Director: Richard Marquand
Cast: Mark Hamill, Harrison Ford, Carrie Fisher**, Ian McDiarmid
Have I Seen It Before?: Any number of times, with any number of different celebration scenes at the end.
Did I like it?: It’s generally regarded as the weakest film in the original trilogy. I would tend to agree, but I am left wondering why.
The climactic (or semi-climactic, thanks to the films in the sequel trilogy) battle between Luke Skywalker (Hamill) and his father, Darth Vader (David Prowse in the suit, Sebastian Shaw once his helmet is removed, and James Earl Jones via voice in the suit) is among the greatest in the series. For years, the Ewoks felt like the most annoying thing that happened to the series, before the prequels made them look absolutely charming by comparison. Also, the series once again ret-conned large swaths of its mythos to shoehorn in the twist that Princess Leia (Fisher) and Luke Skywalker are actually twin siblings.
All of these can be forgiven, especially when considered in the larger context of the series, but I think the real flaw is that the emotional stakes, at least for me, were never fully established, or I never fully bought into them.
Sure, the Rebellion is on the brink of collapse, and the thin possibility of the redemption of Vader hangs over everything, but for years I never believed that Luke was ever in any real danger of turning to the dark side. He had always been portrayed as so morally pure, and not until the last frantic moments of the duel with his father do I get a sense that he could be corrupted in the service of his friends.
That was, of course, until my viewings of it more recently. Of the three main protagonists through the course of the Skywalker saga (Anakin, Luke, and Rey), Luke seems as if he is the furthest on his journey to the dark side.
Consider, he is dressed in a black outfit for the entirety of the film. Not exactly the light robes of a nascent Jedi Knight. Also, the sequence rescuing Han Solo (Ford) from Jabba the Hutt seems like an overlong effort to walk back the cliffhanger from The Empire Strikes Back (1980), but his band of rebels hesitates not one whit to destroy not only the admittedly vile gangster, but everyone else on board his pleasure skiff. Thieves, gangsters, and other odious ones for the most part, but are there not slaves on board worthy of resuce? Any smugglers? In another world where Han had made good on his deliveries to Jabba, would he have met his end there along with everyone else? It’s a minor act of mass murder for someone who killed several million Imperials on the first Death Star***, but Darth Farmboy is way farther along on his journey toward the Dark Side than I was initially led to believe.
That he is still able to pull out of this descent into evil only raises the film in my estimation. Maybe it is still the weakest of the trilogy it has the bad luck of closing, but if it continues to improve with age, it may one day exceed its predecessors.
*I watched the unaltered versions available on the 2006 “limited edition” DVDs. See my review for Star Wars – Episode IV: A New Hope (1977) for further thoughts on this.
**I keep wanting to give her higher billing, but I feel like I have to wait for the sequel trilogy for that, and I don’t thinkthat is my fault.
***Of which—despite any debate in Clerks (1994)—I have to believe at least some were trying to work their way out of the Empire’s clutches.