Conan the Barbarian (1982)

There Comes a Time When Jewels Cease to Sparkle, When Gold Loses Its Luster

Though I already have a pretty decently sized list of requests to get to, I decided to push today’s forward because it seemed like more fun.  Not necessarily more fun as a movie, but certainly with more to make fun of.  Action movies from the 80’s tend to have that going for them.  They’re usually fairly ridiculous and contain lots of problems with story and graphics that can keep a film reviewer such as myself mocking for days.  But this movie has also been considered a classic, so much so that the idea-starved film culture of today has already attempted a remake.  And I’ve already punished them for that in review form.  But I have not reviewed the original, nor have I reviewed its sequel.  So, as requested by Chris, I start today with my review of Conan the Barbarian, based on the stories of Robert E. Howard, written and directed by John Milius, and starring Arnold Schwarzenegger, James Earl Jones, Sandahl Bergman, Gerry Lopez, Mako, Max von Sydow, Valérie Quennessen, and Cassandra Gaviola.

A tribe of the Barbarian clan called the Cimmerians are massacred by the warriors of a wizard named Thulsa Doom (James Earl Jones).  A young boy amongst them named Conan (later Arnold Schwarzenegger) is taken as a slave and chained to a huge grindstone and made to push it around in circles for no discernible purpose.  What it does accomplish is having Conan start getting buffed out and turn into Arnie.  Then it’s face punch time as someone takes Conan from the wheel and has him start fighting to the death in pits against other slaves.  After many successes at this, they start liking him.  They give him women, train him in how to fight better, and have him sit on a table and talk about what is best.  Eventually, he is freed and finds his father’s sword, inexplicably left in an ancient ruin.  He also comes across a witch that tells him how to find Thulsa Doom, but only if he bangs the bejesus out of her.  Pretty sweet deal.  But then she tries to eat him, so he throws her in a fire.  You usually have to wait until the morning after when the booze wears off for the hot woman to turn into a hideous creature.  He also meets a thief named Subotai (Gerry Lopez) and the two start travelling together.  Later, they team up with another thief named Valeria (Sandahl Bergman), who also becomes Conan’s lover.  They rob the Tower of Serpents and steal some jewels, making them rich but putting them on Thulsa Doom’s wrong side.  It also gets the attention of King Osric (Max von Sydow), who gives the trio whatever they desire, so long as they return his daughter (Valérie Quennessen) to him from the clutches of Thulsa Doom.

If someone were to ask me, “Robert, what is best in life?” there are many things I might say.  I might say, “Boobs.”  I may also say, “To crush your enemies, see them driven before you, and to hear the lamentation of their women.”  But I most definitely wouldn’t say, “The original Conan the Barbarian.”  I don’t say that to bag on the movie, because I think it holds up fairly well for what it is.  I mainly say it because I thought it was funny.  But the movie’s okay.  It’s aged quite a bit, and there are plenty of things that would be subpar by today’s standards, but it’s some good sword and sorcery stuff.  Though I liked the overall story of the movie, it seemed a little confused and mixed up.  There was the one driving goal for Conan to get revenge on Thulsa Doom, but he was not so focused on it that he couldn’t be driven off on a few tangents.  A few of them were not by his choice, like being forced into slavery, pushing around a wheel, and killing people for sport.  But then he starts getting distracted by jewels and women and basically keeps Thulsa Doom in the background of his goals.  Even when you think he’s getting on track, he starts dressing like a hippy first.  Sure, it was to infiltrate Thulsa’s temple, but he gets caught almost immediately so he shouldn’t have bothered in the first place.  And when he gets a crack at Thulsa, he gets captured and killed … ish.  I did like the whole magic thing with painting symbols all over his body to bring him back to life and fighting evil spirits to keep his soul around, but it was still pretty tangential.

Basically, it wasn’t their intention to have a fantastically scripted plot; it was to make an action movie.  It was kind of hit and miss on that, though.  There was plenty enough action peppered throughout the movie in case the audience started getting bored, but most of it was kind of goofy looking.  They made a noble enough attempt to make the swordplay interesting, but people that were supposed to be great warriors were basically just swinging their weapons wildly, sometimes not coming anywhere near their target, but getting some obvious blood packets set off anyway.  I remember one part where the guy just had a fairly obvious handful of fake blood that he just slapped onto his chest just after someone swung a sword in his direction.  There were some other hit and miss things for the look of the movie.  The giant snake, I liked.  It was as good as they could do.  Thulsa Doom turning into a snake for no reason I could discern, not so good.  The really obvious green screen stuff in the beginning when Conan’s dad was talking about the miracle of steel was also bad.  When Conan was strapped to the Tree of Woe and left for dead, I thought it was a total badass move for him to bite one of the vultures that was starting to pick at him in the head.  The vulture looked really goofy though.  Even the movie poster comes off as a little goofy to me, but mainly because (as a sword and sorcery movie) the poster looks like something that someone would have painted on the side of their van in the 80’s to get the girls ready before they saw the awesome shag carpet going on inside.  I also had a problem with the music in the movie.  They had a pretty epic, sweeping score going throughout the movie.  It would be nicely done but for the fact that the music didn’t change from the calm mood of the choir and fiddle they were using during the ceremony in the Tower of Snakes when the action started going down.

I think the best performance in this movie (by far) is that of boobs.  I got the feeling that women were not allowed into this movie unless they understood that their boobs would be exposed at some point in the movie.  Most of them were fairly mediocre though, belonging mostly to girls you wouldn’t look twice at in real life, whether those boobs were exposed or not.  Even the main character woman got her boobs out in the movie, but Sandahl Bergman was hindered by her obvious Jewness.  And by that I mean her nose.  None of the performances in the movie really won me over.  James Earl Jones seemed fairly disinterested in being in the movie.  Max von Sydow brought it, but he was only in for one scene.  They did the right thing by having Arnie speak fairly rarely, and practically not at all for the first third of the movie.  Once he was trying to act, he was pretty much only able to convey the feelings of anger and pain with any kind of consistency.

Conan the Barbarian still stands up as a good time, especially since you don’t see that many good swords and sorcery movies.  The story is good but a little distracted at times, the action tries but doesn’t always land, and the performances are some people with their breasts exposed and Arnold Schwarzenegger when he spoke English even worse than he does today.  But still, I like the movie.  I already owned this movie, and I also own the sequel, but we’ll talk about that tomorrow.  For today, Conan the Barbarian gets “Valor pleases you, Crom” out of “And if you do not listen, then to Hell with you!”

Let’s get these reviews more attention, people.  Post reviews on your webpages, tell your friends, do some of them crazy Pinterest nonsense.  Whatever you can do to help my reviews get more attention would be greatly appreciated.  You can also add me on FaceBook (Robert T. Bicket) and Twitter (iSizzle).  Don’t forget to leave me some comments.  Your opinions and constructive criticisms are always appreciated.

Judge Dredd (1995)

I AM THE LAW!

Strangely enough, I had never gotten around to seeing today’s movie, even though it’s one of the classic representations of a big dumb action movie.  It wasn’t recommended or anything, but I know it would’ve been as soon as one of my readers thought of the movie again.  I decided to jump the gun.  When I was reminded of the movie by Kevin Smith and Ralph Garmin on Hollywood Babble-On, I decided that I should watch it post haste.  This is a movie based on a comic book that I’ve never read, so I’m going into this movie clean.  So here comes my review of Judge Dredd, based on a comic book created by John Wagner and Carlos Ezquerra, written for the screen by William Wisher and Steven E. de Souza, directed by Danny Cannon, and starring Sylvester Stallone, Armand Assante, Jurgen Prochnow, Max von Sydow, Diane Lane, Rob Schneider, Joan Chen, Balthazar Getty, Joanna Miles, Mitch Ryan, and James Earl Jones.

As in most things from the future, Earth has gone uber-shitty and humanity is living in walled off Mega-Cities.  Justice is maintained by an elite group of police officers/judges/jury/executioners known as Judges.  One of the best of these Judges is Judge Joseph Dredd (Sylvester Stallone).  He shows up to end a riot and save Judge Hershey (Diane Lane).  He also ends up arresting the recently released hacker, Herman Ferguson (Rob Schneider), even though he wasn’t actually involved in the riot.  Rico (Armand Assante), a former Judge that went nuts, escapes from prison, dons a counterfeit of Dredd’s Judge uniform, and guns down a news reporter (Mitch Ryan).  This murder gets pinned on Dredd, but his mentor Chief Judge Fargo (Max von Sydow) intervenes by retiring in order to grant Dredd leniency.  Instead of death, Dredd gets life in prison.  On his way to jail, he reconnects with Leo Getz … I mean Fergee, in order to keep the audience nice and annoyed, then their ship gets shot down and Dredd and Fergee get captured by a group of cannibals, the Angel Gang.  Meanwhile, Judge Griffin (Jurgen Prochnow) works with Rico to create a lot of chaos and get the other council members to activate the Janus project to genetically engineer the perfect Judge, which in this case will be Rico because of his interruption.  I bet Judge Dredd is going to have something to say about that.  And it’ll probably be dumb.

For a big dumb action movie, this movie was acceptable.  Of course, “acceptable” for a big dumb action movie is pretty shitty for a movie in general.  The idea and the story of this movie are good enough, but the greater majority of the dialogue sucked.  I can’t really knock the movie for having a pretty typical dystopian future setting because (though it’s played out) I’ve liked some movies that use a similar setting, so I have to be fair to the ones that aren’t that great in those settings.  I also like the idea of them making the justice system more efficient by making their cops the judge, jury, and executioners.  The rest of the story was okay as well, with the whole cloning thing and the betrayal in the government thing.  This stuff is probably all taken from the comic books, so I give them no credit.  The dialogue is something that I imagine they wrote, and it mostly sucked.  90% of the things people said was, “I AM (insert any word here).”  “I AM THE LAW!” was the most popular, and they said it a lot.  Of course, there were many other things that were really stupid.  Take, for instance, when Dredd turns his gun to grenade mode (without the barrel changing size at all, somehow), and shoots a door five feet away.  One of the accompanying Judges applauds him with, “Nice Shot!”  Apparently, this other Judge is such a bad shot that hitting the broad side of a barn from five feet away is spectacular.  It’s okay, he gets killed shortly after this.  I felt better.  Later, when Dredd is fighting a robotically enhanced member of the Angel gang, and very angry because he just stabbed his mentor, he ignores the guns laying around the room, ignores the gun he was just holding, and chooses to fight the guy with a stick.  Of course, it’s unfair to assume Sly would do something intelligent.  Later still, Judge Griffin shoots himself in the arm with a pistol to make it look like Dredd attacked him, even though Dredd was carrying a shotgun and no one seemed to care anyway.  So he just shot himself in the arm for no reason whatsoever.  And near the end of the movie, Rico activates the clones to attack Dredd and Hershey.  The clones pop out of their containers to frighten people a time or two, and then are completely forgotten.  No one ever dealt with the clones!  They completely forgot to tie up that part of the story!  They didn’t even have Fergee and Hershey run in and say, “Oh man, it sure was difficult killing all of those clones while you fought Rico, but we did it.  You should’ve been there!”  The movie does look good though.  The graphics were way better than I would’ve expected from the movie.  I especially liked Rico’s robot body guard.  It had a nice look, but it never moved in a smooth manner.

The greater majority of the performances in this movie did not impress, but the other ones were plain awful.  So they have that going for them.  Sylvester Stallone was … in the movie.  Thankfully for him, the character he was playing was stiff and emotionless, so he didn’t have to try and fail at acting.  He was mostly there to deliver horrible lines and throw punches at people.  That mostly worked out for him, but at one point, when he was fighting Armand Assante, he threw a punch that was so ridiculously high so that Armand could duck under it that I thought he would dislocate his shoulder.  I don’t know if I’ve ever seen a movie with Armand Assante in it before, so I can’t compare the uber-hammed up performance he gave here to any of his other ones.  And oh boy was it over the top.  It couldn’t even see the top from where it was.  Even the music was confused by him.  When we first saw his character in prison, the music swelled up as he turned around as if we were supposed to have any idea who this guy was.  It’s like, “BUM bum BUM!  This is how you should feel now!  We’ll explain later!”  Diane Lane was pretty good in the movie, and attractive as always, but didn’t do that much.  She did get in a fight with another really attractive girl, Joan Chen (I wouldn’t have thought I’d have reviewed two things with her in them), and it made me wonder why a trained Judge was having such trouble fighting some random Asian lady.  Rob Schneider was the Leo Getz of this movie, and by that I mean that he was a failed attempt at comic relief that wouldn’t shut up, but still had to be around for almost every scene.

Judge Dredd isn’t a great movie, but it’s a fair enough distraction for two hours.  The premise is good, the story is fine, the writing is awful, and the performances are what you’d expect.  At least the thing looked pretty good.  Because it can’t be streamed from Netflix, I cannot, in good conscience, recommend you go through any trouble to find this movie.  If it was on Netflix streaming, and you had nothing better to do, I would recommend it as background noise, or something to make fun of, if you only had to click a few times to get to it.  But as it is, no real reason to watch this thing.  Judge Dredd gets “It’s better than prison” out of “Emotions … there ought to be a law against them.”

Let’s get these reviews more attention, people.  Post reviews on your webpages, tell your friends, do some of them crazy Pinterest nonsense.  Whatever you can do to help my reviews get more attention would be greatly appreciated.  You can also add me on FaceBook (Robert T. Bicket) and Twitter (iSizzle).  Don’t forget to leave me some comments.  Your opinions and constructive criticisms are always appreciated.

The Hunt for Red October (1990)

My Morse is so Rusty, I Could Be Sending Him Dimension on Playmate of the Month

Leave it to my friend Forty to actually request my review of a good movie.  One of the first, to my recollection.  In all honesty, I don’t really mind watching bad movies most of the time because I tend to find them amusing.  But, every once and a while, I should probably be asked to watch a good one so I don’t kill myself or simply die from From Justin to Kelly-related aneurisms.  Forty’s movie request was for a classic movie that – as with many classically awesome movies – had eluded me thus far, but it is a movie I wanted to see at some point.  And now I have.  I’m talking about The Hunt for Red October, based on a Tom Clancy novel, directed by John McTiernan, and starring Alec Baldwin, Sean Connery, Sam Neill, Scott Glenn, James Earl Jones, Stellan Skarsgard, Tim Curry, Joss Ackland, Courtney B. Vance, Jeffrey Jones, and Fred Dalton Thompson.

Admiral James Greer (James Earl Jones) brings some pictures of a new fancy submarine to CIA operative Jack Ryan (Alec Baldwin).  With the help of submarine expert Skip Tyler (Jeffrey Jones), they figure out that this picture is of a spankin’ new Typhoon-class submarine with a propulsion system called a “Caterpillar Drive” that makes sonar detection extremely difficult, allowing it the potential to get all up in America’s Kool-Aid without even knowing the flavor, and even boil that Kool-Aid with nuclear warheads.  This submarine is called the Red October.  At first, the Joint Chiefs of Staff wet themselves, but then Jack Ryan poses the possibility that the prestigious commander of the Red October, Marko Alexandrovich Ramius (Sean Connery), may want to defect.  The Joint Chiefs give Ryan 3 days to confirm Ramius’ intentions.  The Russians are after him to destroy him before the American’s get their new sub, the Americans are after him to stop him from possibly launching nukes at them, and Ryan’s after him to find out what he’s up to.  Thus begins the hunt for the Red October.

I feel like I’m one of the last people around to reach this conclusion but, here it goes: fuck this movie.  Just kidding, Forty!  This movie rules!  I haven’t always seen eye to eye with this Tom Clancy feller.  Some of his games got way more popular than I felt they warranted, and I’ve heard mixed reviews about some of his other movies, though I don’t know that I’ve seen any of them.  I had worried that, as is the case in some of his video games, I would think they were overrated.  But nay!  This is a good movie.  His story works really well, especially with how well-executed it is.  Most of the story of this movie is just about Ramius’ intentions, stretched into a little over 2 hours.  It’s not until around the last 20 minutes of the movie when you are actually sure of what his actual intentions are.  There are times when you’re sure he’s going to defect, other times when you know he wants to hijack the Red October and blow up America to start a war, and other parts where you have no idea.  And, seeing as the movie takes one idea and stretches it over 2 hours, you’d think it’d get really boring.  I don’t recall being bored at all in this movie.  From the start of the movie the tension builds as different groups get closer and closer to the Red October until the end where it just climaxes all over the audiences faces.  …EWWWWWWW!

There is quite the cast to this movie, as you may have gathered from the long list in the opening paragraph.  Alec Baldwin, still young and handsome, tore it up in this movie.  I never really believed Sean Connery’s accent was Russian, but he was a badass.  One of our first scenes with the guy shows him killing a fellow officer with extreme prejudice and the corner of a table.  He also had one of the best lines in the movie, involving how things react to bullets.  He had a smaller part in this, but I found myself watching Sam Neill more than anyone else in the movie for some reason.  He was a strong character that opened up to Ramius with some kind of sweet and innocent intentions about his new life in America if their defection works out.  I sure hope that works out for him.  I liked Courtney B. Vance as the really good sonar guy; like the action movie version of Harland Williams from Down Periscope.  Joss Ackland was pretty good as well, but I could not see him as anything but DeNomolos from Bill & Ted.  Though I’m usually excited to see him, I was extra excited to see Stellan Skarsgard in a good movie that came out long before I knew he existed, and he was also excellent, if under-used.  The entire cast was great, so I won’t waste more time just saying that.  Take actors name and add “was really good” to the end.

So there you go, Fortissimo.  Good story, great thrills, excellent tension, top notch performances.  This here is the recipe for a good movie.  You’ve probably already seen this movie, so I’m telling you that you should watch it again.  If you haven’t seen it yet, I can’t yell at you because I just saw it myself, but now I’ve seen it so it’s only a matter of time before I’m allowed to yell at you for not watching a really good action-thriller.  The Hunt for Red October gets “Some things in here don’t react well to bullets” out of “And I will have a pickup truck”.

Hey, peeps. Why not rate and comment on this as a favor to good ole Robert, eh? And tell your friends! Let’s make me famous!

Star Wars: Episodes IV, V, and VI (1977, 1980, and 1983)

Twi’leks? Still hot. But then there’s Metal Bikini Leia…

Here we go again. Another super long review because you guys would prefer it to 3 separate reviews. Because of my hatred for reading, this will be the conclusion to my Star Wars review saga. The canon does continue on from here into seemingly interesting places (which I figure from what I can gleam from Star Wars Wikipedia websites), but only in novel form. And fuck that! I don’t read for nobody. Not even Star Wars! I’ve gotten off track … Oh yes! The original trilogy! Here comes Episodes IV, V, and VI. Again, I intend to include spoilers, but if you haven’t seen these movies, I don’t like you. Not at all.

Episode IV – A New Hope (1977)

A slightly less long time ago in an equidistant galaxy, we hop into the middle of a battle between a giant Star Destroyer and a tiny starship. Princess Leia Organa (Carrie Fisher) puts the plans for a terrible weapon the Galactic Empire is working on into one of her droids, R2-D2 (Kenny Baker), and sends him and her other droid, C-3PO (Anthony Daniels), to the desert planet of Tatooine. She is then captured by the Lord of the Imperial forces, Darth Vader (David Prowse, voiced by James Earl Jones). The two droids are captured by Jawas and traded to Owen and Beru Lars and cleaned by their nephew, Luke Skywalker (Mark Hamill). R2-D2 reveals to Luke that he’s owned by Obi-Wan Kenobi (Alec Guinness) and Luke figures out that they must mean the old hermit Ben Kenobi. R2-D2 goes off to find Obi-Wan and Luke follows. Obi-Wan saves Luke from Sand People and tells Luke that he knew his father when he was a Jedi Knight, and that his father was killed by Vader. He tells Luke that he can teach him the ways of the force and presents him with his father’s lightsaber. He tries to get Luke to go with him to save the princess but Luke feels obligated to his aunt and uncle … until he finds out they’ve been killed by Storm Troopers. He then accompanies Obi-Wan to Mos Eisley to find a ship. They find two smugglers, Han Solo (Harrison Ford) and his giant fuzzy Wookie co-pilot Chewbacca (Peter Mayhew), who agree to transport them in their ship, the Millennium Falcon. Back on the Death Star, Grand Moff Tarkin (Peter Cushing) tries to intimidate Leia into giving up the location of the Rebel Base by blowing up her home planet of Alderaan. Luke and his buddies show up to find Alderaan destroyed and get captured by the Death Star’s tractor beam. The group splits up. Obi-Wan goes to disable the tractor beam, the droids stay in the Falcon, and the rest go to rescue Leia. They do and eventually return to the Falcon, just in time for Luke to witness Obi-Wan get struck down by Vader, his body disappearing and his robe falling empty to the ground. The group escapes, minus one old man, and regroup with the Rebels to plan an attack on the Death Star. They find that the only weakness of the massive space station is a tiny exhaust port. They mount an assault but everyone fails at taking a shot at this exhaust port because their targeting computers aren’t up to the task. Luke goes in and Obi-Wan’s voice in his head tells him to turn off the targeting computer and use the Force. With the help of the Force and his schizophrenic voice, Luke destroys the Death Star. Everyone gets medals. HOORAY!

Episode V – The Empire Strikes Back (1980)

A while after the last movie, the Rebel Alliance is still in trouble, even though they blew up the Death Star. Leia is now in charge of a contingent of troops on an icy planet of Hoth. Han Solo and Luke Skywalker are still in the group with her. Luke is riding around on an ugly, horse-like creature called a tauntaun and sees a probe droid land. He goes to investigate it but is attacked by a Yeti-looking mother fucker called a wampa and is dragged back to it’s lair for the purpose of becoming his dinner. Han goes out to look for Luke and finds him laying in the snow, having freed himself from the wampa with liberal use of the Force and his lightsaber. Luke has a vision of Obi-Wan telling him to go to Dagobah and train with Jedi Master Yoda (Frank Oz). Han keeps Luke alive by stuffing him inside the belly of his dead tauntaun. And I thought they smelled bad ……………………………………….. on the outside! The Empire lays seige on Hoth and everyone just barely manages to escape, Luke splitting off from the rest to go train with Yoda. Han and Leia, along with R2-D2, C-3PO, and Chewbacca barely manage to escape, but their hyperspace engine is malfunctioning. Han comes up with the brilliant plan of going to the nearby Cloud City, on the planet Bespin, to get his ship fixed with his old friend Lando Calrissian (Billy Dee Williams). Lando has betrayed Han and they fall into Darth Vader’s trap. Vader freezes Han in carbonite and gives him to the bounty hunter Boba Fett (Jeremy Bulloch). On Dagobah, Luke has been having difficulty training with Yoda and, to make matters worse, starts having visions of his friends in pain. Against Yoda and ghost Obi-Wan’s wishes, Luke jets off for Bespin to save them, falling into Vader’s trap. With Han on his way back to Jabba the Hutt with Bob Fett, Lando manages to free the rest of the group and take them to the Millennium Falcon to escape. Luke battles with Vader and gets his hand cut off. To apologize, Vader tells Luke that he didn’t kill Luke’s father, but instead he IS Luke’s father. Luke responds by jumping down the trash chute and hanging upside-down from the antenna beneath Cloud City. Hundreds of people’s TV’s shut off in the middle of Game of Thrones. Luke reaches out with the Force and tells Leia where he is, so they swing around and get him. With a little help from R2, they get the hyperdrive working and bounce. Luke gets a brand spankin’ new robot hand, Lando and Chewy go off looking for Han, and Luke and Leia look out a window.

Episode VI – Return of the Jedi (1983)

Luke sets up a plan to rescue Han from Jabba the Hutt (not Jabba the English Bulldog). He first sends in R2 and 3PO as a goodwill gift, with a warning that he does not want to mess with newly promoted Jedi Knight Luke. Lando infiltrates the palace as one of Jabba’s guards and Chewy gets brought in by a bounty hunter named Boushh. At night, Boushh frees Han from his carbonite prison and reveals herself to be Leia in disguise. Luke arrives to try to negotiate (I say “try” ’cause it must be hard to concentrate with Leia in that metal bikini) for Han’s release, only to get dropped into a pit with a giant, awesomely badass creature called a Rancor. Luke drops a door on him and kills him, then is taken into captivity. Jabba decides to sacrifice the lot of them to the Sarlacc, a creature in a pit that eats people. R2 shoots a lightsaber at Luke and Luke proceeds to whoop ass. Han also inadvertently hits Boba Fett in the jetpack, shooting him into the Sarlacc pit and to his death. Leia also strangles Jabba to death with a chain (this time it actually WAS my dog. … I was not pleased). The group goes back to the Rebels and Luke returns to Dagobah to finish his training, but finds Yoda dying. In his last words, Yoda admits that Darth is Luke’s father and that there is another Skywalker. In conversation with ghostbi-Wan, Luke puts together that the other Skywalker is his twin sister, Leia. The Rebels have learned that the Empire is creating another, bigger Death Star and plans to destroy it. A ground party comprised of Luke, Leia, Han, Chewy, and the droids will go to the forest planet of Endor to destroy the Death Star’s shield generator while Lando takes the Falcon and attempts to destroy the Death Star. After a tiny skirmish on Endor when they land, Leia and the others join up with a ridiculously cute tribe of indigenous creatures called Ewoks. At night, Luke tells Leia that Vader is their father, and then leaves to surrender himself to Vader and some Imperial troops, taking him to the Death Star to meet Emperor Palpatine (Ian McDiarmid), master of Vader and leader of the Empire. Palpatine tries to convert Luke to the dark side by informing him that he is, contrary to what the Rebels believe, on “a fully armed and operational Death Star”. Both Lando and Leia’s teams run into a large group of Imperials and find out “It’s a trap!” It was all a ruse to get Luke mad enough to join the dark side. Han and Leia’s team, with the help of the Ewoks, overcome their trap and manage to take out the shield. Luke tries to strike down the Emperor but is blocked by Vader and engages him in a lightsaber battle. Vader’s boasting of potentially turning Leia to the dark side since Luke won’t makes Luke snap. He disarms Vader (literally), but stops himself from killing him, believing there is still good in his father. Palpatine gets sick of Luke’s goodness and starts to fry him with some Force lightning. Hearing the pained screams of his son, Vader lifts the Emperor over his head and, despite being fried by Palpatine’s lightning, throws the Emperor down into the reactor and to his death. Luke helps the mortally wounded Vader back to his ship as the Imperials scatter because Lando is making his way into the core of the Death Star. Vader (Sebastian Shaw here, but not the villain from Marvel comics) asks his son to take off his mask so he can see him with his own eyes for once and confesses to him that Luke was right; there was good in him after all. Then he dies. Lando manages to get into the MCP-from-Tron-lookin’ core of the Death Star and destroys it, the Rebel forces and Luke all escaping. Celebration breaks out all over the galaxy, Luke burns his father on a funeral pyre, and Luke sees the spirits of Obi-Wan, Yoda, and Anakin (either Shaw or Hayden Christensen, depending on the version) proudly watching over them.

A New Hope is probably the worst of this trilogy, but only because V and VI were so gundamn good. The visuals were amazing for it’s time, and, even for these times, they stand up quite nicely. The dumb little things that Lucas went back in and added do nothing to help the movie, but they don’t hurt it in my mind either. Fanboys just don’t like any changes being made to their beloved movies, forgetting that they’re actually Lucas’ movies that we’re just getting to watch. The best thing to me about this movie and the next two is R2-D2. Whoever is to be blamed for this little droid should be applauded for giving a featureless little robot such a personality. I love that little mother fucker. The performances are all good as well. Han is the best of the humans to me. He’s a smug asshole, but he’s charming as shit. If Leia didn’t get him, I’d have tried. Leia’s good as well. Luke was a little grating in this movie. He seemed pretty whiny through the bulk of the movie. Aunt Beru and Uncle Own are fuckers though. They almost ruined the entire movies by telling Luke that Obi-Wan is dead and wanting to keep him at the farm. If he’d done that, he’d be dead like you two and we’d have no Star Wars! Jerks. Vader’s design was great. He looks like the badass that he should. And James Earl Jones’ voice sells the shit out of him. Obi-Wan must’ve been getting forgetful in his old age, acting like he stopped going by Obi-Wan before Luke was born and not recognizing the two droids. Nuh-uh! I saw them movies! The scale of this movie is as epic as it should be. This is first illustrated in the very beginning when the tiny Rebel ship is running from the mammoth Star Destroyer, and it continues throughout. For an off topic note, why does the fat pilot gotta be called Porkins, huh? Also, let’s face it, George. Han shot first.

For those that are unaware, the scene where Han is talking to the bounty hunter Greedo (the scene where I’ve memorized a line that Greedo speaks in a made up language, in case anyone doubts my nerdiness), originally Han shot Greedo under the table before Greedo could shoot. George thought this made Han too much of a dick and added in a blast from Greedo so that Greedo shot first. Fans erupted with anger. As I watched this version on BluRay, I could barely tell who shot first. So calm the fuck down, fanboys. You make me embarrassed to count myself amongst your number.

The Empire Strikes Back is probably what most people would call the best movie in the series, and I’d be inclined to agree. The reason? Vader is Luke’s fuckin’ father! HOLY SHIT! Of course, at this point (whether you’ve seen the movie or not) you probably know that. But I remember seeing that when I was a kid and later having to collect my mind from the wall behind me, on account of how much it was blown! The visuals got better as (I assume) the budget increased, not having a movie studio doubting your quality anymore after the success of the original. Now it’s all “Give us money and back the fuck off.” The performances remain in the same quality for the most part. Hamill gets less annoying as he becomes a badass. Watching Han and Leia’s relationship begin to bloom from bickering to love is great, but damaging to me. Why? Because I intend to ruin a great many relationships by only responding to “I love you” with “I know”. Think about it, it will kill many relationships but the one that gets it is meant for me. The puppeteering on Yoda here is amazing. It had so much more personality as a puppet than they were able to pull off with the CGI Yoda in the prequels. But why come Luke travels all that distance to train with a Jedi master just to ignore almost everything he tells him? Vader’s still a badass here, but it’s funny to me when he tries to hide from Luke in their fight because of his breathing problems.

Return of the Jedi wraps it all up for us. Not the best of the 3 but far from a bad movie. Luke has finally graduated to total awesomeness as his training nears completion. The practical, puppet version of Jabba the Hutt was SO much creepier than the CGI one from the prequels and the added scene from A New Hope. In this movie, Leia makes every nerd in the world fall in love with her by wearing a metal bikini as Jabba’s slave, which is much better than her Boushh outfit with the Sega Genesis on her head. And that Rancor is fucking terrifying. They made Ewoks blink in this one, which is a nice touch and makes them more realistic. And watching those adorable mother fuckers die in the battle is the saddest thing ever. PERIOD. Where’s the Sarah McLaughlin video for them?! The benefit of the BluRay remaster was made clearest to me in this movie, when the explosion of the Death Star 2 literally shook my living room. They changed the most things in this movie; all the things you may have seen the fanboy outrage over. The biggest one was that the originally silent scene where Darth Vader picks up the Emperor and throws him to his death now has a Revenge of the Sith-esque “NOOOOOOOOOOOooooooo!” added on top of it. Fanboys cried out in a much similar fashion. But why? I still think it works. I’ve got no problem with this change. It fits and I wouldn’t even have noticed had I not seen it on the internet because I don’t analyze every frame of the film, I just watch it. The change I had a problem with happened a few years ago. And what is that? I miss Yub Nub. Look it up.

Also, a little cool fact I found out while watching these movies: A character says “I have a bad feeling about this” in each of the 6 movies. Obi-Wan in Episode I, Anakin in Episode II, Obi-Wan again in Episode III, Luke and Han in Episode IV, Leia in Episode V, and C-3PO in Episode VI. I wouldn’t have thought of it had I not been reading the trivia about all the movies on IMDB while watching them.

My prognosis here is: AWESOME. I’ve always loved these movies and I can’t imagine there’s anything that could happen in my life, or anything George Lucas could do to them, that would change that. I probably watch these movies at least once a year as the whim strikes me ever since they came out on DVD. And, now in BluRay, they’re at their best. You don’t notice the difference as much in the prequels because they were filmed in higher quality. But when you get to the original series, all of which came out before I was even born, you can really see a big jump in quality of video and sound. My review? “Buy these movies” out of 3000. I think you should buy the whole saga, personally, but if you hate the prequels so much, at least do yourself the favor of picking up the original saga. Don’t make me come to you and wave my hand in front of your face to make you do it.

And, as always, please rate, comment, and/or like this post and others. It may help me get better.