Oh, I hate The Battle for Endor in a rather uncomplicated way. If The Ewok Adventure was the best possible Ewok movie, here is the worst possible Ewok movie. In fact, The Battle for Endor is, by far, the worst Star Wars film, and after seeing The Star Wars Holiday Special I do not make that statement lightly. In fact, The Battle for Endor may be the worst POSSIBLE Star Wars film. I cannot imagine the bar ever going any lower. In light of The Battle for Endor I actually find myself extra-defensive of The Ewok Adventure. I did not like The Ewok Adventure either, but I at least appreciated that it stuck close to the bone of the Star Wars universe and could have been a lot worse. Little did I know.

Sticking close to the bone of the Star Wars universe made The Ewok Adventure embarrassing to watch but helped it retain the grungy attraction of the original trilogy. I felt that The Ewok Adventure should be included in official Star Wars canon, but that isn't because it earned it exactly. Look at it this way: Suppose that you have an apple, but unlike most apples this one is yellow and instead of being round has a long thin curved shape. And the skin is very thick and bitter, but inside the fruit is very soft. There aren't any seeds inside, at least not the hard black ones that most other apples have. With all these changes is it not safe to say that this fruit can longer be called an apple, but must be categorized as a banana perhaps?

Basically, The Ewok Adventure looks and tastes enough like Star Wars to BE Star Wars. As a child, The Ewok Adventure was dubbed on a tape that my Dad made for me and came right before Return of the Jedi. I seem to remember the two films blurring into one another, unfortunately enough. (Although, I knew that Return of the Jedi was superior because it had more than Ewoks in it. Later, possibly for the best, I taped Gus Van Sant's My Own Private Idaho over it.) You could probably say that The Ewok Adventure does little for Star Wars, but Star Wars has done a great deal for The Ewok Adventure. Had it not been for Star Wars, The Ewok Adventure probably would not exist. It's not substantial enough stuff to stand on its own. But that's OK; borrowed greatness still counts as greatness in my book.

The Battle for Endor should not be Star Wars canon. It portrays few if any of the characteristic traits of a Star Wars film and is banana through and through. Not being a Star Wars film, it cannot leech off the greatness of the Star Wars series. There is, again, the good news and the bad news. The Battle for Endor will neither infect nor dilute your good feelings for Star Wars, but without that Star Wars association it is painful to endure on its own terms.

Don't mistake this freedom from the Star Wars orthodoxy as an indication that The Battle for Endor is not derivative. For some unfathomable reason, it takes as its chief inspiration Lucio Fulci's Conquest. Yes, that Lucio Fulci, the one that made Zombie and liked showing people getting it in the eyeballs. Both films feature fantasy planets that are ruled by evil witches that employ armies of malevolent Cookie Monsters that speak in broken English. The heroes in both films include a true believer and a cynic who is quickly won over to the forces of good while fighting the evil witch.

Okay, the storyline I just described could be easily tweaked to be Star Wars, or Willow, but I have to wonder where the Cookie Monsters came from. The Cookie Monsters in Battle for Endor are far too similar to those in Conquest for it to be a coincidence (especially given that the writers/directors Lucas selected for the film, Jim and Ken Wheat, cut their teeth on horror films). Conquest was a sadistic, off-setting piece of work, which was OK because it's Lucio Fulci for Christ's sake. Despite seeing and hating Zombie, I was attracted to Conquest after compulsively reading and re-reading Walter Chaw's piece on it for Film Freak Central. His position is that Fulci hates the movies and hates women especially, and makes incompetent films on purpose so that these attitudes are hidden and then perpetuated under a veneer of jeering ironic distance. I think that Chaw could be right in applying this to some of Fulci's other films, but in the case of Conquest I think that I would disagree.

I'm reminded of some of the reviews I've read of I Spit on Your Grave by those websites devoted to "bad movies." I suppose I am thinking of a piece I read on "Oh The Humanity!" in particular. They discovered that the "cheese" factor of I Spit on Your Grave was considerably low because the subject matter (a woman's gang rape and her subsequent hyper-brutal revenge) was so heavy. Similarly there is a brutality to the violence in Conquest, something very angry but arrogant, that effectively cuts through any distance that we may try and form between ourselves and the film. It's the image of the barely literate ruling class rampaging through the villages, taking that which is their right by birth (the village women) that seems to get my goat. This is not random violence, this is violence with a distinct purpose; it's politicized. Images of the Germans raping the Russians, the Japanese raping the Chinese, the Americans raping the Vietnamese, etc., were triggered while watching Conquest; the violence has that same sort of gravitas. We are basically seeing the fantasies of serial killers (or men turned into serial killers) given opportunity and legitimacy through racist wartime ideologies. You can't laugh at it without coming off as an asshole.

In a way, I think both Conquest and I Spit on Your Grave are praiseworthy in not "working" as camp. Probably the most obnoxious thing about the ironics is their "everything is shit" philosophy. I'm reminded of a theater manager that I knew who thought that the greatest film of all time was Spaceballs and hated anything that was "artsy fartsy." I think she even went as far to say that all movies "should be spoofs." Not somebody of particularly high class or imagination, she was impossible to hold a conversation with. When the weight of a cheesy film's content destroys the fun of tearing it apart, it seems to indicate that at least some images and ideas in our collective lexicon have been able to retain their significance; that the "everything is shit" crowd is forced to admit that not everything is, in fact, shit, and there are some things that make you an asshole for laughing at. I wouldn't argue that it is better exactly, but a film like Conquest is perhaps the perfect antidote to the work of Trey Parker.

That Conquest works at all is attributable to its grungy aesthetic and explicit violence, the two things that The Battle of Endor surrenders through the translation. What it retains is that anger and arrogance behind the violence. The film starts with the casual death of Cindel’s (the little blonde girl from The Ewok Adventure) entire family. They are killed in a battle with the Cookie Monsters who want their power generator as they think it will give them magical abilities. There is something a little Khmer Rouge about these well-educated humans being casually executed by the stupid Cookie Monsters who just happen to be in power. (The stupid Cookie Monsters also think little about killing the equally stupid Ewok peasants, which is also important to note.)

The Battle for Endor starts off on such a sour note. Unlike in the original Star Wars, the bad guys have such an upper hand at such an early point in the film that any hope that we can attribute to the heroes is meager enough to feel like a sick joke. That the villains are stupid accentuates the injustice of their power as well as the height of it. They are so powerful that they are allowed to sink to that level of stupidity.

The climax of the film ends with the evil Cookie Monster general threatening to execute the little girl if he doesn't get the power generator. Fairly heavy stuff even if this wasn't an alleged "children's film," but I will admit that I should be fully desensitized at this point. I'm not sure what my problem is, but maybe it'd that the general isn't made to look desperate in taking this action, and he isn't even made to look truly evil through it. There is a genuine amorality to this scene: I couldn't really find any indication the film feels that threatening little girls may be beyond the pale, or that it has the moral compass to even spin the scene for cheap thrills. It all goes by so quickly and is given so little weight that only the sheer rationality of the general's actions stand out. He threatens the girl simply because he knows that Wilford Brimley (who has the power generator) values her. That makes sense. That is what you have to do to get what you want.

You see, John Travolta licking Dominique Swain's face as he takes her away at gunpoint in Face/Off, that's sick and kinkily enjoyable, because we get the feeling that taboos are being broken. The Battle For Endor never seems to acknowledge the existence of any taboos at all. The evil Cookie Monsters see life as cheap, and that philosophy has metastasized into the film's bones. The repugnant thing about The Battle for Endor is that this little girl sees her family being slaughtered in front of her and then later has a gun pulled on her, and we're not at all affected by it. We're not thrilled, we're not disgusted, we're not saddened, we don't really have any emotional reaction at all. The film regards all of this as nothing more but busy noise.

When writing about The Ewok Adventure, I observed how it was torn between producing an authentic Ewok experience and alienating the audience (ninety-odd minutes of Ewoks talking Ewokese and doing Ewok things) or involving us by giving us strongly defined human characters but pushing aside the Ewoks in what should be their own movie. The Ewok Adventure was a failure, but I wasn't sure that there was any way for it to be a success. The Battle for Endor, of course, does not bother to struggle between which direction to take. This is humancentric, push-the-Ewoks-to-the-side sort of stuff from the get go. The racism that never quite manifested itself entirely in The Ewok Adventure is omnipresent here. The little girl does not learn to speak Ewokese, but her "best friend," the Ewok Wicket speaks English rather fluently if poorly.

Okay, purely on a superficial/experiential level, it is creepy as fuck hearing Wicket speak broken English. I am reminded of the Japanese roboticist Dr. Masahiro Mori's invaluable theory of the "uncanny valley." Basically he found that when robots only partially resemble human characteristics, they are attractive and "cute." As the robot begins to exhibit more and more human characteristics, however, we no longer recognize they way in which we are similar to them, but in how they are different. This difference, called the "Uncanny Valley," nauseates and frightens us; Dr. Mori compares it to that of an animated corpse. The "Uncanny Valley" theory does not only apply to robots, of course, but also to Ewoks. As aliens, I guess that we were able to equate the Ewoks as animals. They were cute and their customs and culture were cute in how it mimicked that of our own. That's a condescending position to take, I suppose, but there was a level in which that worked. Now the Ewoks are given the ability to speak broken English, and it's not all cute.

Strangely, the broken English of the Cookie Monsters reads as just moronic. It somehow does not perturb nearly as much as the Ewoks'. Perhaps it is simply that we have gotten so used to seeing the Ewoks as a race of walking teddy bears with a civilization parallel to our own that seeing them consistently speaking broken English is too violent and too vulgar a renovation for us to accept. Perhaps it's that we like the Ewoks, and that while the stupidity of the Cookie Monsters feels almost voluntary – they are a culture of barbarians where intelligence does not matter – the Ewoks are trying their very best to communicate and still can't get it right. When we didn't understand what the Ewoks were saying, we were able to speculate on the value of the Ewok civilization. Now that the Ewoks can communicate, we are forced to acknowledge the inadequacy of their mental capabilities. They become pathetic and painful to watch.

Now, of course, behind the unpleasant experiential qualities of the Ewoks' broken English is an equally unpleasant racist ideology. Citadel does not learn a syllable of Ewokese, presumably because she does not need to. I mean come on! Ewokese?! All it is is squawking and gibberish. Wicket learning English, however, seems to indicate that he has been civilized through his adventures with Citadel. He has evolved from the ignoble savage to the good nigger. Notice that at no point is he seen as Citadel's equal. The buck-toothed and cross-eyed Wicket has fruit thrown at his head by a mischievous furry gnome and later sits on a hot coal (!). Both injuries are met with enthusiastic laughter by an otherwise indifferent Citadel. Note that had these things happened to her, Wicket would not be amused and in all probability would show great concern as to her well-being. That is because Citadel is a little human (read English-speaking, which is to say read American) girl with Aryan good looks, and Wicket, despite the merit of his character, is just a dirty little Ewok.

I must go back and note that Jar Jar Binks was not given a modicum of dignity in the original Star Wars trilogy (at least not the version that my generation saw), and so when he hadn't any dignity at all, we were saved from reflecting how the mighty have fallen. Far from being the Ewok Stepin Fetchit, poor Wicket is the Ewok Jackie Chan. Perhaps the most offensive moment for me is when Citadel gets kidnapped by the Cookie Monsters, and Wilford Brimley and Wicket have to go and save her. She is inside a castle that is surrounded by a moat. Upon seeing it Wicket exclaims, "Wicket swim!" Wilford Brimley stops him and says, "Oh no, you don't swim. Take a look at this." He then dips a stick into the moat and it comes out smoking. "That could have been you, ya little bugger!" Okay, Wicket lives on this moon, but because he is an Ewok and because Wilford Brimley is a human, Brimley better understands this environment. His race does not tie him into his world; it prevents him from fully understanding it.

Early in The Battle for Endor Citadel tells Wicket that he should come home with her so that they can go to school together. He actually thinks about it before gently telling her that his family is here on the moon of Endor, and he belongs with his family. That's as close to a reproach that Wicket ever offers to her. And of course there is never any question as to whether or not Citadel will stay on Endor. Despite knowing him for a shorter time, she relates far more deeply with the Brimley character than Wicket. At the end of the film she returns to wherever it was that she came from, a la Dorothy in The Wizard of Oz. Race seems to precede all other forms of association for her.

Of course, I would not fault Nicholas Roeg's Walkabout for acknowledging an unbridgeable gap between diverse cultures. In fact, way back in my Epinions days, I criticized the underseen documentary The True Meaning of Pictures for its Polyannic insistence in ignoring it. I do think that both Citadel and Wicket will really be happier with their own kind. However, The Battle for Endor does not seem to have the moral intelligence to lament this gap or to milk some irony from its cynicism like Roeg did with Walkabout. It's flippant about it, and this essentially transforms the film from a comment on racism into an example of it.

The movie seems to have a secular pro-technology slant. While the Cookie Monsters are the ruling class over the Ewoks, they don't seem to be any more developed intellectually, and they are certainly not on the level of intellectual development as the humans. Similarly, I don't think that their usage of human technology is seen as degenerate because of their moral limitations, I think it is seen as degenerate because of their racial and cultural limitations. They are fighting to obtain the power generator because they want the "human's power." As the child Citadel points out, however, the power generator will not work when taken off of their star cruiser. Those stupid Cookie Monsters. The non-secular magical capabilities are all sanctioned through a human "space witch" who works with the Cookie Monsters. We don't see the Ewoks doing anything magical as we did in The Ewok Adventure, basically because the filmmakers do not want to do anything that would glorify the culture of this teddy bear "mud race." But the Cookie Monsters can only interpret the power generator as a magical artifact and their reliance on a magic-centric lexicon is characteristic of their naivety, and so it would follow the inferiority of their civilization relative to the humans. Whew!

The secularist worldview of The Battle for Endor may be a tip-off as to why it is profoundly apoetic. This is a loud, tinny, ugly piece of work; again, like the worst of the Star Wars series, it legitimizes all of the attacks that have been launched against the series.

Like Citizen Kane... um, let me pause for a moment as I laugh uncontrollably at having just typed "like Citizen Kane" in reference to this movie. Okay, better now. Like Citizen Kane, The Battle for Endor indicts its poor characters just as harshly as it indicts its rich characters. Like the Welles film, ranked as the greatest of all time by most of the polls, the poor are seen as barbaric and vitriolic whereas the rich are callous and cold. Citizen Kane idealized neither side of the socio-economic spectrum; both poverty and affluence prove to be breeding grounds for assholism. In discussing The Battle for Endor in terms of the poor and rich, I suppose that I'm thinking principally on a global scale, but it's basically the same story. We have the Khmer Rouge-esque Cookie Monster military class, the snobbish and mostly indifferent human imperialists, and then finally the pathetically weak-minded Ewok peasants who are exploited/condescended to by the first two groups.

It wasn't until fairly recently that I could appreciate Citizen Kane purely on a superficial level: as great filmmaking. I had thought it was a great film, but found it to be a great downer. What Kane has that The Battle of Endor does not is a degree of humanist feeling that complicates the sometimes classist attitudes and a degree of self-knowledge borne out of the subjectivity of its title character. Kane falsely idealized his common man roots, and failed to accept or acknowledge that he was raised closer to those rotten richies. However, the film itself does not follow his mistake. Of course, The Battle for Endor does not have that developed a moral intelligence.

Did I say that already when comparing it with Walkabout? What do you want me to say? The Battle for Endor is not a good movie. It is a bad one, which is the polar opposite of a good movie. Why did I compare it with Walkabout and Citizen Kane? Well, because like Walkabout and Citizen Kane it has a deep cynicism toward race and class, but unlike those films it does not have the brains to realize that it's cynical. But also because I think it is important to acknowledge that you can and should watch Walkabout or Citizen Kane or possibly even rewatch them instead of sitting through this shit. And it is shit; I've told you and you know and so I don't want to hear any excuses. You know, if you went and saw White Chicks, Catwoman or A Cinderella Story in theaters, you are excused as I did too, if only because I was desperate at the time to leave the house and see a movie, any movie, on the big screen. But the video rental industry had democratized the cinema, and there is no reason to see a movie like this when there are no doubt hundreds of genuine masterpieces that you could just as well have seen.

Oh, and on the subject of whether or not The Battle for Endor is a Star Wars film, the Ewoks are referred to as Ewoks in the film, which if you ask me is about on par with the droids referring to the humans as humans. And where were the Cookie Monsters in Return of the Jedi? And what is up with that space witch? There is nothing in the film that ties it in directly with the Star Wars universe. Change a few words (like Starcruiser and probably Ewok) and it could pass as a cheap-ass rip-off instead. Amusingly if terrifyingly, I've learned while doing some light research for this review why this thing was made in the first place. It was basically George Lucas' present to his daughter. The reason that he killed off Citadel's family in the very beginning is because he believed that his daughter would respond more strongly to an isolated female protagonist.

Hoe Lee Shit! Talk about having grown fat with power. There are no two ways about it; call The Phantom Menace the worst film ever made and you're a pampered little bitch who has never experienced true pain. Call The Star Wars Holiday Special the worst film ever made and you're guilty of gross hyperbole. It is this, The Battle for Endor, that fully symbolizes the depth of George Lucas' insanity and the terrors that can manifest themselves when creative bankruptcy joins forces with absolute creative freedom. I swear to God, if you even tolerate the existence of The Battle of Endor, Star Wars fans, you lose those last few shreds of credibility that you still retained with me. That's a warning and I mean it. There will not be another.