Not smart in what way? I thought it served as a way to illustrate the change in Luke's thinking. Where before he rushed in with no plan and no preparation, for the encounter at Jabba's Palace it's clear from the get-go that he's put significant thought into this. The fact that it doesn't go off without a hitch hints at his lingering inexperience, but the plan succeeds where shooting up the joint starting at the front door wouldn't have gotten far at all. I can understand not
liking it (especially if you watch the 'remastered' versions with the awful singing
), but calling it bad is simply wrong.
The Ewoks I don't particularly like and would rather they have been Wookies like my vague memory recalls about the original script. Instead, we got "kid friendly". If you just pretend that they're Wookies instead, the whole thing is much better. The non-Ewok parts of Endor are pretty cool, too. The cinematography to shoot the speeder bike chase was imaginative and the scenery itself is used in typical Star Wars fashion - that is to say, the environment is not neglected as backdrop and is instead a thing for the characters to interact with, coming with its own struggles and conflict. Go watch one of the Indiana Jones movies, for an example that's still closely related, and the desert in Raiders of the Lost Ark is important only because it's Egypt and therefore must be desert. The jungle temple in the intro is in a jungle only because hidden temples are found in the jungle. Tatooine is a barren wasteland, and A New Hope is able to convey the sense that there is
nothing there except endless desert and harsh terrain (and none of that "I hate sand" obvious commentary). Hoth is a show of the total desperation the Alliance faces and in the early movie even emerges as an antagonist in its own right. Dagobah is a twisted, gnarled swamp that Luke must conquer in order to overcome his own twisted, gnarled impulses toward rage and hate and despair. Bespin is an impossible utopia, both in the sense that cities obviously can't float in the air, and that the utopia is a thin veneer over a bed of harsh industry and betrayal. Endor becomes an antagonist like Hoth with the speeder bike chase, and also demonstrates without the anvil dropping flavor of something like The Day After Tomorrow that nature fights back against human disruption and machinery.
And again, you can perfectly well not like something. I don't like the Ewoks, and I've never particularly liked Jabba's Palace (and even less the more successive releases come out), but calling them
bad is something I'm prepared to discuss at length in the opposite direction.
