Early in Return of the Jedi, Luke Skywalker (Mark Hamill) and his band of rebels are back on Tatooine, where Jabba the Hutt, a gluttonous slug who presides over the criminal underground like a late Roman emperor, is keeping Han Solo (Harrison Ford) frozen in carbonite. By trade and trickery, they attempt to pry Han loose from Jabba’s clutches, but all they succeed in doing is getting captured, one by one, and making the beast angrier. But rather than kill them outright, Jabba enslaves Princess Leia (Carrie Fisher, looking less comfortable than any human in history) and condemns the other to the Dunes, where they will be fed to a giant worm-like beast called the sarlacc.
“In his belly,” announces Jabba, “you will find a new definition of pain and suffering, as you will be digested over 1,000 years.”
Forty years ago, the sarlacc seemed like the gnarliest creature in the galaxy, treating its victims to a hell that only just begins when they walk the plank and drop into the abyss of its hungry maw. Now, the sarlacc feels more like a metaphor for the Star Wars franchise itself, which keeps grinding ceaselessly away at its own mythology, leaving no small bone or tendon undigested. Even the bounty hunter Boba Fett, a minor character dropped into the pit and presumably gone forever, had his own mediocre series on Disney+.
Yet Return of the Jedi, for all its flaws, still has the power to bring you back to a time when Star Wars was an event, a cohesive and awe-inspiring piece of world-building that hadn’t yet started to deconstruct itself. It was also firmly in the hands of its creator, George Lucas, who would mothball the entire series for 16 years until tackling the prequels, with Disney’s sequel trilogy coming another 11 years after those ended. The gaps between trilogies are large enough to allow for generational attachments to each one, but the integration of the entire Star Wars universe over time has had the effect of eroding rather than enriching the experience. There’s hardly a beat that hasn’t been significantly worked out.
One of the problems with Return of the Jedi is that the franchise had already started to eat its own tail. In the original Star Wars, the Rebel Alliance went to incredible lengths to seek out vulnerabilities in the Galactic Empire’s planet-zapping Death Star and destroy it. (Just intercepting the blueprints for the Death Star would lead to a prequel movie, Rogue One, and perhaps the best of the Disney+ series, Andor.) Return of the Jedi is ultimately about the Rebel Alliance going to incredible lengths to seek out vulnerabilities in the rebuilt Death Star, which either says something profound about history repeating itself or is more simply a case of Lucas returning to the well.
Nevertheless, Return of the Jedi carries a lot of momentum from The Empire Strikes Back, the best of all the Star Wars movies, which leaves it in a place where Luke has to pick himself back up from revelations about his father and the Empire’s renewed strength in crushing the resistance. As a Jedi-in-training, Luke has gained power that’s coupled with uncertainty, because he’s not in full command of a Force that Darth Vader and the Emperor intend to use to lure him to the dark side. Fate has dictated that Luke and Darth Vader will have a father-son relationship, but the terms are under violent negotiation.
With the completion of the new Death Star a priority for the Empire – being a contractor for the Emperor is maybe the worst job in the universe – the rebels have to plot another unlikely mission to destroy the reactor at its core. But first they have to get past the impenetrable shield protecting the space station, which is rooted on the forest moon of Endor. The Empire is fully anticipating every step of this plan, but the rebels make allies of the Ewoks, the cuddly, merchandisable teddy bears who live on Endor, to say nothing of the beds of every child under 10 in America.
The action set pieces in Return of the Jedi rarely have the same impact as the highlights from the previous two films, with nothing like the excitement of Luke’s climactic shot at the reactor in Star Wars or the attack of those all-terrain “walkers” in The Empire Strikes Back, with their imposing, Ray Harryhausen-esque jankiness. The one pulse-quickening event here takes advantage of the Endor’s gorgeous forest setting with speeder bikes zipping around (and into) trees with the immensity of California redwoods. But it remains an odd choice to relegate Han Solo mostly to the sidelines here, especially after Lucas and Ford had helped redefine the modern adventure movie a couple of summers earlier with Raiders of the Lost Ark.
Yet Return of the Jedi is more concerned with emotional payoffs than interstellar thrills, which puts Luke’s identity – as a son, as a brother and as a Jedi – front and center as the series completes its arc. Lucas has sound reason to cash out on the massive investment viewers have made on these characters over three films, and how you feel about Return of the Jedi tends to relate strongly to how you feel about the episodes that preceded it. Luke’s visit with his fading mentor Yoda on Dagobah, the recasting of his relationship with Leia and his final light saber duel with Vader complete a hero’s journey with an affirmation of the themes that had guided the trilogy to this point – loyalty, decency, redemption, self-sacrifice, friendship and family. It all seemed more affecting 40 years ago.
