8 Things You Learn When You Rewatch Star Wars: Return Of The Jedi

5. The Scenes On Endor Are Insipid

The forest setting of Endor could've made for a great backdrop to the seemingly endless sequences set on the moon planet. With dense foliage and the stark green and brown of the woods, Return Of The Jedi could've had a great battle setting, the antithesis to the blitzed wasteland of Hoth, one more akin to Vietnam than it was to any kind of star war. Instead, the scenes on the planet feature, in no particular order, a band of teddy bears; a lacklustre assault on a shield generator which sees Han fool a Stormtrooper by literally tapping him on the shoulder; death by rocks; and a long, drawn-out, nigh on unbearable sequence in which said teddy bears mistake C-3PO for a deity, leading to minute upon minute of supposedly hilarious cultural misunderstanding. It's one of the most misjudged sequences in the whole series, and that it makes up for the bulk of the final (at the time) entry in the saga is all the more baffling. Add to that the fact that Han Solo, one of cinema's great characters, is reduced to playing a bitpart in it all (at one point "hot-wiring" a door), and the fact that C-3PO ends up reciting a Star Wars greatest hits to the Ewoks (in which he describes the events of A New Hope and The Empire Strikes Back; proof of how dramatically thin Return of the Jedi is), and you have that rare example of an entry in this Star Wars rewatch series which has forced me to be completely and utterly negative*. *Note: for the most part I've tried to keep this series positive, to try and understand and appreciate the whole saga despite its flaws; in this case, however, I had to revert to outright admonishment.