The Last Starfighter (1984) Revisit

 

I love seeing older films on a real theater screen. As much as I might enjoy re-watching a favorite movie at home, seeing it on the big screen reminds me that it is not a video product but a theatrical experience that I can see on video when the optimum viewing experience is not available. "The Last Starfighter" is a movie from 1984, one of my favorite movie years. In fact, if you look on this page, you will see a link to a whole series I did almost a decade ago on a film year that was thirty years old at the time. Starfighter is an example of the 80s style Science Fiction that was so popular at the time. This year had a Star Trek Film, the first big screen adaptation of Dune, and "The Adventures of Buckaroo Banzai Across the Eighth Dimension". "The Last Starfighter" was also an early adopter of computer imagery to create environments for the story to take place in. 

Alex Rogan is a teen, dreaming of a different world , rather than the modest surroundings of the trailer park he lives in with his Mom and little brother Louis. He is a lot like Steve Rogers from the MCU, devoted to doing the right thing and willing to sacrifice for others. His Mom works as a waitress and they manage the park, which means Alex is the handyman. He has to be available to reboot an electrical panel, fix a leak, put up a TV antenna, you name it. It often means that he sacrifices time with his girlfriend Maggie, who lives in the park with her grandmother. "Starlight, StarBright" is the name of the trailer park, and there is a community that appreciates Alex and his friendship, but they are all a little quirky. Otis, who runs the little grocery store at the location, is an older, friendly mentor to Alex, who sees his potential and tries to keep Alex from despair of ever getting out. One night, Alex gets started playing the lone arcade game in the facility, "Starfighter", which he has mastered and seems to be a natural at. As he gets close to breaking the record, Otis calls all the residents out to cheer him on, and the sleepy little community gets a collective chance to celebrate Alex and his achievement. It might seem a corny and improbable moment, except it is set up by seeing how Alex has interacted with everyone and how all the residents are in each other's business to some degree.  His victory seems short lived as his Mom delivers the news that his application for student loans has been turned down and he will be doomed to the local community college and staying at the trailer park.

This is when the story takes off. It turns out that the video game is actually a recruiting tool for pilots who might be able to fight with the Star League. The nostalgic home front has been established nicely, now it is time for Alex to show what he is made of. The recruiter is Centauri, played with ebullient enthusiasm by Music Man Robert Preston. He turns on the flim flam man charm and his character punches the energy level of the story into the next gear. As usual, the hero has doubts, hesitates to step forward and seemingly withdraws from consideration. It is only when he is confronted by the threat to himself and the planet he is from, including his little community, that he fully commits. 

The hero needs a mentor and a connection to the new culture that is asking him to save. Grig, a lizard like alien with a wife and 6000 little griglings, is played by another old pro, Dan O'Herlihy. Even under a prodigious amount of makeup, O'Herlihy gives a lively performance conveying warmth and humor. The byplay between Alex and Grig is full of those moments that are in every hero movie, but they are underscored with a lot of laughter, and the two warriors seem destined to achieve "Victory or Death" as the other now dead starfighters chanted. 

The effects in the film are primitive by today's standards. The planets, asteroids exterior structures look like early video games. The Starships on the other hand are solid. Centauri's vehicle looks like a DeLorean on steroids, the Xur fighters are distinctly designed to distinguish them from the Kodan ships. The Kodan ships look like early renderings of the fighters in the Star Wars Prequels. Alex's Gun-Star is the most interesting ship design, and the secret new weapon system is deployed at a key moment and it is fun to watch. 

The battles are important, but the heart of the story is back on Earth in the Starlight, Starbright trailer park. At the close of the film, we see Maggie and Alex resolve their conflicts, reach for the dream they both have, and they inspire his little brother to start dreaming himself. Some in the audience at last night's screening laughed a bit at the corny moments of the community, but I saw that this is where the real battles were being fought by Alex. All of the intended humor still works, and even the derisive laughs coming from some audience members did not seem to bother the nearly sold out house for this terrific 1984 film. 

Furious 7 (2015) Revisit

 

So this is the one with the parachuting cars and the cars that fly from one building to another. Abu Dhabi, Tokyo and Colorado serving as a stand in for the Caucasus Mountains are the setting, until the conclusion where Los Angeles gets the treatment that London got in the previous film. This is one that I actually saw when it was released in 2015. 

In addition to the convoluted spy plot, the pyrotechnics and the physics defying car stunts, we get evil Jason Statham, as a mass killing machine who is as implacable as the Terminator, and slippery Kurt Russell, as a government agent so secretive, we don't even know his name. The team of Torretto and company have gone full blown spycraft now, and the macguffin technology and secondary villain are almost forgotten in light of all the crazy stunts, chases, and unfortunately, the cinematic illusion of making Paul Walker look like he was there for the whole time. This is the one they were filming when he died in a mysterious high speed crash in Santa Clarita. 

The main difference in this film is that there is only one car race that is planned as a race rather than a chase. Usually, the team would have to strap up their cars to go out and obtain cars for the heist they are planning. Here the joke is that they have enough money of their own, and the resources of the U.S. government, to get all the tech they need without having to steal it or win it. There is a time glitch in the story also, this film seems to take place right after "Tokyo Drift", so that film chronologically must come after Fast 5 and Furious 6. 

There is an early showdown with Statham's Deckard Shaw, which end up taking Dwayne Johnson's Hobbs out of the plot for 80 % of the movie. That first fight is all hand to hand combat and the two have an amazing choregraphed fight scene, that if it were real, would leave any of us mere mortals dead. Of course these two are not mere mortals, and they are in a movie, and there will be another showdown. The second massive fight sequence gives Statham a chance to rough up Vin Diesel before having a concrete garage dumped on him. Of course he will survive for the next film, and the sp[in-off that is coming. Michelle Rodriguez gets to face another woman MMA champion, Rhonda Rousey, in a cool fight in a luxury building in Abu Dhabi. That one is also full of punishing hits that would wipe most human out of furter action, at least for the duration of the film.

Djimon Hounsou  is a secondary bad guy named Mose Jakande: A Nigerian-born mercenary and terrorist who leads a private military company that allies with Shaw, He does not get much to do except scream from a helicopter and shout orders. Maybe it's in his contact that he doesn't have to go fisticuffs with a behemoth twice his size. 

The parachuting cars come early in the movie, and once that scene happens, nothing else can be taken seriously. People complain about the 007 film "Die Another Day", but they can accept this silly element. That's probably because the "Fast and Furious" films have never felt particularly real, and we began accepting the more outlandish elements way too soon in the story line. Just pass the popcorn, and let's not ptretend these are great movies, they are just great entertainment.  

Furious Six [AKA Fast and Furious 6] 2013

 

While the movie can't quite decide what it's title is, that fits because it also can't decide on what sort of film it is. Is it a heist film, a spy film a racing film, who knows? Maybe since it has all of those elements we should not be too worried about classifying it, and more worried about the whiplash we get as we move from one action sequence to another. Maybe the transitions are supposed to be made easier by the brutal fight scenes that break out around them. 

Logic aside, Furious 6 has some great things going for it. The return of Dwayne Johnson gives the extended plotline a little more coherence. Johnson drips charisma and he gives Vin Diesel someone to act against who disappears into the scenery. This time he is accompanied by another DSS agent, in the form of Gina Carano, another actor with charisma to match the counterparts on Dom's team. Carano's character, Agent Riley,  engages in an extended fight with Michelle Rodriguez's Letty in the London Underground. These characters are as brutal as any man would be in a similar fight, and I suppose the justification for this is so Letty can have some combat scenes and not have to be pounded on by one of her male co-stars. The resolution of Riley's storyline is disappointing because she could have been a compelling recurring character. I guess they have enough of those already, so adding to the reoccurring cast was undesirable. 

Location shooting in London looks great, and as a Bond fan, I always appreciate when Great Britan is featured at the center of a spy story. The villain of this episode is Owen Shaw, played by Luke Evans, and his character is basically Bond gone bad. As if Dr. No persuaded double o seven to join SPECTRE and commit international terrorism on a scale only dwarfed by the events of 9/11. Most of London gets bruised in the early section of the film, and then Spain gets the destruction of hundreds of cars with passengers in them for a chase scene involving a tank. I've read that the tank crushing of the cars was real and not just a CGI animation. I can believe it because the weight and mass of a tank in comparison to some European sedan would be massive. There was an incident several years ago where a deranged Army Vet stole a tank and decimated a neighborhood in San Diego. You can see in the news footage that a tank can in fact run over a car with impunity. Where the scene gets it wring is in the use of a couple of cars to try and anchor the tank so it will flip. It is also a big stretch to see Dom, flying through the air to catch Letty and then landing safely on the road. 

A good suspenseful climax that gets drawn out by a series of complications is always welcome, but it needs to be somewhat grounded. The plane/car chase here is just not acceptable for suspense purposes, but it is fine for spectacular action. Cars getting on and off a plane, a harpoon gun taking down the whale of a cargo jet, and an extended fight sequence in the belly of the plane are all fun but at no point do you think this is going to come out wrong for our heroes. Even the apparent death of one of the female crew is nearly dreamlike, we never see the outcome, just a moment of vanishing, but into the dark and we are not sure how far of a fall is there. Characters in this series get revived from the dead all the time, so i would not "Wonder" if a certain actress were to return in a future film. 

The best payoff in this movie is the thirty seconds of Jason Statham, glaring at the camera and scowling as he makes a threatening phone call that will set up the action in the next film. I think the best way for me to keep track of these movies which are all fun but forgettable, is to check the location and stunt moments. Furious 6: London Car Flipping, Spanish Tank Chase, NATO base with the longest runway in the world and a car plane chase. There, that should help you remember more than Letty does for most of this film. 

Fast Five (2011)

 

Next week brings us the Tenth film in the "Fast and Furious" saga, a series that I never could have imagined when it opened twenty years ago, that would still be going strong. This premise has been used to give us race centered movies, gangster films, spy films and heist films. Scratch Vin Diesel and under the surface you may find another genre struggling to get out. There is always the "Family" drama going on, but this is never going to be "Ordinary People" or "Terms of Endearment". 

In getting ready to see the newest film, I thought it would be fun to go back and finally see all of the other movies. After the first film, I did not return to the series until the sixth movie. Six, Seven, Eight and Nine all have posts on this site already. We burned through the first four at home on video so they did not really demand a commentary from me since the majority of the posts here are based on a theatrical experience [Special Projects Excepted] .  I was looking up times for next week when I noticed the local Cinemark, was playing all of the films in succeeding nights. This timed out well for me so the next three days will have "Fast Five",  "Fast and Furious 6" and "Furious 7" filling this spot. [The 8th and 9th films conflict with some other activities].

This is the entry where Brian has finally shed any connection to law enforcement, and having engineered Dom's escape from prison, finds him and Mia on the lam in South America. So the action for most of this film is centered in Rio de Janeiro. There is substantially less street racing than in the previous films as the movies transition to more heist related story lines. In this case, a car theft from a moving train starts the action, but it is the briefest part of the heist chronology, serving only to introduce us to more complicated thefts down the script. 

The other element that makes this film noteworthy is that this is the movie where Dwayne Johnson becomes part of the universe. The former "Rock" is set to be a fixture for five more of these films but this is the one where it started. Johnson's character Luke Hobbs is a U.S. Agent sent to catch the team, not realizing that they are in the midst of a heist to bring down a bigger fish that the DOJ and State Department would love to bag. In this series, enemies become allies, the dead return to the world of the living, and there is always a double cross or plot twist down the road. Let's just say that when Dawyne Johnson bursts into the movie, the whole film comes to life with a voltage high charge of charisma. 

Eventually there will be a mano a mano showdown, and the two behemoth actors of Johnson and Diesel, will pound on one another for several minutes, but don't expect them to stay permanently at odds for the whole film. Brian's character has already abandoned the LAPD and the DEA and FBI, so it is problematic to have Johnson fully commit to a life of crime as well. The truce that gets made will also set up Johnson's return in the following films. The other agents that Hobbs supervises are basically red shirts that do not go on to have bigger roles in the next caper. 

The car stunts are thrilling but they do get progressively more outlandish with each film after this one. While some of the chases and heist moments are over the top, it does not reach the level of incredulous disbelief until the final sequence when Brian and Dom essentially take a giant safe and turn it into a wrecking ball for the streets of Rio. We are lucky they could not scale  Corcovado , otherwise Christ the Redeemer might have been brought down. 

The term "popcorn movie" perfectly describes these films, which don't have serious content, weighty themes or intellectual depth. They do have great entertainment value and the technical crews and logistics of making a film like this are nothing to sneeze at, unlike the plots. 

KAMAD Throwback Thursdays 1975: Return to Macon County

Throwback Thursday #TBT

Throwback Thursday on the KAMAD site will be a regular occurrence in the next year. As a motivational project, to make sure I am working on something, even in a week where I don't see a new film in a theater, I am going to post on movies from 1975. Along with 1984, this is one of my favorite years for movies and it is full of bittersweet memories as well. 1975 was my Senior Year in High School and my Freshman Year in College. The greatest film of the last 60 years came out in 1975, as well as dozens of great and not so great cinematic endeavors. Most of the films in this weekly series will have been seen in a theater in 1975, but there are several that I only caught up with later. I hope you all enjoy. 

Return to Macon County

On my original project, I did a post on "Macon County Line", an semi-exploitation film that I remembered pretty well and it was surprisingly good. This is a second film with a similar premise, but it is not a sequel and no one from the first film appears in this film. The main connection between the films is that it was written and directed by the same man who co wrote and directed the first film, Richard Compton. Compton was primarily a tv director who did shows like "The Equalizer", "Miami Vice, and "Babylon 5". He was also Married to actress Veronica Cartwright for over 25 years, she of "Alien" and "The Right Stuff" fame. 

The original " Macon County Line"was a big success and it lead to a lot of drive-in material about the dangers of traveling while young in the South. It probably is a descendant of a movie like "Easy Rider", but with a simpler story that is more nostalgic than anything else. Instead of two anti-heros giving the bird to the man, both "Macon County Line and Return to Macon County feature attractive young me, traveling in by car, who acquire an attractive girl for their road trip, and then complications ensue. 

"Return to Macon County" features the debut film appearance of actor Nick Nolte and a second 1975 film from Don Johnson ["A Boy and His Dog" will be featured later this year on KAMAD TBT]. Both of these guys would go on to substantial fame and fortune and they continue to work today. Robin Mattson, the waitress they take with them on the road is played by Robin Mattson, who did a lot of television in the following years and has been feature on numerous soap operas. 

Mattson's character Junel, is a wild card girl, who impulsively joins them on the road and turns out to be a love interest for Nolte, but also the source of the plot complications. She comes equipped with a gun, and she feels compelled to recklessly brandish and  discharge it in a number of situations, that make everything worse for the characters. Let's just say it becomes a chase film, with a few car crashes and clever escapes along the way.

The three of them are pursued by a local gang of toughs who lost a race, welched on a bet and beat up Johnson's character. There is a local sheriff, from Macon County of course, who also gets bested by the hod rod driving fugitives, and disobeys orders to give up the chase and he pursues them across state lines. The movie meanders from incident to incident, with some romantic clutches along the way, including a rendezvous that Johnson has with a woman at a motel. There is a brief moment of nudity in that scene, and it only gets a PG rating in 1975. 

It would be expected that the resolution of the story would be tragic ala "Easy Rider" and "Dirty Mary, Crazy Larry". In fact there is a confrontation and a death, and lives ruined at the end, but it goes in a direction that is unexpected and lets us have a happy ending to some degree. It is not nearly as good as "Macon County Line" was, but it is an innocuous way to spend ninety minutes. In 1975, getting out of the house, going to a drive in with a romantic partner, and watching an undemanding movie, was everyone's idea of a good night out. 

The movie is on You Tube, I don't know if it is pirated or not, but below is a link if you want to tale a look. 

Guardians of the Galaxy Volume 3

 

Writer/Director James Gunn has had an off the wall sensibility throughout his career. He originally made films for Troma, so that makes sense. When he took on the task of making "Guardians of the Galaxy" into an entity that would fit into the MCU, that was going to be a stretch, but he managed it very well. He is now taking over the DC Universe, and with any luck, he will get that portfolio of characters into shape. The thing that I find a little surprising is that despite his off kilter sense of humor and story telling, his films in this series have largely succeeded because they have an emotional heart at the center, not just some twisted sense of humor. In the original Guardians Volume, the disparate characters come together to form a team. The sacrifice of one of the team members to save the others, and then the follow-up of standing together to hold an Infinity Stone, was heart warming. In Volume 2, Quill finally reaches Gamora, and even more importantly, discovers that your Daddy may not be your father. Once again, the loss of a character drives the emotional conclusion of the film. Yondu may not be practically perfect, but we want to remember him as Mary Poppins anyway.

Why then should anyone be surprised that Volume 3 would be the biggest emotional touchstone in the series? This is the climax of the storyline of the original Guardians, and there were clearly going to be some tears somewhere. Well, they start early and keep on coming. The biggest sobs will be had over the backstory of the most hardened of the Guardians, Rocket. The opening of the film features a sad and morose Rocket, singing along with the sad and morose song from Radiohead, Creep. WE then go to a flashback to see when Rocket became transformed from what we know as a raccoon, to something more. This becomes the structure for most of the film. Every few scenes we come back to Rocket's origin story and it becomes sadder as we go along. Years ago, it was suggested that Andy Serkis deserved some Oscar attention for his motion capture performance as Gollum in the "Lord of the Rings" films. I know that Rocket is not a motion capture of actor Bradley Cooper, but is instead a digital animation, but Cooper gives an equally great non-screen performance as the tortured hero. His anger issues and insecurity are as much conveyed by the vocal work her as any of the visual cues. These are the kinds of moments that elevate these movies past the realm of being mere cartoons, to being something we can care deeply about and become a character we can embrace.

As central to the story as Rocket's history is, we also get a post mortem tale of a love lost. Peter Quill and Gamora both still exist, but because Gamora is a character from a different time line, the love that existed between the two no longer exists. Peter is in love with the memory of Gamora, and the current version is a ghost that haunts him with loss and feeds him with false hope. The story does not resolve itself in the way that one might hope, in spite of the potential. This is another step in the closure of the original Guardians story. All of the Guardians get some kind of closure to their current story arc, which is exactly the kind of thing you want in a capstone film like this. Drax, Nebula and Mantis have new paths to follow, and they make sense, although the time devoted to those stories is not as great as the two main points. The script also sets up some future storylines with some of the characters, and some of the tangential characters that are suddenly a part of the team.

The traditional plot points involve two villains, Adam Warlock and the High Evolutionary. Adam is the creation of "The Sovereign", the elitist culture the Guardians crossed paths with in Volume 2. If you were not paying attention at the end of the previous film, you may have missed the rise of this potential threat. The High Evolutionary is the main villain however, and he is gleefully played by Shakespearean actor Chukwudi Iwuji. By the end of the film, his character has become one of the most reprehensible foes in the whole MCU. Iwuji plays him with a light touch at first, but as circumstances become more complicated, the character becomes even more insufferable, prompting cheers when in a penultimate moment, Rocket gets to face him, or maybe I should say, deface him. If you think that Michael Vick got off lightly for his abuse of dogs, you will be happy to know that this character, the Joseph Stalin of animal genocide, gets treated exactly as he should be.

Some of the things that work well in this chapter include the amusing insertion of Nathan Fillion as a security officer in a strange uniform, but with the same problems that every supervisor has. The sections of the film featuring Rocket are frequently shot from what would be his eye level, so we are even more immersed in his story. The sequence where the Guardians penetrate the headquarters of the corporation that the High Evolutionary controls, and it's living tissue structure, is filled with amusing moments as well as tension. Star-Lord plants the seeds of his always lucky exit strategies and we cheer them on. The most spectacular sequence is a hallway fight (which seems to be almost a cliché these days) where the Guardians take on a throng of opponents in a low gravity environment. It is shot for 3D, and I saw it in both 2D and 3D formats. It looks spectacular in each, and even if you see the traditional two dimensional version, it still looks like a 3D experience.

There are a couple of reservations that I have about the movie. The needle drop songs that were so perfect is the first two films, are just not as engaging in this one. Many of the song choices are from the 90s rather than the earlier decades that Peter knew from his time on earth. I don't think we feel much attachment to them, and frankly, as an older fan, I don't have the same appreciation for those tunes as I did for the choices in Volume 1 and 2. There is no "Brandy", "Come and Get Your Love" or "The Chain" moment that stands out. The closest I came to feeling those vibes was when the Beasty Boys "No Sleep Till Brooklyn" gets deployed. Maybe the song choices will grow on me as I extend my relationship with the film. The other reservation I have is the utilization of a herd of children at the climax of the story. In some ways it feels like Drax is being dropped into "Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome". In the end it turns out okay, but if there is emotional manipulation that is not earned in the movie, this is where it is located.

Of all the Marvel films focused on specific characters, the Guardians films have been the most consistent in tone. Volume 3 delivers the humor we want with spectacular space based action. There are weird creatures and amazing technology that is visualized in a production design that should not only appeal to the audience, but should get some artistic recognition as well. The Orgoscope headquarters is imaginative as heck, and the idea of Knowhere operating as a vehicle and not just a destination is fun, and it allows us to see more of the design of a giant Celestial skull as a city in space. I love the character of Kraglin, as a fledgling Guardian and the interactions with Cosmos, the Soviet Space dog are frankly just up my alley. This movie certainly satisfied me. It brought a tear or two to my eye, and I felt emotionally fulfilled as opposed to emotionally manipulated. There is lots to see here, so I have no doubt I will be seeing it a lot. 

KAMAD Throwback Thursdays Special Edition 1983: Return of the Jedi

 Throwback Thursday #TBT

Throwback Thursday on the KAMAD site will be a regular occurrence in the next year. As a motivational project, to make sure I am working on something, even in a week where I don't see a new film in a theater, I am going to post on movies. This week only, we are taking a break from 1975 and jumping ahead almost a decade. This is the fourth day of May, and as many Star Wars fans refer to it, "May the 4th be with You". I happened to have seen a Star wars film in the theater this week, and so in honor of May the 4th falling on a Thursday this year, I decided to post about it today.

Return of the Jedi

Since this is a #TBT post, there will be a lot of nostalgic story telling as well as an assessment of the film as it stands in 2023. I first saw "Return of the Jedi" in it's opening engagement at the Egyptian Theater in Hollywood California. 

It opened on May 25th, 1983 and there was a midnight show for everyone who wanted to get the jump on seeing it. My best friend Art Franz and I got in line at two in the afternoon the day before. The line went around the block and we sat on the sidewalk behind the theater for the day. Sometime after five pm, we were joined by our spouses who were equally excited to see the movie. Tickets did not go on sale until an hour before the show was supposed to start. Sometime around 11 pm, the rest of a local fraternity showed up and met with the one pledge they had sent to stand in line. Needless to say, there were a lot of people who were unhappy, and folks who had been there for ten hours already were being bumped from the first show. That included us. However, for the first weekend, the Egyptian was running the film on a 24 hour cycle. So we missed getting into the Midnight show, but there was a 3am screening and we all made it in for that. You would think we would all be fighting to stay awake from three to five in the morning, but the adrenaline was high for us, we had waited three years to see what was coming.  We were all quite stoked when the film was over, and we made arrangements to see Art and his wife Kathy, later that day to see the film again, out where they lived. Dolores and I walked out of the Egyptian, just after five thirty, and saw that the line for the six am show had already gone in, and the box office was open, so we bought tickets, walked in and saw a back to back screening of the film. When we got home at around 10 am, we collapsed for a few hours, and then headed to West Covina, to meet up with our friends for what was out third screening of the film in the first 24 hours. 

Six months earlier, I had gone Christmas shopping for a traditional gift at our house, movie posters. At the shop in Hollywood that I usually went to [Hollywood Book and Poster] I scored a copy of the poster for the upcoming third Star Wars film, "Revenge of the Jedi". I paid a nominal price and went home happy with my purchase. Days later it was announced that the title had changed to "Return of the Jedi" and I now had a collectors item that people were paying a premium for. In 2014, I was able to have my item signed by artist Drew Struzan, the man who painted the famous image. 

Drew signing my poster while I chat.

Enough now with the history, let's talk about the movie. This last week, "Return of the Jedi" has been playing on 475 screens in honor of the 40th anniversary of the film. It ranked number four at the box office as a forty year old film. I think I can tell you why. My screening was a four pm show on a Tuesday, there were maybe twenty people there. Three families with kids, a handful of thirty year old geeks, and three or four of us oldsters. This is a chance for the next generation to see the movies from a franchise they love, in their natural habitat. 

Unfortunately, the version of the film that is playing is the 1997 "Special Edition" which is where George Lucas tinkered with a few elements to tweak the film. I don't think all of the changes are terrible, but I prefer the original version of a film like this, everytime. The two scenes that are most irritating in their revisionism include a music/vocal performance in Jabba's palace, and a beaklike mouth extruding from the sarlacc pit. There is also one final change at the end of the film that makes no sense except for marketing the prequel films. In the 2004 video release, the actor playing Anakin Skywalker was replaced in his "spirit" form by Hayden Christenson, who played Vader at a younger age. It's counter intuitive even if it is ridiculous in the first place.

"Return of the Jedi" is sometimes ranked as the least of the Star Wars films, at least by people who have never seen any of the prequel films. It is criticized for some clunky dialogue and performances that are not always as strong as they could be. Most people object to the Ewoks, as if they were a marketing tool for toys, rather than a twist in the story line. I can't say that the dialogue issues are not there, they are. Han and Lando stumble through some exchanges that just sound awkward. Luke has to skip over exposition to keep the plot driving forward. Carrie Fisher does the best she can with some of the moments that she is given, but her character arc is a little light in exposition during the film.  On the other hand, I will defend the Ewoks, the idea of a primitive culture, fighting against a technologically advanced culture is intriguing.   The reason it is distracting is because the Ewoks themselves are just so darn cute, they look like teddy bears in most of the sequences. That appearance is part of the deception, and it also allows us to invest in characters that are not speaking a language we understand. When some of them go down in battle in the final act, we have to feel that loss and the way they look is a shortcut to those emotional points.

Regardless of the dialogue or the Ewoks, the film is technically amazing. The battle around the second Death star is complex with some spectacular moments. The three tiered battle conflict was managed very well, although the timing on the attack run on the reactor has to be forgiven for taking as long as it does. Meanwhile, there is a fun and effective ground battle sequence that has some clever moments, some comedy moments and a couple of moments to tug on our heartstrings. The best of all however, is the fight between Vader and Luke with the Emperor in the Death Star Throne room. Mark Hamill gets to do his best work in the series in this sequence, tipping between the light and the dark side of the force and finally finding the will to choose and sealing his destiny and creating a redemption moment for Darth Vader. John Williams score here is fantastic, with an ominous undercurrent and a chorus like refrain.   The moment that Vader takes to choose between Luke and the Emperor is played out with great patience and a couple of cuts that magnify the choice, even in the climax of the film. 

The opening sequence of the movie, with the rescue of Han from the clutches of Jabba the Hut is iconic. Han as wall art, Leia passing herself off as a bounty hunter was great, but of course later as a slave in a gold bikini, it is priceless. All of our favorite characters get a moment to shine in this section. The aliens from a thousand worlds are good background and make nice fodder for Luke and his Light saber. Although I watched the Boba Fett  streaming series, I'm just going to believe that he is still being digested inside the sarlacc. The sail barge was so much fun and it has the swashbuckling elements that make these films catnip for me.

I can see the seams and imperfections more clearly now, after forty years of reflection, but the story arc is not a problem, and the characters followed the paths that seem most satisfying. The film looks great, and it does not need those "improvements" that have been added over time. I continue to hope that someday, Disney will find a way to restore the original films and release them on home media, but until then, I still have my Laserdiscs which contain the films in their original form.