pull focus from his and his wife’s contributions to the making of Princess Leia as we know her.

Kenobi‘s premise allows its writers to indulge in the kind of incessant namedrops and thinly-veiled references to other movies that quickly become cringeworthy than cute, but the blatant abuse of nostalgia works if the end-goal is to force viewers to look past the poor pacing, lackluster dialogue, and other technical and story issues. Forget that you just watched the same long, slow montage of Obi-Wan Kenobi taking the bus home from work and feeding his alien camel three times – there’s Temuera Morrison, cameoing as a clone trooper of the 501st! There’s that toy starship that Luke Skywalker played with in A New Hope exactly once, and it even has a completely unnecessary backstory now! That guy’s the Grand Inquisitor (Rupert Friend) from Star Wars: Rebels!

Now, to be fair, I was excited for the Grand Inquisitor – even after the trailers gave it away that his distinctive character design hadn’t made the jump from animation to live-action particularly well. I was certainly not expecting his character to be rendered incompetent and seemingly killed off near the end of the second episode, several years before the events of Rebels season one. Regardless of whether he’s dead or alive, however, one thing became clear to me in the moment that Reva (Moses Ingram) impaled him and left his body on the floor of a cargo-bay; Kenobi is probably not aimed at fans of Rebels.

Nor is it designed to appeal to fans of the sequel trilogy. If I had to guess, I’d say that Kenobi is a last-ditch effort by Lucasfilm to try and win back the people most likely to have disliked Rebels and outright despised the sequel trilogy – middle-aged men, particularly those with strong emotional attachments to the characters and settings from the original trilogy and prequel trilogy we’ve seen popping up on Disney+ in all the aforementioned dad-centric Star Wars shows. How much of that is Favreau’s obsession with recapturing the original trilogy’s aesthetics and Filoni’s desire to redeem the public image of the prequels as part of a commitment to George Lucas, and how much of that is Lucasfilm learning all the wrong lessons from the poor reception to the sequel trilogy? I wish I knew.

Favreau and Filoni’s fingerprints are all over Kenobi, although they weren’t involved in the show until surprisingly late in the writing process. Ironically, it’s been confirmed that they were enlisted to tweak the show’s scripts after noticing troubling similarities to The Mandalorian, which raises the question of how much of a blatant Mandalorian rip-off Kenobi must have been that even its revised version still plays out like a Mandalorian rip-off, hitting most of the same beats and falling into all the same traps. Filoni also took the opportunity to insert the Grand Inquisitor, one of his own original characters, into the script (which, come to think of it, might explain why the writers killed him off first chance they got). And of course, Kenobi director Deborah Chow is one of Favreau and Filoni’s recruits, having worked on The Mandalorian season one.

It’s truly unfortunate that Chow and her talented cast are burdened with a writer’s room at war with itself, because here and there are glimmers of what Kenobi could be if it only knew what it was trying to be, and how to get to that point swiftly and directly. In Obi-Wan Kenobi’s self-imposed exile on Tatooine, I see the potential for a raw and unflinching character study, something wholly unlike anything we’ve seen before in Star Wars. You want to throw Darth Vader in there too, explore Kenobi’s guilt over losing his closest friend – his brother – to the Dark Side and the toll of isolation on a mind already fractured by that kind of anguish, sure! I’d be down for that.

Or…we could do another show about a grumpy middle-aged guy and a small child working together to fight bad guys while running around the galaxy. That works too, I guess. It’s just…not the kind of Obi-Wan Kenobi story I would have expected to be set after his self-imposed exile on Tatooine, that’s all. It makes you wonder why Kenobi would go back to Tatooine after this is over if he realizes now that Leia is every bit as important as Luke and requires the same constant surveillance to ensure that someone doesn’t…I don’t know, kidnap her again. Not like the high-profile daughter of a senator publicly opposed to the Empire’s authoritarianism might be in constant danger or anything.

I can nitpick stupid stuff like that, but we’d be here all day and it wouldn’t get us anywhere because ultimately, my problem with Kenobi is just that I’m not feeling the decision to make it another single dad story in the style of The Mandalorian, but I can’t fully explain why, even to myself. I just know it’s not working for me yet and I’m getting a bit tired of the trope, but if you enjoy all these stories about single dads, or if you can relate to them on an emotional level, or if you just think single dads are attractive, more power to you.

I debated publishing this post because I hate to be critical of something that people seem to be having a fun time with, especially when my issues with it aren’t concrete, but hey, it happens sometimes. I don’t like everything that Marvel’s been putting out lately, either, and it’s caused me to stop writing as frequently about either franchise.

Oh, one last thing before I go. I want to make it abundantly clear that regardless of your opinions on Kenobi, you should be able to express those opinions without resorting to racism, sexism, and other forms of bullying….and if, for whatever reason, you feel like you can’t, then there’s a better than even chance that you are a racist, a sexist, and a bully. And I will not tolerate the harassment of the show’s actors, who are just doing their jobs and putting in good performances, I might add, so if you’re tempted to spew that nonsense in my comments section, I will delete your comments and block you expeditiously.

Episode Rating: 5.5/10

December 16, 2019

“Star Wars: Revenge Of The Sith” Review!

We are officially in the last leg of the long journey to Star Wars: The Rise Of Skywalker, which means that the mighty Skywalker Saga, a story spanning forty years across films, books, comics, cartoons and video games is finally coming to a close – which in turn means that it’s time to reflect on that nine-part saga and take a good long look at the films that predate and inform Rise Of Skywalker‘s epic conclusion.

To do that, we’re going to have to discuss spoilers for each of the eight films in the Saga, so…SPOILERS AHEAD.

Star Wars: Revenge Of The Sith

Despite being the continuation of George Lucas’ underwhelming prequel trilogy (and the last Star Wars film he’s directed), Revenge Of The Sith is not a fitting conclusion to this chapter in the Skywalker Saga. Why do I say that? Because, while it may be sacrilegious to some, I feel strongly that Sith is miles ahead of both its predecessors, and deserves far more praise than it has gotten (to be fair, its Rotten Tomatoes score is actually pretty good).

There are several things that make Sith the best movie in the prequel trilogy and a good movie regardless. The story has a singular focus on Anakin Skywalker (Hayden Christensen), and all the other subplots, from the Clone Wars to the Trade Federation, finally find a way to tie into his story without Lucas having to force him into theirs. The themes are stronger than before, with Lucas finally plunging bravely into Anakin’s darkness – it’s too late to understand him or sympathize with his journey, but we’re no longer called upon to do so: instead, Lucas merely asks us to marvel at the horror and spectacle of it all. And isn’t that what moviegoers do best? And there are several scenes, characters and plot-points here that are among the strongest in the entire franchise.

The first and least surprising of many revelations is Ian McDiarmid as Chancellor Palpatine a.k.a Darth Sidious. While Phantom Menace and Clones wasted the actor’s talents on rambling monologues about trade reform and taxation, he was gifted some of the trilogy’s best dialogue in Sith – where he also finally gets to shed his disguise and become the horrible, cackling, wild-eyed goblin we all know and love. In the scenes immediately preceding his grotesque transformation, where he slowly but surely seduces Anakin over to the Dark Side of the Force, McDiarmid is at his finest: a silver-tongued charlatan selling the promise of immortality with ease, grace and dignity. As the film’s title suggests, the power of the Sith has grown unstoppable: despite there only ever being two Sith Lords at a time, their ability to manipulate is their greatest weapon, as we learn that Palpatine has been using lies and deception to grow stronger in the Senate, until he finally takes the mantle of Emperor, and begins his reign of terror. And he has help from all over the galaxy, even briefly from Count Dooku (Christopher Lee) who fails him early in the film and is executed by Anakin, and the legendary General Grievous (voiced by Matthew Wood), a lightsaber-wielding quadrupedal cyborg with a nasty cough, who lurches his way through a series of epic battles. And the Emperor’s most secret weapon, and the one which ultimately gives him the advantage over his age-old enemy, is Order 66.

"Star Wars: Revenge Of The Sith" Review! 2 — comicbook.com

It’s one of those scenes that screams “instant classic”. Though we had heard of the Purge that wiped out thousands of Jedi across the galaxy, seeing it was something else entirely: John Williams’ haunting music, the beautiful imagery, and the sheer nightmare of watching vast clone armies turn against their commanders at the push of a button. Honestly, it’s even more painful to watch than the Battle of Helm’s Deep in The Lord Of The Rings, where the Elves of Lórien are brutally slaughtered in battle, because of how quickly and easily this massacre is carried out: from Plo Koon’s violent death, blown to pieces in the explosion of his spacecraft, to Aayla Secura gunned down before she could even comprehend the click of loaded blaster-guns behind her, her body tumbling peacefully into a field of giant flowers. Only a handful of Jedi escape the purge, whether through their own quick-thinking – as in the case of Yoda (voiced by Frank Oz) – or because of a very helpful accident, as with Obi-Wan Kenobi (Ewan McGregor).

But despite how sad we all are about the Jedi Purge (or maybe because of it), we can’t help but love every second of Anakin Skywalker’s long, slow, agonizingly painful transformation from man to machine. Not only is it great to see him bested in battle by Obi-Wan Kenobi and left for dead, a burning husk of a ruined man, on the lava shores of Mustafar, but it’s fantastic to watch what happens next, as this man-thing is brought back from death’s brink, stitched together by the Emperor’s medics and minions, clothed in darkness and wreathed in horror – and also blessed with the rich, powerful voice of James Earl Jones.

"Star Wars: Revenge Of The Sith" Review! 3 — ew.com

Anakin’s meandering journey through two previous movies left aside, Sith finally gives us what we were looking for from this character: an actual explanation for why he turned to the darkness, one that is every bit as dark, horrific and irredeemable as it needed to be. In this final movie, George Lucas works overtime to come up with a good reason for his hero’s sudden shift in loyalties, and he comes up with something that, while not startlingly original, at least feels legitimate, given what we know already about Anakin’s character, and the lengths he will go to to protect those that he loves. The explanation is simply this: Anakin, in his desperate need to save the life of his wife Padmé (Natalie Portman), ends up being lured to the Dark Side to explore the promise of immortality, a promise which he learns too late is nothing but a lie. Yes, stronger chemistry between Portman and Christensen would have gone a long way in selling this idea, and the prequel trilogy in general, but I can hardly fault the actors for not being able to conjure up much genuine emotion, considering the poorly underwritten dialogue. But at least it’s something – and Lucas, for what feels like the first time in this trilogy, understands that Anakin is a villain at his core. Rather than try to make him sympathetic or understandable, Lucas shows us just how irrational and horrible he is, even falling back on the Anakin-murders-innocent-children trope from the last movie, but this time without having anybody come up with stupid, clumsy excuses for why he did what he did. He’s not a good person: he never was. The evil spirit of Darth Vader always lived inside Anakin – it just needed to be coaxed out by the Emperor’s cunning words. I don’t even think that Anakin being a truly evil person makes his “redemption” and sacrifice in Return Of The Jedi unearned: as I wrote in my review of that film, I feel Vader’s choice to betray the Emperor was his attempt to do right by Padmé, who I think he truly loved. In Return Of The Jedi, he was motivated exclusively by his desire to save the life of his own children, not by any concern for the Rebellion, or the Jedi. He was a selfish and overly protective person until the day he died: was there light in him, as Luke claimed? I believe there was, but it expressed itself in his love for a woman whose death he had caused, and whose children he had tormented.

"Star Wars: Revenge Of The Sith" Review! 4 — imperialtalker.com

Speaking of that particular woman’s death, however, we do have to address the biggest issue in Revenge Of The Sith: Padmé being fridged, or to be precise, pre-fridged. “Fridging”, a term which refers to a female character being killed or harmed to further a male character’s storyline, is not strictly applicable in this case, because it wasn’t Padmé’s death, but rather the fear of her death, that motivated Anakin to madness. But regardless of what happened when, Padmé is barely even a character in this movie, having little more to do than act as Anakin’s muse and the mother of his children. She makes one powerful decision near the end of the movie, when she chooses to leave her husband for good – but even afterwards, she’s still haunted by him. How she dies is something of a mystery: her doctor droid says something about her losing the will to live, but the clever juxtaposition of her death with Anakin’s painful resurrection, combined with Palpatine’s remark to Anakin that “it seems, in your anger…you killed her”, almost implies that it was Anakin’s grief and the burning fires of his anguish that somehow drained her of her stamina. A semi-telepathic link between the two is possibly teased earlier in the film, when Anakin and Padmé seem to “see” each other from opposite sides of the city of Coruscant, or at least can feel the other’s presence very strongly. While it’s not explained if this is the case, it makes more sense than the resilient Padmé Amidala dying of sorrow.

Another interesting fact about Padmé’s death, mere moments after both her children are born into the fluorescent light of the Polis Massa maternity ward: Leia is born just after her twin brother Luke, almost seeming to underscore her birth as the more notable of the two. Given everything we know about Leia’s character arc, it wouldn’t be entirely implausible to believe that this was yet another hint that Leia Organa was destined to be the true heroine of the Skywalker Saga. Just a thought.

"Star Wars: Revenge Of The Sith" Review! 5 — aminoapps.com

Finally, we have to talk about the film’s action sequences, which range from “meh” to “magnificent”. There are two in particular that stand out to me: the battle on Utapau that pits Obi-Wan Kenobi against Grievous, who, as previously mentioned, wields four lightsabers at once, with metal arms spinning and swirling like helicopter-blades as he uses all of Count Dooku’s fighting techniques. Kenobi has never been the franchise’s most skilled dueler, preferring brute force tactics, which makes the fight a little unbalanced until he wrenches open the cyborg’s chest cavity and puts a few laser-bolts into his heart – I’m not precisely sure on the mechanics of why Grievous promptly goes up in flames, with fire erupting from his eye-sockets, but it’s a cool visual. And then, of course, there’s a much bigger, more epic battle in which Yoda and Emperor Palpatine chase each other through the cavernous Senate Building, employing force lightning and insanely fast-paced lightsaber action. It’s Palpatine’s best moment in the series’ history, and McDiarmid (not to mention his CGI stand-in) nails it. After that high, the final battle between Skywalker and Kenobi on Mustafar is bound to be disappointing, not least of all because the CGI lava is spectacularly unconvincing.

So Revenge Of The Sith is not only a return to form for the franchise, but a fun, thrilling, and tragic conclusion to a trilogy that could so easily have ended with a resounding thud. It’s cool to witness Anakin’s ruinous downfall in real-time, as the whiny teen becomes the impressive Sith Lord we were all just waiting to see. It’s satisfying to be present at Luke and Leia’s birth, and see them brought to their new homes on Tatooine and Alderaan, respectively. It’s nice to be able to have seen this chapter of Star Wars history, even if it wasn’t always great, or good, for that matter. And it’s also nice to close out this chapter with a film that, for all the flaws it’s burdened with by two prior failures, somehow manages to tell a decent story about light, darkness, and the enduring nature of hope.

Movie Rating: 7.9/10

December 13, 2019December 14, 2019

“Star Wars: Return Of The Jedi” Review!

To do that, we’re going to have to discuss spoilers for each of the eight films in the Saga, so…SPOILERS AHEAD.

(Before we begin, be aware that I’m going through the list by order of release date: I understand that George Lucas wanted movies 4, 5 and 6 to be movies 1, 2 and 3 and to be treated as such – but they’re not good enough to warrant that distinction. Sorry, George).

Star Wars: Return Of The Jedi

The final chapter in the original Star Wars trilogy sags under the burden placed upon its shoulders by the two previous installments in the Skywalker Saga. Why? Because it follows the same basic principle of The Force Awakens, but without the benefit of coming out some twenty years after the original film – rather than looking like a dreamy, nostalgic callback to former glory, Return Of The Jedi instead feels mostly like a frantic cash-grab, capitalizing on all of A New Hope‘s flashes of ingenuity but ignoring that they cease to be ingenious when repeated time and time again. It doesn’t help the film’s image when you discover that George Lucas rewrote the entire movie to maximize toy sales, something that we’ll discuss in detail.

But first, because I don’t like to be negative about a franchise I love – does Return Of The Jedi have any redeeming qualities?

"Star Wars: Return Of The Jedi" Review! 7 — lucasfilm.com

Well, yes. Most films do. Even The Phantom Menace has some good moments (can’t think of any off the top of my head, but I’ll have to think of some for my review of that film). But unfortunately, most of Return Of The Jedi‘s great moments are overshadowed by the larger flaws they contrast. For instance, having Luke Skywalker (Mark Hamill), Darth Vader (voiced by James Earl Jones), and The Emperor (Ian McDiarmid) get in a three-way battle to the death is a great idea, and lends itself nicely to some very cool scenes of action, lightsaber wizardry and Force-lightning madness. However, the fact that this battle takes place on a cheaper, less intimidating knockoff of the Death Star, whose crucial design flaw is basically identical to that on the first Death Star, rendering the object pointless and boring…well, that’s not quite as much fun. If you’re going to reuse old ideas, at least make them bigger and more epic – maybe don’t downgrade from “a weapon the size of a moon that can blow up other planets” to “a partially-constructed weapon the size of a large asteroid that can blow up spaceships one at a time”. Honestly, if you’re going to build a new Death Star, at least have the courtesy to give it to Alec Guinness (who reprised his role as Obi-Wan Kenobi) after you’re done using it, so he can promptly annihilate the entire Star Wars fandom – how he got roped in to doing a third Star Wars film, I have no idea, but it’s evident from his bored, mechanical line-readings that he was doing his level best to make the film unwatchable (apparently, early script drafts had him joining the action as a Force-ghost and helping to defeat The Emperor, but Guinness didn’t like using special effects. You can’t have it both ways, Alec; you’re either an expository ghost or a CGI wizard – there is no middle ground).

Return Of The Jedi is truly disappointing because of how many awesome what-if scenarios were originally going to make their way into the film: scenarios that would have to wait until decades later to be realized onscreen, because George Lucas was afraid that taking risks would minimize the sales of toys, action figures and other Star Wars merchandise. Most shockingly, the trilogy was at one point intended to end with Luke Skywalker removing his father’s mask – and claiming it for himself, having been so corrupted in his fight with The Emperor that he became a Sith Lord, channeling the Dark Side of the Force to turn on the Rebellion, leading to Han Solo’s heroic death during a raid on the Imperial base. Even after Lucas scrapped that idea (it was too sad for a kid’s movie, he claimed), there were still plans for the film to end on a bittersweet note, with Leia in charge of a last, desperate band of Rebels and war-torn heroes, while Luke would abandon the cause and go into hiding. While many of these concepts later found their way into The Force Awakens, they don’t fit particularly well in that film, coming off a trilogy that actually ended triumphantly, with the Empire destroyed, the Jedi supposedly restored to power, and the galaxy at peace. J.J. Abrams’ sequel trilogy is largely founded on an alternative version of Return Of The Jedi that never saw the light of day, a version that allowed for a sequel.

Even Lucas’ film, however, feels like it has multiple parts that belong to a completely different movie. For instance, the thirty-minute long detour on Tatooine to rescue Han Solo (Harrison Ford) might just be an excuse to revisit what is arguably the franchise’s most iconic locale, but it definitely seems to be setting up Solo’s story to actually…go somewhere. But beyond helping to shut down the energy-shields surrounding the Death Star, Solo is largely unimportant to the story. He’s still great, because he’s Han Solo – but why was it so important that we spend half an hour saving him from the clutches of Jabba the Hutt, without any real payoff? Why, unless he was originally intended to do something essential, something heroic – something that would have resulted in his death, and thus fewer toys sold?

This is, unfortunately, the very same trap that J.J. Abrams and his team could fall into with The Rise Of Skywalker. Not with regard to toy sales, I don’t think, but they must similarly feel like ending their trilogy on anything other than a victorious high note would be disappointing after so much buildup. But I sincerely hope they have an incredible plan for the franchise’s climax, and it will be satisfyingly poignant, triumphant and original: if The Lord Of The Rings could end with a decent portion of the main cast setting sail into the West, than so can Star Wars!

There are a couple of characters for whom Return Of The Jedi is not a total mess: Princess Leia (Carrie Fisher), who is finally revealed as Luke Skywalker’s twin sister, and has some strong emotional moments handling the ramifications of that revelation – not to mention more action scenes than she’s ever had before or since, from single-handedly strangling Jabba the Hutt to a crazy speeder-bike chase through the forests of Endor, picking off stormtroopers; C-3PO (Anthony Daniels), who has one hilarious scene in which, mistaken for a deity by the Ewoks of Endor, he ends up nearly condemning Luke, Han and Chewbacca (Peter Mayhew) to become the main course at a sacrificial banquet in his honor, because he’s too polite to refuse; and the oft-quoted Admiral Akbar (Timothy Rose), the Mon Calamari alien who becomes the first high-ranking non-human member of the Rebellion, gets one infamous line of dialogue, and then is seen afterwards partying with the Ewoks. Good for him.

"Star Wars: Return Of The Jedi" Review! 8 — disneyplus.com

In Return Of The Jedi, George Lucas’ hand once again reaches in from the future to clumsily tinker with the special effects – and here, he has one particularly egregious use of CGI as well as one addition that I have to grudgingly admit is a nice way to keep continuity between all his trilogies. The former is the notorious addition of an entire alien musical number in Jabba’s palace, one which is apparently supposed to make the giant slug’s cavernous lair seem more like a family-friendly dance hall than a den of vice. The latter is the replacement of original Anakin Skywalker actor Sebastian Shaw’s Force-ghost with the likeness of Hayden Christensen, who portrayed Anakin in the prequel trilogy: while that change has always been controversial, I feel it’s actually a nice touch – as are the scenes of celebration in several prequel trilogy planets such as Naboo and Coruscant, lending the victory scene a larger, more epic scale. There’s also a couple of weird little alterations, from giving the Sarlacc a head to digitally shaving off Darth Vader’s eyebrows.

The connection between Darth Vader and Luke Skywalker is the original trilogy’s most powerful element, and the true heart of this story. Luke is faced with many struggles and temptations, and is eventually brought face-to-face with The Emperor (who probably makes a lot more sense if you know who and what he is, thanks to the prequels). Luke’s battle to resist the darkness within him is fiercely compelling. Darth Vader’s redemption might seem to come out of the blue, but it does make sense when viewed in the context of future movies – as Vader watched his son writhe in agony beneath The Emperor’s whips of hellfire, it was impossible for him not to see in his child’s face the tortured eyes of Padmé Amidala, Luke’s mother and the love of Vader’s life – the person for whom he had turned to the Dark Side in a desperate attempt to save her life, only to realize that by doing so, he had actually brought about her anguished, ruinous death. Hearing his son’s pleas and realizing in a blinding flash that The Emperor was solely responsible for all the grievances, betrayals and nightmares visited upon him and his family, Anakin rebelled in that moment, ridding the Skywalkers of The Emperor, who had been their demonic guardian for three generations, giving up his own life to save his and Padmé’s children. It’s powerful stuff. Granted, audiences back in 1983 didn’t know any of that backstory: however, even without the assist of the prequels, you can easily understand and appreciate the poetry of The Emperor being destroyed by his apprentice, just as all Sith are and always have been.

"Star Wars: Return Of The Jedi" Review! 9 — radiotimes.com

But of course, The Emperor is apparently returning in The Rise Of Skywalker…so does that make Vader’s sacrifice meaningless? Or is it a sign that as long as the Skywalker family exists in the galaxy, The Emperor’s malevolent spirit will haunt them? Probably best not to think about that yet.

In conclusion, Return Of The Jedi is not the best way to cap off a great trilogy, and not a good blueprint for The Rise Of Skywalker to follow – while there may be a handful of redeeming qualities in this movie, most of it is corrupted by the Dark Side of the Force.

Movie Rating: 5.9/10

December 12, 2019

“Star Wars: The Empire Strikes Back” Review!

To do that, we’re going to have to discuss spoilers for each of the eight films in the Saga, so…SPOILERS AHEAD.

Star Wars: The Empire Strikes Back

In Star Wars, the successor is always stronger than the predecessor: this is symbolized in both the Sith and the Jedi religions, where the apprentice always overcomes the master eventually, whether by force or fate – and it is symbolized in the film trilogies themselves, where each successive sequel is better than its precursor. And if A New Hope is the wise old Jedi master of Star Wars, then Empire is their fiery, free-spirited student (and that puts Last Jedi somewhere on an Anakin Skywalker level of chaotic energy).

A New Hope played by the rules, establishing a handful of lead characters, giving them a couple of fun, exhilarating obstacles to overcome, and then leaving them (and us, the audience) with a happy, satisfied feeling as we watched our plucky band of heroes rewarded with the highest honors. The Death Star had been destroyed, the terrible Darth Vader had been sent careening off into the depths of space, and Luke Skywalker (Mark Hamill) was, um, well, he was a Jedi or something, right?

Wrong. When Empire opens, it immediately establishes that the story is far from over, as the Rebellion finds themselves back on the battlefield, with Imperial forces surrounding them on all sides, hunting relentlessly for the man named Skywalker. Darth Vader (voiced by James Earl Jones) is back, with a terrifying new overlord vaguely referred to as the Emperor, and worst of all, Luke himself is caught in a hurricane of new emotions as he struggles between his desire to fulfill his Jedi training and his instinctive need to confront the power of the Darkness. Yes, while he might have been a beacon of hope and moral purity in A New Hope, Empire finds Luke wavering between good and evil, just as his father before him.

"Star Wars: The Empire Strikes Back" Review! 11 — cinemablend.com

That balancing act makes Empire a thoroughly satisfying movie from a thematic point of view, and gives Hamill and the character of Luke Skywalker plenty of fascinating material to work with – watching Luke confront reality and slowly begin to understand that his youthful dream to follow in his noble father’s footsteps will in fact lead him to the Dark Side is utterly thrilling: and the movie ends just when it needs to, with Darth Vader finally breaking the young Skywalker’s steadfast resolve and destroying all of his last, desperate delusions – forcing the audience, along with Luke, to see that the concept of “destiny” can be a curse as well as a blessing. I say again, this movie is thrilling.

In many ways, Empire is the precursor to the premise of The Last Jedi – it takes the established Star Wars canon, takes one look at it, and tosses it over its shoulder. But whereas the new trilogy has been plagued by a mess of many conflicting directorial visions and an unwillingness to follow through with Last Jedi‘s promise, George Lucas’ original trilogy wasn’t afraid to “go there”. It broke the sheen of romanticism that it had built around itself, took risks, and changed the direction of the franchise – for the better. But since it was only the second movie in the entire series, fans were willing to “forgive” all of that: eight movies in…not so much.

And it’s not like Empire just made the series a little darker and more mature. It did a lot – from introducing the series’ first black character in roguish, charming heartthrob Lando Calrissian (Billy Dee Williams), to retconning one of the first film’s central plot points and making Darth Vader Luke’s father without any explanation (nowadays, Fantastic Beasts fans complain about having to wait a year or two to find out how Credence is a Dumbledore: original Star Wars fans had to wait about two decades to get answers – no wonder they’re embittered!).

In The Empires Strikes Back, the Star Wars story also moves away from the science-fiction serials and TV shows it had been based on, by taking what could very easily have been an episodic story and turning it into…a story that is definitely not episodic, but still insists on categorizing itself into episodes anyway, even forty years later. Empire builds the foundations of what would become the Skywalker Saga, by giving Luke a personal stake in the story and pitting him against a worthy enemy in Darth Vader.

Duality. Remember that from my A New Hope review? Empire expands upon the concept by throwing in the big shocker that Darth Vader is Luke’s biological father, his mirror image on the Dark Side of the Force, and supposedly the destiny that awaits him too. Vader and Skywalker orbit each other in Empire, waiting for their inevitable moment of eclipse when one will destroy the other. They are two inextricably linked forces of nature, and the greatest champions that the Force can conjure (though, there’s been a lot of theorizing recently that The Mandalorian‘s Baby Yoda, born in roughly the same year as Anakin Skywalker, might actually have been Vader’s true equal and nemesis: a bit late for that reveal, I think, but interesting nonetheless).

"Star Wars: The Empire Strikes Back" Review! 12 — starwars.fandom.com

The theme of duality is also seen in the characters of Princess Leia (Carrie Fisher) and Han Solo (Harrison Ford) who have a tumultuous and similarly circuitous trajectory toward becoming the series’ defining love story. While they’ve definitely got a lot of chemistry and romantic tension as they huddle in the frozen tunnels of their Hoth base-camp, it’s only when they’re separated from Luke that things get really interesting in their relationship – not only because it prevents all the awkward accidental-incest that might have otherwise resulted, but because it gives Leia and Han a chance to solve problems on their own, without Skywalker flying in to save the day every two seconds. And it only gets more romantic when, after nearly being crushed to death in the mynock-infested mouth of a giant space-slug, Han takes Leia to safety in the Cloud City of Bespin, only to be betrayed to the Empire by his best friend, turned into a tabletop, and sold to another giant space-slug on the far side of the galaxy. Meanwhile, on a much smaller scale, C-3PO (Anthony Daniels) and R2-D2 (Kenny Baker), everyone’s favorite comedic duo, are separated and forced to survive mostly on their own – unintentionally mirroring each other’s hijinks from across the galaxy.

In Empire, we also get our first hint of Leia’s importance to the story and her mysterious connection to Luke, as she taps into the Force to see him hanging from the underbelly of Cloud City, just in time to rescue him (and yet we still pretend that Leia using the Force in The Last Jedi was a retcon). She is, of course, the infamous “another” that Yoda (voiced by Frank Oz) spoke of – the Skywalker who would outlive and outlast Luke, and maybe – just maybe – save the entire universe in its darkest hour. Since Empire, that has been Leia’s established destiny: her character arc, from those first few moments of force-sensitivity, has been leading her to a confrontation with the Dark Side, just like her brother. It’s no secret anymore that, if Carrie Fisher had not tragically passed away in 2016, she would probably have been revealed to be a Jedi in The Rise Of Skywalker, getting her very own lightsaber and wielding the Force. Depending on how much footage director J.J. Abrams was able to use of her in this film, she still might do some of that – but it’s hard to believe that we’ll see a conclusion to her story that doesn’t disappoint, considering what could have been.

"Star Wars: The Empire Strikes Back" Review! 13 — aminoapps.com

Well, that’s depressing. So…um…space battles, anyone?

Empire features some of the franchise’s most impressive action sequences, from the siege of Hoth (featuring one of my favorite Star Wars droids, the Viper probe) to the incredible, gravity-defying lightsaber duel between Darth Vader and Luke Skywalker in the Cloud City engine rooms, where words cut just as deep as weapons. It also introduced the world to bounty hunters like Boba Fett, who was so epic, he actually made a deal with Darth Vader to have Han Solo turned into a carbonite table and shipped to Jabba the Hutt in a flying iron, before being pushed into a Sarlacc pit on Tatooine and eaten…okay, forgive me for asking, but why did we all collectively decide to idolize Boba Fett? We’ve all been wondering why The Mandalorian is a pretty boring character, but has it occurred to anyone that they were never all that interesting? If I’m being honest, I was always more intrigued by that weird insectoid bounty hunter who showed up in one scene – who apparently was named Zuckuss? Yeah, I cared more about a bug-man named Zuckuss than I ever did about Boba Fett. Or his flying iron. Is no one going to explain why his spaceship was designed to look like an iron?

"Star Wars: The Empire Strikes Back" Review! 14 — starwars.fandom.com

Boba Fett’s iron isn’t the only weird thing about Empire, a movie that also features: Luke being abducted by a yeti and shoved into the stomach of a space kangaroo; Muppets from space twenty years before Muppets From Space; and Darth Vader’s bizarrely well-choreographed surprise dinner party. But I’m willing to suspend my disbelief long enough to enjoy this deliciously unpredictable morsel of a movie – one that makes you want to wash it down with a tall glass of Last Jedi; the only other movie in the Star Wars…(frantically searches for a word describing a group of nine)…nonad that mixes wonderment, drama and originality so perfectly.

Movie Rating: 9/10