The FilmNerds Blog

Note: Back to the Movies is a special feature on the FilmNerds blog in which Matt Scalici will be watching the Top 50 highest-grossing movies of 1983 in order from 50 to 1.

As our epic journey through the far, far away galaxy of the 1983 cineplex, we come to the year’s most successful box office hit (by far) and easily the most enduring cultural landmark of 1983 cinema. Return of the Jedi marked the conclusion of George Lucas’ groundbreaking sci-fi/adventure franchise known as the Star Wars trilogy…or so we thought back in 1983.

Lucas’ multiple reincarnations of the franchise, whether through the reviled “Special Edition” re-releases of the original films or the equally reviled prequel trilogy, have had perhaps more HTML dedicated to them than any other subject in the internet era. Fans have endlessly debated whether Lucas has destroyed his once great creation with his later work but in this post, I want to keep the discussion of what Lucas did later to a minimum. Today, I want to focus on a time in which the Star Wars films were still a pure, unadulterated work of unfathomable imagination and unparalleled creative depth. A time in which the release of a new Star Wars film brought with it the promise of new adventures with Luke, Leia and Han, new bizarre and alien creatures that were unlike anything we’d ever seen before, and to a lesser extent a long-awaited resolution to a rather compelling and surprising storyline. That time was 1983.

OK, perhaps I’m overly romanticizing how great everything was on Skywalker Ranch back in 1983. Yes, Lucas had suffered a run-in with the Directors Guild of America (it involved philosophical differences over Lucas’ decision not to include opening credits in The Empire Strikes Back) that prevented him from hiring his producing partner and good friend Steven Spielberg to direct the third installment of his mega-hit franchise. In fact, because the production would now be non-union, it wasn’t just Spielberg who wouldn’t be available to direct but most other proven directing talent in Hollywood as well. Lucas approached a couple of up-and-coming filmmakers with solid pedigrees, David Lynch and David Cronenberg, but both ultimately turned down the job to pursue passion projects (and yes, it ultimately worked out in both men’s favors). Eventually, Lucas hired little-known Welsh director Richard Marquand, a relatively inexperienced filmmaker who had absolutely zero experience working on a project of the scale and budget he would have for Return of the Jedi. There are varying reports of exactly how much of the directing Marquand did but for the sake of this post, let’s assume it’s somewhere in the middle with Marquand handling the day-to-day duties of directing but Lucas holding overall creative control.

Then there were the disputes over the story and how it should ultimately end. Lucas had a very difficult time deciding exactly how to handle the closing chapter of the trilogy and began pre-production on the film without a finished screenplay. There were reportedly some fairly heated disputes with both screenwriter Lawrence Kasdan, who along with Harrison Ford felt that having Han Solo die a heroic and sacrificial death would add great gravitas to the film, as well as his producing partner Gary Kurtz, who ultimately walked away from the project when he felt Lucas’ storytelling had become tainted by his consideration for things like merchandising and toy sales.

In the end, a script was settled on and while some have remained critical of the film’s tidy happy ending, there are more than a few sequences in Return of the Jedi that hold up today as absolute classic moments of 20th Century Hollywood.

Return of the Jedi will always be remembered first and foremost for the incredible, funny, dark and thrilling opening scenes of the film that center around the rescue of Han Solo from Jabba the Hutt’s palace. The character of Jabba had already been mentioned throughout the first two films and Lucas had been warning the audience that he was a bad dude who was not to be trifled with but it wasn’t until we saw him in all his disgusting and hedonistic glory that we could truly understand what Lucas had in mind when he was speaking of this intergalactic crime lord. Jabba is a combination of a Roman aristocrat and a Mongol warrior king. He eats small rat-like creatures alive whenever he gets a craving. He keeps a herd of dancing slave girls around that he either licks or feeds to his monster, whichever he feels will be more amusing at the moment. He’s a truly revolting character, almost to a comedic extent, and the visual presentation of him has a lot to do with his effectiveness.

Jabba was, and remains to this day, one of the most complex and expensive puppets ever built. Designed by the brilliant Phil Tippett, the Jabba puppet cost over a half a million dollars to construct and weighed over a ton once completed. It was operated by as many as six puppeteers at a time, some inside the puppet, some behind the puppet and some off set using radio control devices. What Frank Oz did with his magnificent performance as Yoda in The Empire Strikes Back is equalled here by his Jim Henson Company cohorts with their work on Jabba. What’s most astonishing to me so many years later is how wonderful and real these puppet characters feel, not just Yoda and Jabba but all the peripheral make-up and latex creations that fill the edges of the room in Jabba’s palace.

I know I said I wasn’t going to talk much about Lucas’ later work but when it comes to puppets, I think Return of the Jedi has a lot to teach all of us today, not just Lucas, about the power of using real things over computer generated images today. As many of you know (especially if you are a nerd like me) George Lucas’ rationale for adding CGI effects to the “Special Edition” re-releases of the original films was that had he possessed the technology at the time, he would have used CGI instead of practical effects. In fact, Lucas states in his audio commentary on the 2004 DVD release of Return of the Jedi that whether a character is created via puppet or CGI, it will always be “fake” since they are both artificial and that if anything, the CGI character is more real since it can do things that a puppet cannot do, such as walk. This is where Lucas and I disagree vehemently. I think a piece of meticulously painted latex is VERY real and real in a way that a computer generated image could never be. Computers can do a lot of impressive things, sometimes things that no practical effect could ever do, but when it comes to creating a character, computers will never be able to duplicate the distinct movement of a living being, the “essence of life” if you will, in the way that a skilled puppeteer can. I won’t second-guess everything Lucas did with computers, but I’ll never understand why anyone could prefer a computerized Yoda and Jabba to the original puppet creations.

Among the other things Lucas got so very right in Return of the Jedi was the interplay between Luke Skywalker, Darth Vader and the evil Emperor Palpatine. While the Emperor was referenced in earlier films and even made brief appearances, he was never truly brought to life as a character until Ian McDiarmid took over the role and played him in person for the first time in the series. We saw McDiarmid earlier in Back to the Movies in a small but interesting performance in Gorky Park, in which he portrayed a creepy forensic scientist. Here McDiarmid takes that creepiness and adds a healthy dose of pure evil to it, overshadowing Darth Vader as the ultimate villain of the piece and giving Vader and his son Luke some common ground for the first time in the series.

Other than the typically cranky Vincent Canby and the notoriously nasty New York Post reviewer Rex Reed, most critics loved the film and while many felt it wasn’t as strong as the first two installments of the franchise, they were still blown away by its originality and pure entertainment value. In his 1983 review, Roger Ebert talked about the “density of the canvas” shown to us in Return of the Jedi, referring to the abundance of originality and imagination pouring out of Lucas and his team. Ebert was fascinated with the sheer volume of new and fresh ideas present on screen, even if they were mentioned only for a moment of referenced in a single shot.

It’s easy to take for granted today how rich and fresh these films must have felt when they were new. I don’t know if it’s really possible to go back and view these films with that same sense of newness, since so many things that have come since then have been so deeply influenced by them, from the Lord of the Rings films to Saturday morning cartoons. As you’ll hear in the podcast included below, even a first-time viewer of these films in 2011 can’t view them with the same fresh perspective as a 1983 audience would have since they have become so deeply ingrained into our popular culture today. Even if you don’t see these films, you can’t help but be exposed to references to nearly every individual scene within them just by being out there and consuming the entertainment.

There are things that are less amazing and fascinating in Return of the Jedi, whether it’s the slightly-too-cute Ewoks or the cluttered space battles or repetitive Death Star destruction sequence, but this film has more originality and creativity in its little finger than most sci-fi/fantasy films from the last 30 years could ever dream of having. It’s a clear reminder of a time when George Lucas wasn’t a figure that inspired cynicism. He was one of the great creative minds working in Hollywood.

DOWNLOAD: Back to the Movies Podcast – Return of the Jedi (with special guests Chris Rosko and Jason Roche)

Next Up: We take a look back at some of my favorite films, performances and moments from this epic journey through the films of 1983.

Note: Back to the Movies is a special feature on the FilmNerds blog in which Matt Scalici will be watching the Top 50 highest-grossing movies of 1983 in order from 50 to 1.

Do you like Star Wars? What about Mad Max? What if you took those two movies, combined them, traded out the actors for a bunch of nobodies, made the screenplay laughably bad and cut the special effects budget in half? You still want to see it? Then have I got a movie for you…

I knew at some point in this process, I’d run into my first camp classic and Spacehunter: Adventures in the Forbidden Zone is it. Loaded from end to end with bad acting, cheap special effects and one of the laziest, most brazen attempts at cinematic plagiarism I’ve ever seen, Spacehunter is the kind of movie that can really only be enjoyed by the cynical and sarcastic hipsters raised on Mystery Science Theater 3000. Believe me when I say, though, that I am not the kind of person who enjoys the camp factor of a bad movie. I might be amused by how bad it is but make no mistake, friends, this is 90 minutes of my life I will never get back. A sacrifice for the integrity of the blog.

The film opens with a confusingly shot effects sequence involving some cardboard spaceships hitting a meteor and exploding. An escape pod holding three women in spandex and New Wave hairdos ejects and crash lands on a strange planet where we will spend the rest of the movie. The premise here, though it is never fully explained in the film, is that this planet has been overrun by a horrible disease that has turned everyone on it into melty-faced mutants who apparently spend their entire lives making Molotov cocktails in preparation for the events of this movie.

Anyway, the three women, who are never named and never speak a word of dialog in the entire film, are captured by the mutants and taken to an evil warlord named Overdog (we’ll get to him later) for unspecified purposes. That’s when we meet our hero, Wolff.

Here’s where the plagiarism kicks in. Wolff is Han Solo, plain and simple. He dresses like him, he has the same haircut, he’s sarcastic, he’s a loner, on and on. The only difference is that while Harrison Ford oozed charisma in the role, Wolff is played by a TV actor (Peter Strauss) who looks like he was on morphine for the length of the production.

Even the name evokes Han Solo. Here’s how I’m pretty sure they named the character. Han Solo. Solo. Alone. Lone. Lone Wolf. Wolf. Add another f so people don’t suspect what we’ve done.

Anyway, Wolff receives a message about the three women with an offer of a reward if he can rescue them. Wolff and his sexy female assistant Chalmers (I love that name) zoom down to the planet, bury their spacecraft so the aliens can’t find it (Wolff’s best line: “Make it eat dirt, Chalmers!”) and embark on their adventure.

The first mind-blowingly stupid action set piece we encounter (don’t worry I won’t take you through all of them) involves a group of “land pirates” who ride a train in the shape of a pirate ship. I’m not even going to attempt to apply logic to that idea because I know the writers who came up with it didn’t. Anyway, the pirate scene ends with what has to be the most campy sequence in the entire film, an early death scene for the ill-fated Chalmers that contains a hilarious reveal that I admit I should have seen coming. Think Ian Holm in Alien.

With Chalmers dispatched, we meet the real female lead of the film, the much less sexy Niki, played by a pre-Sixteen Candles Molly Ringwald. I kid you not. At this point in her career, Ringwald was a newcomer, known only for her role on The Facts of Life. In her defense, she’s clearly giving this role her all. The character is meant to be obnoxious and dopey and Ringwald’s delivery is probably the best anybody could hope for with this screenplay, which I should mention is loaded with distractingly idiotic future-slang. Words like ‘brainworking’ (which means thinking) and ‘scavvy’ (which means disgusting). Marlon Brando would sound like an idiot with this dialogue. Ringwald had no chance.

As Wolff and Niki search the desert planet for signs of the three captured women, they encounter lame monsters, futuristic biker gangs and on a couple of occasions an old frenemy of Wolff’s named Washington, played by Ernie Hudson. Hudson must have gotten roped into the movie by his Ghostbusters director Ivan Reitman, who executive produced Spacehunter (weird) and it’s a fortunate turn of events for us as he’s far and away the most entertaining part of the movie. He too is given ridiculous dialogue, mostly focused on his love for his specialized bulldozer vehicle, but Hudson is such a likable actor that he seems to get away with it far more than the rest of the cast.

The film climaxes with a big spark-filled battle with Overdog, who looks strikingly like Darth Vader without a helmet. He’s sufficiently gross looking for an intergalactic villain but it doesn’t appear that anything was done to effect his voice, which basically sounds like a normal dude’s voice coming through a hideously disfigured half-man, half-machine.

So how did this piece of junk get a green-light from a major Hollywood studio (Columbia Pictures)? And better yet, how did this film end up in the Top 50 at the box office for the year? A quick glance at the film’s history answers both questions. Spacehunter was released on May 20, 1983, one week before the opening of what many correctly assumed would be the biggest hit of the year, Return of the Jedi. The first nerdlings were already setting up camp in front of their local theater when Spacehunter opened and Columbia must have figured that a low-budget, thrown together knock-off might be able to capitalize on the excitement preceding Jedi. It wasn’t a bad bet; Spacehunter finished with $16.5 million at the box office with a production budget of $14.4 million. Nothing to sneeze at in 1983 dollars.

Still, it’s films like this, low quality garbage with a clear intent to capitalize on the success of another well-made film from another studio, that give the ’80s a bad name when it comes to movies. I’ve flipped across so much campy trash like Spacehunter that it’s tainted my view of all films from the ’80s. I’m willing to excuse camp when it comes from a filmmaker who was legitimately trying to make a good film but failed. I’m less forgiving with films like this, churned out quickly and cheaply by a major studio with the resources to do better work. This is the first truly bad film I’ve encountered on the list so far. Looking ahead though, this might be a taste of things to come for 1983.

Next Up: Krull starring Liam Neeson.