Lucas and Kasdan are firing on all cylinders with this thrilling conclusion to the classic Star Wars trilogy. True, on paper it lacks some of the energy that is apparent onscreen, but it's plotted well, has clever dialogue, and has a powerful message that anger is an easier emotion to feel than love.

My reading habits have gotten so poor that it has taken me five months to finish the screenplay of a two-hour movie, which is really dismaying to me. I originally started this as preparation for The Rise of Skywalker, and of course by now even the postmortem of that film has long since came and passed. It was frankly a little bit of a chore to return to this book when after TROS all I wanted to do was take a break from Star Wars, and it didn't help that there really wasn't anything very new to me in this edition, other than a handful of black-and-white facsimiles of concept art that weren't especially illuminating, and a brief introduction from Kazanjian, who seemed to be a suit rather than one of the film's true creatives.

But though the story was already very familiar, it was nonetheless the screenplay of a beloved film from my childhood, and seeing it on the page reinforced for me how good a script it was, exercising great economy in many of its most iconic moments. It has a few weaknesses, which I'm sure anyone reading this review will already have their opinion on. The only two that really matter to me are the (mis)treatment of Boba Fett, and the sloppiness of the resolution to Yoda's "there is another" line. Luke and Leia's relationship in this script is beautiful, and is one of the very economically-handled things I mentioned in this script where a lot is going on, but it's not really a full pay-off to the promise of a second Skywalker. Anyone who would rank this film poorly among the Star Wars films however is, I think, mistaken. This is a satisfying cap to the saga, and one of the greatest sci-fi adventure spectacles ever put to film.