Posted 17 May 2006 - 12:01 AM
If you want to ascribe blame for the worm, then blame one of the influences Lucas supposedly used for SW, Joseph Campbell, professor of mythological history and author of the book The Hero With A Thousand Faces, among others. The worm makes as much sense in the real world as does the whale in the Old Testament which swallowed Jonah to take him back to the city he didn't want to preach at, because God was calling the shots and you cannot avoid your destiny with him, because his plan for you will come to fruition no matter how hard you try to stray from it. So it is in the old Testament story and many others where characters intersect with the beast and are changed in some way by it.
5t works onscreen because as an audience, we don't expect something like that to exist or appear in the high tech universe we see before then. It reinforces the 'caves are spooky places filled with dangerous stuff' quality of storytelling and is a foreshadowing of a dark event Luke is witness to in another cave on Dagobah.
As for the lava fight, the rumor that was around many years before ROTScame out, indeed even before ROTJ was filmed, was that Obi Wan and Vader fight on a planet and make their way to a volcano where Obi Wan barely manages to overcome Vader at the last minute and Vader falls in, later to be saved by the Emperor. No 'lava planet' was mentioned nor was one needed to exist. If Obi Wan spotted the volcano on his approach to the planet upon landing and then realized 'Indiana Jones Style' that he could use the obstacle to a last desperate advantage to get rid of Vader and save himself, it would have been far more elegant and subdued than the all out lava fest on Mustafar we got.
And ROTS failed to deliver on one line that is rendered meaningless from ESB, mainly when Luke arrives at Dagobah and says "Still, there's something familiar about this place..." OK, GL, how? According to the events in ROTS, that would be beyond an impossibility.
And as for the abbreviated training, Obi Wan and later Yoda aren't training Luke to be another and perhaps last Jedi to take on Vader and the Emperor, they're turning a father against a son, or trying to coax Vader back from the Dark Side to set things right again. I know the Obi Wan line in ROTJ "he's more machine now than man' seems to contradict this, but for what we see during the first two films, an arguement can be made for it to be there. And the abbreviated training is more a fault of Luke's than either one of them.
And finally, the space worm makes more sense in the film than does the Rancor in ROTJ. Having a beast that big in a space so small would require more feedings than is implied, so much so that any sentient being in Jabba's court would say "I'm sorry Jabba, but the trap door in the floor routine every fifteen minutes is beyond state now, and I've just been here for three days. You'd think the stench of those before coming up from the grates would tip off the sluts you have chained before you before they fell in. Invest in a length of brass pole for some change of pace, dude....." After all, the biggest crime boss in the galaxy resides above where the fierce creature takes massive dumps which unless they smell like chocolate, must have made palace living a hell to say the least.