What is interesting, however, is the way that the film chooses to tweak the ending of Return of the Jedi. Reopening the Star Wars universe for new stories mean tweaking that ending, changing the full stop at the end of the sentence into a comma so that the story might continue. After all, the very existence of the new trilogy suggests that the story did not actually end with Luke and Vader vanquishing the Emperor as Lando blew up the second Death Star. It is no surprise that any attempt to continue the Star Wars franchise would have to return to the ending of Return of the Jedi and strip away some of the finality. (The infamous “Death Star contractors” debate from Clerks is just one example.) In particular, fans have wondered about the consequences of blowing up a moon-sized space station in orbit of a forest planet, wondering whether those cheerful little Ewoks would become an endangered species. The joy of large-scale science-fiction franchises is that there is never a shortage of film nerds ready to pick apart the finer details of a given story. Of course, deconstructing and interrogating that supposedly happy ending is nothing new. The general impression was that this was a gigantic “happily ever after” for the universe as a whole, having vanquished the Empire by crippling its unhealthily Death-Star-dependent economy. The original trilogy ended on a note of celebration on the forest moon of Endor, with the special addition retroactively inserting footage of similar festivities on Coruscant and Naboo. One of the more interesting aspects of The Force Awakens is the way that it recasts the conclusion of Star Wars: Episode VI – The Return of the Jedi. Handover from one generation to the next…
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