Hmm, time to “christen” my WordPress with a random musing…

Watching Return of the Jedi is as good a way to finish off a weekend as any, I guess, and it is on my telly right now… Just up to the bit where Princess Leia is befriending Wicket the Ewok (the legendary Warwick Davis out of Willow and Nightmare in Silver, amongst many other things).

And as I always do when I watch this film, I’m reflecting on just what nasty pieces of work the Ewoks are on the quiet, what with their attempted cooking/eating of Luke, Han and crew and their uncompromising attitude to bashing stormtroopers on the head with rocks/stabbing them with pointy sticks in the later battle scene.

(To go off on a slight tangent, that stormtrooper armour must be made by a similar sort of corrupt pork-barrel defence contractor to the one I suspect must have built the Death Star. It can’t even stop a stone-tipped arrow, let alone a blaster bolt…)

It doesn’t really surprise me that the Emperor’s troops get their clocks cleaned by the Ewoks, by the way, once Chewie turns the tide by negating the only thing they have going for them in that fight, namely the highly mobile heavy fire support provided by the AT-STs. Militaristic dictatorships are generally known to have lousy armies. Realistically, 20-odd years after the Clone Wars, most of the current crop are probably eighteen year old conscripts, kids not unlike pre-Obi-Wan Luke in all likelihood, with minimal training (witness their abysmal shooting in most firefights they get into), more used to shooting up unsuspecting moisture farms on Tatooine than going toe to toe with a gritty, resourceful, committed enemy like the Ewoks. And if you’re fighting Ewoks, you’d do well to save your last blaster charge for yourself, because if they take you prisoner it’s B-B-Q time.

Which is what prompts me to the thought that if proud new Star Wars owners Disney are going to persist with making various spin-off films in addition to the new triology, they really need to do one set pre-Jedi on the forest moon of Endor, a.k.a. “The Green Hell.” The last place any stormtrooper wants to get posted.

Troops meets Avatar*, if you will, in the style of Platoon or Hamburger Hill, or possibly Cross of Iron. We follow a diverse squad of young stormies, having any Imperial indoctrination they might have quickly beaten out of them as they do battle with their elusive enemy in those endless forests. First thing that they see when they get off the shuttle at the shield generator complex is the pile of body bags waiting to be loaded aboard for the return flight. By the end of the second reel, they’re a demoralised bunch of burned-out spice-smoking veterans, dreaming of “fragging” their (English-accented) officer and thoroughly disillusioned with the Emperor, gradually getting picked off one by one by the unseen foe that lurks behind every tree with a bow and arrow, or a rock on a string.

And then they all get killed in the end. A heartwarming story. You know, for the kids.

I’d watch it, anyway.

*And yeah, the dodgy racial politics implicit in the idea of recasting Ewoks as furry Vietcong is not lost on me – although those sorts of Unfortunate Implications seem to be a required aspect of most Hollywood blockbusters. And it’s not as if Lucas wasn’t thinking it when he was orchestrating that battle scene.