CT ROTJ without the sister twist

OPENING CRAWL


Luke Skywalker has returned to the swamps of Dagobah to complete his Jedi training. His ally Princess Leia fights to rescue her lover Han Solo from the clutches of Jabba the Hutt.

Little do our heroes know that the GALACTIC EMPIRE rushes to build a new space station even more powerful than the Death Star.

If completed, this weapon will spell certain doom for the small band of rebels struggling to restore freedom to the galaxy...


ACT ONE


On Coruscant, a group of civilian laborers in a droid factory goes on strike. The Imperial authorities respond with a violent crackdown; a squad of Stormtroopers, led personally by Darth Vader, breaks into the strikers' safehouse and executes them all.

Above Tatooine, the Emperor personally oversees the construction of a new weapon: the Super Death Star. It is a space station able to jump into a star system, instigate a runaway chain reaction inside the sun, and escape before the rapidly-expanding star destroys all of the surrounding worlds. The Emperor meets with Boba Fett and pays him to assassinate a high-value target.

On the jungle planet Siseman, Lando finds an audience with Jabba the Hutt, towing Chewie and Leia apparently as his prisoners. Having gained entry into Jabba's palace, Leia unfreezes Han from carbonite and Chewie releases Jabba's pet rancor. The palace erupts into frenzy as the rancor rampages around and eats Jabba. Our heroes flee amidst the chaos aboard the Millennium Falcon.

Luke continues his training on Dagobah. He climbs a mountain, and when he gets to the top he finds a green crystal that he uses to power his new lightsaber. He talks to Yoda on the mountaintop, who tells Luke about the Anakin backstory and then dies of old age. Luke reunites with R2 and departs from the planet.

ACT TWO

Leia, Han, Lando, and Chewie return to the Rebel fleet. Mon Mothma, the Rebel leader, tells them of the mission to destroy the unfinished Super Death Star in the Tatooine system.

Rebel cruisers enter from hyperspace to flank the flagship, but they are tracked by Boba Fett. Slave I destroys the flagship bridge and kills Mon Mothma. Han, Chewie, and Lando take off in the Falcon and defeat Slave I in a space duel, killing Fett. Leia mourns, but then accepts leadership of the Rebels.

Luke reunites with the fleet. Light-hearted banter between all four heroes ensues, then the first phase of the mission begins. The strike team of Luke, Lando, and 3P0, jumps to occupied Tatooine.

On Tatooine, Luke uses his powers to ward off an angry krayt dragon, thus winning the respect of the Tusken Chieftain. Lando and the Chieftain free a captured Sandcrawler from the Empire. Then Luke senses Vader's arrival in the system and wanders into the desert, where he surrenders himself to Stormtroopers. Vader meets Luke and takes him to meet the Emperor.

ACT THREE

On Tatooine, Lando's assault on the shield base is stalled by Imperial forces, but a surprise attack by the krayt dragon allows the Rebels to turn the tide against the Imperials.

The Rebel fleet fights against the Imperial fleet. The Emperor orders the Super Death Star to fire on one of the twin suns. Han and Leia realize the Rebel fleet has been entrapped.

The Emperor tempts Luke into fighting Vader. Vader reveals that the Emperor is his father, and tells Luke that his fall to darkness is inevitable. Luke is enraged and mangles Vader.

Lando and the native army overpower the Imperial garrison and destroy the shield generator.

Luke refuses to kill Vader, so the Emperor tortures Luke with lightning. Vader intervenes and kills the Emperor by throwing him down a shaft.

The Falcon and other fighters try to find a centralized main reactor but instead see that there is a decentralized power network. Solo realizes he must instead destroy the SDS's engines, knowing this will mean he and Chewie will lack the time to flee the exploding star.

Luke escapes on a shuttle with his father's body and Lando flies from Tatooine with the surviving natives. They and the Rebel Fleet all jump to Coruscant. The Super Death Star and the Millennium Falcon perish in the expanding star.

On Coruscant crowds of civilians take to the streets in jubilation. Leia reveals to Luke that she is pregnant. Luke promises to help her raise the child, build the New Republic, and teach the next generation of Jedi.

The spirits of Obi-Wan, Yoda, and Anakin smile upon Luke.

 

At least GL didn't give us this sister twist.

 

The Rebellion Theme Song after 20 years of Empire rule, "We're not gonna take it, NO! We ain't gonna take it....we're not gonna take it......anymorrrre!!!!!"

 

I always thought that Luke's sister could have been a slave girl they rescued from Jabba's palace. That would place her as a Tatooine native and it would not be too coincidental. Luke's lost sister was simply lost to slavers (or perhaps intentionally hidden away as a slave). Everything else in Return of the Jedi stays the same.

 

I think the sister twist would have been more impactful from a narrative standpoint if RotJ didn't wrap up the way we did and we got another trilogy after this one focusing on the relationship between Luke and Leia, with Leia potentially becoming a Jedi Knight just like her brother. I know originally with 9 movies in mind, Lucas was going to have the Emperor be the main baddie of the ST, but personally, the Vader redemption stuff was so good, I probably wouldn't have changed it to keep the Emperor alive.

Also while we get to see Leia take everything that Luke just told her, we don't get to personally see her interact with Vader. Not that she needed to since it wasn't her story as much as it was Luke's, but when he returns to Endor for the celebration, she doesn't seemed to be impacted by anything of what Luke told her earlier.

If anything the twist just adds buildup to the final showdown with Vader and what's on the line. If you had removed it from the movie, not much would really be different IMO. The love triangle wouldn't have been ruined either.

 

The point wasn't about Leia and Vader, it was Luke and Vader. But as Lucas said, the twist was necessary to force Luke into attacking Vader. To raise the stakes further.

"In the end I had a problem in the fight between Luke and his father of why he makes the final turn--Luke makes the final turn to the bad side of the Force and tries to kill his father. Richard [Marquand] was trying to block out the fight between Luke and Vader and we got down to that point underneath the throne room there and he said, 'You know the script sort of says that Vader says something that upsets Luke,' or something vague like that. I can't remember exactly what the script said but it was a very vague...spark. And we didn't have that actual moment that we needed where you got the sense that Luke is hiding. He's not going to fight him. He refuses to fight. He'd rather die first and then something turns him around and makes him fight. And I never really came up with a satisfactory answer to that of what he could possibly say to set Luke off. And in the process of evolving the script and evolving the importance of Leia as the sister, it was sitting right there in front of my face and it became obvious that turning her to the dark side would be the thing that would set Luke off again."

--George Lucas, ROTJ Annotated Screenplay; 1999.

As to the love triangle, it was already resolved by the time Leia tells Han that she loves him. She and Luke only have two scenes together in TESB and the main scene with the romantic angle was cut. He had already decided that Han and Leia would get together and not Luke, by the time Kasdan came onboard.

 

It wasn't just that, though. The whole idea of paired siblings or twins was pretty foundational to the story from the very beginning. You see the idea pop up from the rough draft of the original movie all the way up to the rough draft of Empire. It was clearly an idea that Lucas felt was pretty important to include in some form or another. I'm guessing for thematic/mythological reasons.

 

Return of the Jedi is a derivative turd. The filmmakers should've went ahead with and shot the original story idea for episode VI, the dark and infinitely better one. When George lucas fired Gary Kurtz that was the end of Star Wars until Rogue One came along.

 

ESB had already placed Leia and Solo in a romance story so by making Leia a wife like figure to Luke would take away the romance story that had been created in ESB. Leia and Solo were always a match from ANH, opposites attract so i can't see the Luke Leia story being workable without them being relatives and having a deeper connection with each other.

 

Great idea. We would feel more sympathy toward her, as well as admiration for her will to survive and escape.

 

I had numerous goals when I set out to write this outline.

First I wanted to give Leia and Han more consequential stuff to do in the second and third acts. The middle act of this story revolves around Boba Fett's assassination of Mon Mothma. This serves the purposes of providing a more worthy ending to Fett's character, showing Han's proactive nature and mended relationship with Lando, and allowing Leia to assume her rightful place as leader of the side of good.

in the real ROTJ they stand outside the door to the shield bunker for half an hour of screen time. In this version, Leia takes the place of Admiral Ackbar and Han flies the Falcon, even going out like a hero in the end. This brings his trilogy arc to a close, from being a self-centered scoundrel in the early part of ANH to giving up his very life to save his friends.

My second goal was to trim out extraneous secondary elements and replace them with more meaningful scenes. The Dagobah stuff from earlier is meant to transfer the exposition from ghost Obi-Wan to dying Yoda.

The Ewoks are out. The Sand People/Tusken Raiders have taken their place. I did this because the Tuskens feel like a more formidable match for the Imperial troops while still displaying a low-tech aesthetic. Making Tatooine the site of the SDS gives Luke a chance to return to his homeworld. This allows the audience to reflect on how far he has come since ANH. Additionally, the scene where Luke wanders into the desert in response to feeling Vader's presence in the Force is meant to invoke the wandering spiritual quests in many of Earth's religious or mythical tales.

The third goal was to provide a twist to replace the sister twist and one-up the father twist from Empire. Luke is shown to be the one who breaks a dark cycle which has consumed the galaxy for decades.

Making all of these changes would necessarily rewrite large stretches of the prequel trilogy and butterfly away the very existence of the sequel trilogy as we know it. For instance, there cannot be a scene where Ben kills Han if Han was already dead before Ben was born.

One suggested change that was brought to my attention recently was to have Vader and the troopers at the beginning just kill the strike leader at the plant, instead of all of the workers. That way they will make an example of him/her to show the other workers what happens to those who defy the Empire.

 

That is one flaming hot take.

 

That's true, the ultimate purpose of the sister twist is to give Luke a final motivation to attack Vader. However, the irony is that, as Lucas says, this was added during the filming of that scene; in other words, the sister revelation was firmly in place months before they used it to give Luke a motivation. That is why, probably, it feels a somewhat forced revelation to some viewers: because it was created without any meaningful use for it.

Also, the fact that Han and Leia are basically sidelined from the main story of ROTJ means that there isn't any room for any personal development for Leia following the revelation. Both Luke and Leia accept the truth without problems, as if they had "somehow" always known it. But there is a melancholic subtext there as well (very well emphasized by the "Luke and Leia's theme" on the soundtrack), a bittersweet taste, almost acknowledging their "it could have been" relationship.

 

Luke cared for Leia before Lucas decided to create the sister twist.

Vader: “Your feelings for them are strong, especially for...Leia. So, Leia is strong with the Force. Your feelings have now betrayed her too. If you will not turn to the Dark Side, then perhaps she will.”

Done. No sister twist necessary.

 

There wasn't much of a story idea at the time. Not to mention that "Star Wars" as a whole is derivative.

 

I really like the sister angle. It solidifies the connection between the big three, for a longlasting source of storytelling. It makes them a family, and keeps them together for the continuing story, be it a sequel trilogy, or EU, etc. It also raises Leia's importance to the plot.

Since this is about the story, I'm not sure what Gary Kurtz has to do with it. Maybe if he was around for ep6, Tatooine scenes would have been filmed in Tunisia, rather than California?

 

This is an expansion of the opening crawl and first scene.

STAR WARS
EPISODE VI
RETURN OF THE JEDI​

Luke Skywalker has returned to the swamps of Dagobah to complete his Jedi training. His ally Leia Organa fights to rescue her lover Han Solo from the clutches of Jabba the Hutt.



Little do our heroes know that the GALACTIC EMPIRE nears completion of a new space station even more powerful than the Death Star.



If completed, this weapon will spell certain doom for the small band of rebels struggling to restore freedom to the galaxy...​

END OPENING CRAWL



Pan down to the Imperial starfleet in orbit above Coruscant.

A Star Destroyer deploys a TIE Shuttle down to the metropolitan planet surface. On the bridge of the Star Destroyer, an Imperial Admiral expresses his disdain for the strike occurring in the industrial district.

The craft skews downward, and the camera cuts to AT-STs trudging through the streets to enforce the curfew. Scattered buildings glow with columns of flame poking out of their windows. In an alleyway, a squad of Stormtroopers lines up a group of seditious citizens in front of a wall and executes them with blaster fire.

The TIE Shuttle touches down outside a droid factory, a metallic silo surrounded by barricades and bodies of Stormtroopers and rebels alike. In the factory, the strike leader, a grizzled man with cybernetic legs, beckons his fellows to make good on their promise to avenge Alderaan and Cloud City. The crowd of armed workers cheers in righteous fervor.

The boarded-up doors of the factory dazzle with sparks as the Stormtroopers slice through the durasteel. The workers brandish arms and take up firing positions against the door. Then the door tumbles over and Stormtroopers pour forth.

The workers trade a flurry of blaster bolts with the Stormtroopers, then fall back into the assembly line of the factory. Stormtroopers secure the entrance and hold the strike leader prisoner.

Through the hole in the wall strides that familiar inhuman breathing. His dark cape billows with each step as he approaches the kneeling, fatigued strike leader. The strike leader expresses defiance to the last, even in the face of darkness personified.

Darth Vader chokes the old man to death with the Dark Side of the Force. A horrified worker runs back to meet his comrades deep in the silo. Vader orders the troopers to proceed inward and set their weapons to stun.

 

What is that from? That can't be the screenplay for RotJ.

 

To me the Leia sister reveal is still the single dumbest thing in SW and this is coming from someone who ranks ROTJ as the 3rd best SW movie.

Never, ever sat right with me.

 

I wrote it.

 

I think the father and sister reveals give the story a great note of universality. If Luke represents the everyman, then all the characters revolving around him represent the rest of society, and the fact that the major players all turn out to be related to him--Vader is his father, Leia is his sister, Han is destined to become his brother through marriage--puts a cap on the metaphor. Be careful how you view and treat people, because the villain in your life could be your misunderstood father, the object of your lust could be your sister, and that insufferable braggart you just met in a bar could be your brother. We're all part of the human family.

 

Heh??

 

Haven't you ever heard of a guy treating some woman he wants to have sex with like crap, and someone else saying, "Hey man, would you treat her like that if she was your sister?"

 

Cut to the familiar golden disc of Tatooine against the stars. The camera rotates to show an imposing new shape, the unfinished structure of the Super Death Star transitioning in front of one of the system's twin suns.

Out of hyperspace jumps a light cruiser, the distinctly vertical craft known as Slave I. It burns through the darkness above Tatooine, the Super Death Star's surface turbolaser turrets constantly angled in its direction by Imperial fire control technicians. Within the hangar bay patrolled by squads of Stormtroopers, Slave I sets down thrusters-first and the feared Boba Fett walks out.

Imperial officer Jerjerrod greets Boba Fett with the Emperor's salutations, but his eyes project the most contemptuous glare in the galaxy. Boba Fett replies tersely, "A job's a job. Take me to the boss." The two men walk past the Stormtroopers and take the lift to Throne Room.

In the shadowy rotunda of the royal nest, Galactic Emperor Palpatine sits on the swiveling throne and surveys the construction of his ultimate weapon. The door open behind him and he turns around to face the booted footsteps approaching him. Boba Fett sees for the first time the gaunt and withered face of Imperial power. Jerjerrod takes his leave.

Palpatine speaks, telling Fett that he has tracked his movements since the operation on Cloud City and that he is impressed. Palpatine then offers Fett a new job, a high-value assassination. Fett asks what's in it for him. Palpatine promises Fett a full official pardon for his life of crimes, in addition to a handsome sum. Fett asks, "Who will it be?"

The Emperor cackles. Boba Fett steps closer to the Throne and views Tatooine from above.

 

Then Boba Fett takes off his helmet and oh my god it's Kramer from Seinfeld!

*audience goes crazy*