Secrets of the Force

by Edward Gross

  John Williams’s son, Joseph, followed in his father’s footsteps as a musician, and worked on several pieces heard in the film as “source music,” including the music the Max Rebo Band performs after Jabba the Hutt purchases Chewbacca from Boushh the Bounty Hunter. This piece can also be heard in the documentary From Star Wars to Jedi. It remains unreleased on any soundtrack album, as the master recording is rumored to be missing from Lucasfilm’s vaults. Joe Williams also served as the lead vocalist for the rock band Toto for many years.

  Although The Empire Strikes Back used a choir for the Millennium Falcon’s approach to Cloud City, this film was the first Star Wars entry to really feature choir in a significant way, using low male singers for the Emperor’s Theme, as well as the stirring, “religioso” treatment as Luke rages against Darth Vader in lightsaber battle. Finally, in the original version of the film from 1983, a full choir sings in both English and the Ewok language for the final celebration music. In 1997, the full choir was replaced by a group of children singers.

  For the first time in the saga, an entire action sequence was rescored. The fight at the Sarlacc pit had first been accompanied by all-new music, but it was later decided to instead write a score based around action themes from the original Star Wars score from 1977. The original version can be heard on the 1997 Special Edition release of the soundtrack. During the Rebels’ attack on the second Death Star, Williams incorporates a clever development of the Medal Ceremony music from Star Wars.

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  Return of the Jedi was released on May 25, 1983, to mixed critical reaction—actually, the worst reviewed of the original trilogy, not that the audience seemed to mind very much. Made at a production cost of $35.5 million, it eventually earned a worldwide gross of over $475 million.

  RIC MEYERS

  (author, For One Week Only: The World of Exploitation Films)

  Let me go on record right now. I have absolutely no problem with creators who make things for kids. Walt Disney made things for kids. Roald Dahl made things for kids. Stan Lee made things for kids. Warner Bros.’ Looney Tunes made things for kids. Dr. Seuss made things for kids. But they all made things for kids they liked and respected. They all made things that didn’t speak down to kids. They all didn’t treat kids as if they were stupid. They didn’t make things for kids that were “good enough for garbage.” Star Wars was not for dumb kids. The Empire Strikes Back was not for undiscerning kids. So what the hell had happened? I was told that Lucas was upset by the overwhelming reaction, and, in addition, this cerebral, art film–loving director was having a hard time accepting that his heartfelt homage to Flash Gordon was becoming his inescapable legacy to cinema.

  I could buy that. To me, Return of the Jedi was the work of a numb producer—one who now cared so little for his creation that, when the plotting gambits he had used in Empire to give him options in case any of the stars refused to return for Jedi (Boba Fett, the “other one,” and Obi-Wan lying), he simply dropped the plot twists without developing them in any exciting or involving way. He didn’t even care that the Ewok suits were rudimentary and not credible, or that the characters “borrowed” from H. Beam Piper’s Little Fuzzy and worshipped C-3PO for no apparent reason. The final result was, for me, the work of a filmmaker who just didn’t seem to care, or worse, didn’t care if the audience cared. Little wonder one of the film’s most overused lines was “I’ve got a bad feeling about this.” That bad feeling would only increase as time, and Star Wars films, went on. But, for the moment, I put my love of the first two, and my heartsick disappointment in the third, behind me. For what it was worth, the Star Wars trilogy was over, and both its maker, and I, had other fish to fry.

  BRIAN JAY JONES

  One thing to keep in mind is that when Lucas gets to Jedi, his entire life is falling apart. He’s getting divorced from Marcia, and the fact is he’s selling off portions of his company, including Pixar, at fire sale prices for the divorce settlement. At the time Lucas is producing Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom, and there’s a moment in there when someone gets their beating heart ripped out of their chest. I really think Lucas is putting that on-screen intentionally. His life is a mess at this point and he really does need to step back to try and get his shit together. And in the divorce, what’s really astounding to me, is that he and Marcia get shared custody of their oldest child. He ends up with the kids. He’s raising the kids and then he adopts two more. So he’s raising the family, and he wants to be a dad at that point. And more power to him. He steps out at that point and it just shocks people that he’s willing to walk away. But when you’ve got fuck-you money, you can do that.

  RAY MORTON

  On top of Jedi’s other problems, there’s too much repetition of old ideas; too many elements recycled from Star Wars. This includes the Star Destroyer flyover in the opening scene. While Jedi showed us more of Luke’s home planet, Tatooine, than we saw in the first movie, there was no escaping the fact that we’d been here before. Once again, Luke and Leia swing across a vast expanse on a rope. In terms of monsters, the cantina scene in the original Star Wars is a classic bit of weirdness featuring a delightfully odd collection of intergalactic creatures. Jabba’s court is essentially the cantina scene on steroids with triple the number of monsters. While there are certainly a number of really cool creatures in these scenes (including Jabba himself), the higher quantity of monsters can’t make up for the concept’s basic lack of freshness.

  It was inevitable (and correct) that Star Wars had to end with some wars in the stars. However, to conclude Jedi, Lucas opted not to devise a new type of space battle, but to instead simply repeat the climax of Star Wars by presenting another dogfight in space between the Rebels and the Empire ending with the Rebels blowing up an important Imperial object. To differentiate it from the battle in the original picture, Lucas made the dogfight in Jedi bigger and more elaborate, but there was still no escaping the fact that it was a retread. And the fact that the object of the Rebel attack was another Death Star didn’t help matters. Early in the writing process, some thought was given to making the target of the Rebels’ attack in Jedi the Empire’s capital planet—a polluted world completely covered by cities called Had Abbadon (Abaddon was an angel of death in the book of Revelation). Eventually, it was decided it would be too unwieldy and unbelievable for the Rebels to blow up an entire planet, so Lucas fell back on the idea of using another Death Star. To make it seem less repetitive, initially, the idea of using multiple Death Stars was considered, but that notion was eventually dismissed because it was too difficult to dramatically focus the final attack if the fighters had multiple targets. Ultimately, Lucas decided to proceed with a single Death Star, albeit one that was not finished (although not, as the Rebels would discover in one of the story’s better twists, nonoperational). The filigreed look of this unfinished battle station was quite striking, but not striking enough to hide the fact that we were basically seeing the same thing all over again.

  ALAN DEAN FOSTER

  It’s a good movie that showcases everything that the people involved learned about making Star Wars movies in the first two films. It kind of harkens back to the spirit of the first film and was a lot of fun. At the same time, you build everything up to such a peak of anticipation after the first two films that it’s virtually impossible to bring off a third film. Lord of the Rings does it, but there’s no problem coming up with a storyline for Lord of the Rings—it’s all there in the three books. The one problem I have with Jedi, which I’ve already mentioned, is the redemption of Darth Vader. Nobody asked my opinion, but what I wanted was at the ending of Empire when Vader says, “Luke, I am your father,” I thought you should find out in Jedi that he’s really Luke’s evil older brother who killed their father, making him doubly worse. Then you’d have no problem killing him and the audience would cheer it on. It all would have fit with the storyline at that point, too, but, again, nobody asked me.

  JONATHAN WILKINS

  (editor, Star Wars Ins
ider, 2009–2017)

  The thing you have to remember as well is, there were lots of things in the original trilogy that people aren’t necessarily enamored with. Like Boba Fett getting walloped in the Sarlacc pit by a blinded Han Solo. After all that build-up, “Oh wow, he’s such a cool character … Oh, wait. That’s it?” I remember saying to Jeremy Bulloch once, “How did you feel about that?” And he said, “Well, if Boba Fett had a cool fight and been dispatched in a cool way by being shot by Han Solo, whatever. It would’ve been a cool moment in the film, but people still talk about what happened.”

  The Ewoks for example, there was a period where people really didn’t like the Ewoks. I think we’ve kind of gone past that now. It would be very boring to end Return of the Jedi with a space battle of ships and another big battle of spaceships, and not have any sort of fun with it. Nothing unique or original. Where else are you going to see a tribe of savage teddy bears defeating an Empire? It’s a Star Wars thing. When people were criticizing The Phantom Menace, I remember George Lucas having to say, “It’s Star Wars. It’s not The Terminator.” There’s a lightness to it.

  RICHARD MARQUAND

  It was an enormous responsibility getting the ending right. Endings are always a problem. This film has such a complex ending that your problem as a director is to make it clear, make it work, and make it emotionally satisfying. Your job is to enable the audience to overcome some of the sadness of the film. And there are some deeply sad moments in this movie.

  RAY MORTON

  It’s hard to fathom why Lucas—after displaying so much imagination and originality in the first two films in the trilogy—would be okay with recycling so many ideas in this one. Some accounts suggest that Lucas—who has been quite vocal over the years about how disappointed he was in Star Wars, because budget and technical limitations didn’t allow him to fully realize his expansive vision for the project—redid many of the concepts he was unhappy with in the original movie—in particular the monster rally and the space battle—in Jedi so that he could finally get them “right.”

  KYLE NEWMAN

  (director, Fanboys)

  I know people malign Return of the Jedi, which is sad. I think it’s one of the boldest independent movies ever made. The guy took the greatest villain of all time and he said, “You know what? I’m not going to do a layup. I’m going to humanize him. I’m going to create an even scarier villain,” which he did. Then he did this whole Luke rejecting his elders, embracing love—none of this was easy terrain for a sequel. Empire Strikes Back was a crazy sequel. That’s why I think people have issues with The Force Awakens. That’s why George has issues with The Force Awakens, which J.J. Abrams has openly admitted is a heavy retread. George committed to bold sequels and he put all of his own money into it. That was a $35 million investment out of his own pocket that would make or break him. That’s pretty crazy stuff. What filmmaker is putting $35 million—today that’s like a hundred and fifty—of their own money into a sequel? And they’re like, “I’m going to break the mold and not do what is expected.” That’s pretty crazy.

  RAY MORTON

  Lucas may have been suffering from burnout. As J. W. Rinzler’s excellent 2013 book The Making of Return of the Jedi makes perfectly clear, after six years of nearly constant work on Star Wars, everyone in the company from Lucas to the actors to the visual effects teams were running on fumes. Concerns about the repetition of elements were raised frequently during the story and script conferences between Lucas and Kasdan (and producer Howard Kazanjian and director Richard Marquand)—often by Lucas himself. Fresh alternatives were discussed, but most of the time it was ultimately decided to redo that which had already been done. It may be that Lucas was simply too exhausted to come up with anything new.

  JOHN KENNETH MUIR

  (author, Science Fiction and Fantasy Films of the 1970s)

  A crushing disappointment. Return of the Jedi is a film made not for the young at heart, like the previous two films, but for very young children who wish to consume product (meaning purchase toys). Cue the burping Muppets. Cue the teddy bear aliens. Every concept that might have been treated with maturity and intelligence in the film is instead handled in perfunctory, let’s-get-this-over-with fashion. The Luke-Leia-Han triangle? Forget it, Luke and Leia are siblings, and she claims she’s always known (which makes their previous on-screen kisses double creepy). Obi-Wan lied to Luke about Vader? Well, no, it all depends on your point of view. Watch Yoda squirm when confronted with the fact that he was in on all the lies: “Rest I must. Tired I am,” or thereabouts. This is how the Jedi Knights behave? Lying, obfuscation, and deflection? And even the film’s big threat is a rerun, a second Death Star. Han Solo, meanwhile, is portrayed as a bungler and comic relief, as though Harrison Ford were being punished for doing too good a job with the character in The Empire Strikes Back.

  RAY MORTON

  Apart from making large chunks of Jedi feel uninspired and tired, all of this repetition reduced the scope of the saga. Whereas Empire told us that there was much more to the world of Star Wars than we initially imagined, the recycling of locations and events in Jedi told us no—the world of Star Wars was actually no bigger than the one we saw in the first movie. Given all of the marvelous, expansive world-building in the first two films, this was quite a letdown. The finale of Return of the Jedi is not at all satisfying. After three epic films, we were expecting an epic finish: a galaxy-wide celebration of the defeat of the Empire; Leia being named the leader of the New Republic; Han and Leia getting married; and Luke becoming a full-fledged Jedi Knight and setting off on a lifetime of new adventures. Instead, we get a campfire at which the heroes we had been following through three films literally sit on the sidelines as a bunch of teddy bears dance. Crushing, crushing disappointment would not be too light a description of my and many others’ reactions to this conclusion.

  JOHN KENNETH MUIR

  On a personal note, I saw the film when I was thirteen and I was left gasping, when it ended, at the emptiness of the entire film. This was it? This was how it all ended? Dancing Ewoks around a campfire? This film was the canary-in-the-coal-mine for later Star Wars films, stressing either burping or cute aliens, merchandising opportunities, and facile storytelling. As Mark Hamill noted in an interview with Time magazine (“Great Galloping Galaxies”) at the time: “Let’s face it, we made a film for children.” He might have added, “at the expense of everyone else.”

  PETER HOLMSTROM

  I’ve been a die-hard fan my whole life, and I honestly never knew there were people who hated this movie until a couple of years ago. Guess it’s the difference between growing up with something, and growing up with something else and seeing this as something different. Structurally, there are some problems, sure—but there are some amazing moments, best of the franchise. When Lando blasts out of the Death Star with fires right behind; Luke’s battle with Vader; the fight on Endor; all of Jabba’s palace—this is the stuff dreams are made of! Boggles my mind how anyone can say this movie is anything other than amazing.

  BRIAN JAY JONES

  After that, Lucas steps out for almost a decade. He’s producing friends’ films, art films that he wishes he could make. I don’t regret him stepping back at all and I really do think he believed with Return of the Jedi, it was done. And what sort of puts a final note on that is that he makes an appearance at some award ceremony or on a talk show, and when he walks out onstage, they play the Raiders of the Lost Ark march, and not the Star Wars theme. It wasn’t just Lucas. It seemed like the world was moving on as well.

  * * *

  With the release of Return of the Jedi, the trilogy was complete and Lucas was ready to move in different directions—not the least of which was rebuilding his personal life. That being said, there were attempts to keep Star Wars alive, though admittedly in ways the vast majority of fans may not have been expecting. They’d already seen the results of The Star Wars Holiday Special some years earlier, but this time it would be in the for
m of a pair of movies about the Ewoks as well as the Saturday morning animated series Droids and Ewoks. None of these, needless to say, have stood the test of time.

  What all of this represented for those who had turned the big-screen trilogy into such a sensation, and embraced it as a kind of religion, were future directions, and what was unfolding was not encouraging.

  GLEN OLIVER

  All of the early TV stuff, as crappy as it often was, suggested a breadth of storytelling—the presence of possibility and flexibility of narrative within the Star Wars universe—which would’ve worked nicely if any, or all, had been more strongly realized. These shows weren’t exponential leaps forward for either Star Wars storytelling or televised science fiction/fantasy in general. But they did help to lay the groundwork for bigger, bolder, more interesting shows to come: The Clone Wars, Rebels, Resistance, The Mandalorian, the Cassian Andor series, Obi-Wan … I kind of look at those early efforts as being a first-ever date. Someone’s first-ever date doesn’t necessarily go so well, and is awkward and exploratory and filled with unease and maybe even regret. But it almost always opens the door to a larger world …