Saga Unpopular Star Wars opinions!

Maybe even pretty unpopular:
No Star Wars movie benefits as much from nostalgia bias as Return of the Jedi and - at least nowadays - seems to be no serious target for accusations in terms of being too telling-time wasting (Jabba's Palace), too family friendly/merchandisy (Ewoks) and too copying (Death Star II) which it would be for sure if it came out after the prequels. I go even a step further: only the arc on the DS II with Palpatine, Vader and Luke plus the epic space battle really save this movie from being "just a weaker sequel installment to ANH and TESB".

 

ROTJ is usually considered the lesser of the original trilogy. It also contains the worst retcon of the Lucas era (Leia as a sister). However, it benefits from the fall of the Republic shown in the prequels. Prior to that, I'd never been too impressed by the Emperor. I know these days everyone likes to blame modern special effects for the movie woes but I think ROTJ in particular could've been improved had the more powerful special effects been available. Lucas's original idea was to have it set on Coruscant with multiple Death Stars (instead of just one). It could've been epic.

 

ROTJ was pretty divisive back in the day. In a way I don't recall with the first 2 films.

 

Of all the original six, ROTJ has the most amount of scenes I want to skip during the marathon. Not even TPM is that tedious. Maybe because you can feel Lucas was glad to return to his universe and explorer before it was torn apart by various calamaties whereas ROTJ leaves an impression key people involved (Ford?) just wanted this to be over.

 

my personal unpopular opinion is that Empire Strikes Back is put on a pedestal, and I think some felt the tonal shift to ROTJ too jarring.
I don't suppose the people that consider ESB to be a masterpiece were particularly too happy to have 'teddy bears' (their words) going around defeating Storm Troopers.

I myself don't mind the different tonal shifts in the SW movies, it stops them being relatively flat to me. One of the only problems I have with the Nolan Batman movies is that they all feel like one long, and at times lifeless, movie

 

I agree—ROTJ has terrible pacing (the Tatooine and much of the Endor sections reeeeeeeeaaaaaaally drag, while the Dagobah and throne room sections could’ve been longer), and much of it has a “let’s get this over with” feel to it.

 

Mutch of ROTJ feels fake and is filmed like it was done poorly. Forest and Dessert looks fan made.

 

This scene in the hangar always stands out to me because the background looks too much like an obvious matte painting. In general ROTJ feels like it aged worse than TESB due to a number of flat backgrounds and green screen effects.

 

Yeah, I agree with this entirely.

 

But it was the real desert! And the real forest! Because that's what Star Wars is about, showing us the real locations from our own world

 

It looked still porly made, i can forgive the forest but the dessert, noo.

 

I'd still take ROTJ over the ST any day and twice on Sunday.

 

That's nice, i still take TFA and TLJ. The only good scenes in ROTJ is Palpatine/Luke,Vader. the other's scenes are between bad, meh to ok.

 

Unpopular opinion: despite the hectic fast paced, overstuffed feeling of TROS, it's still the best of the ST and in the top half of the Star Wars films.

Probably because Palpatine had something to do with that. Can never go wrong with Darth Sidious.

 

Both locations were real. The trouble in some Tatooine scenes, like when Han and Luke talk on the way to the Sarlacc, is, they are very obviously in front of a blue screen or even a back-projected translucent screen. The lighting is off, and it looks pretty fake. The blaster bolts also look extremely fake. They shouldn't even be visible in bright sunlight. Instead they are actually darker than the sky background.
Endor is another matter. That forest location is just BORING, looks like just some random forest anywhere on Earth. ESB at least had some more exciting locations. Another thing I noticed in the throne room scene. The emperor is in focus while the window behind him is out of focus. The stars outside the window, which should be lightyears away, on the other hand, are IN focus. No camera in the world could do that, focusing both on close and extremely far objects but not on those in between. I don't know if this was done on purpose, but it looks VERY fake. Yes, I do sometimes pay attention to such things, and when it looks so obviously fake, it does take away from my appreciation of a movie.

 

Except that the giant redwoods are considerably larger than other trees on this planet. If you’ve seen them in real life, these giant sequoias don’t look anything like other trees, so the forest looks distinctly different from other forests.
Admittedly though, the impressive size of these trees doesn’t always translate all that well onto the screen. Not even a photo like this does them justice:

 

Return of the Jedi is the less visually interesting of the Original Trilogy.

 

Honestly, they’re just not filmed in a very interesting way. Compare that to this scene in Hitchcock’s Vertigo to get an idea of how you can truly make that location look majestic:

 

Sure, they do look impressive, but hardly appear in the movie. We mostly see more ordinary trees and lots of leaves. I don't remember a shot showing huge stems as in your picture. The tree village is a matte painting and studio set anyway. In short, they could have done more with the location they chose, and shoot scenes next to the more exotic looking trees.

We can easily include the PT as well. What are the ROTJ locations compared to Theed, the Gungan underwater city, Coruscant, Kamino, Geonosis, Utapau, those places where Order 66 is executed (don't remember their names) or Mustafar? Not even close!

 

Interesting, to me ROTJ feels open and "real" while much of ESB feels too much like a movie set.

 

I agree. IIRC, the only location shooting for ESB was done in Norway, which ended up in only a handful of shots. The rest of the film is all sets.

(The only Star Wars film with arguably less location shooting than ESB is ROTS. Though like I said, that’s arguable; that film used a lot of second-unit location shooting that was used for the background plates, and if you include those locations, ROTS actually has more locations than any other Star Wars film.
Side note: some of the ROTS second unit-shooting was done by Ron Frick, the director of the gorgeous films Baraka and Samsara.)

I completely agree, in the sense that ROTJ, unfortunately, doesn’t do a very good job at translating the enormous size of these giant sequoias to the screen (as mentioned by a C poster above, the film Vertigo does manage to do that). Look at the scene below; you can see plenty of these giant sequoias, in the background. But do they look giant, on the screen? Not unless you know what you’re looking at, I think.



I do think the ferns do look lovely, though. Those plants do manage to convey a sense of something primal and ancient. But those things have been around since the Devonian period, or so. But, a fern-covered forest floor is not a particularly unique environment.

 

Yes it does, but I think that the sets feel more intimate and give the film a more "drama play" feel to it. Dagobah especially is very obviously on a soundstage, but it gives it very much a surreal, dreamlike quality that I can not describe.

 

You are right about Dagobah being dreamlike. Luke even describes it as such.

 

Oh true and that's just general proof that George Lucas isn't a good DIRECTOR in what DIRECTORS do in making things visually interesting and getting performances out of his actors.