obviously stripped of his armor, but his head is now in bandages, and his voice is muffled, so the camera can safely do full frontal views without spoiling the eternal mystery that is Boba Fett. To show his recuperation, as in Yojimbo, we see Fett practicing his knife-throwing work, a decidedly low-tech skill compared to his usual technological means of dispatching his enemies, but this just goes further to show that Fett is a multi-faceted killer. In Yojimbo, this is shown by Mifune staking tumbling leaves in the wind. Here, let’s have Fett stab some kind of desert dragonfly or something equally fast and impressive to hit instead. Greedo II comes by with C3PO’s head in tow. R2 connects 3PO’s head to a battery supply and 3PO comes to life with the usual mincing consternation at his bodily state (or rather disembodily state), but as protocol droid, he dutifully translates Greedo II’s speech: Watto has been captured, and Boba must come rescue him. Knowing full well he is walking into a trap, Boba demands Greedo’s blaster and aims at a particularly speedy and tiny dragonfly, Boba incinerates only the head, and the dragonfly’s body falls down. Boba tosses a knife as well, which cuts the dragonfly’s body down the middle before it hits the ground. FORESHADOWING!
We next see a montage of Boba prepping for the coming battle in Watto’s Inn, grabbing bits of junk and weaponry from here and there. Tellingly, one of these shots should include Boba grabbing 3PO’s carbon-scored chestplate, much to 3PO’s dismay.
At dawn, Boba emerges into the town thoroughfare, where Watto is hanging by shackles and baking in the Tattooine suns, his wings torn off, leaving bloody nubs, and generally looking like a beat-up mess. Let us borrow imagery now from RKO serials: Boba Fett should conjure up Karloff’s Mummy, walking a bit stiffly with a bandaged face, looking like a weird hybrid between the Mummy and Eastwood’s poncho-wearing stranger. Keep in mind the “poncho” are rags torn from the remains of Obi-Wan’s robes -- more rhyming!
The Hutt gang has been waiting for him, hiding in nooks and crannies of the various shops and structures. Unbeknownst to them, Boba can see them all using a makeshift thermographic monocle torn from 3PO’s optics. In Fistful, Eastwood taunts his foe to aim for the heart. Let’s have Boba Fett instead do a wordless open-armed invitation directing ammo towards his torso, once again invoking a mummy’s posture. The gang all shoots at Fett, seemingly felling him. They cheer at their easy victory.
After a beat, Boba rises, throwing everyone in shock. He unlatches 3PO’s chest plate from beneath his poncho which falls smoking to the ground with a satisfying “clang.” Before anyone can recover from this revelation, Boba throws an obviously home-made smoke bomb. In the confusion, he blasts several gang members with Greedo’s gun, throws a control bolt over to the gang’s sole remaining soldier bot, which latches magnetically, and allows Boba to remotely execute the remaining threats until Unosuke cleaves it in half with his evil red lightsaber. In Yojimbo, the antagonist has a fetish for the pistol in an age of swords. Here, it is reversed. The re-ignition of the Jedi school has brought a fetish for the lightsaber in an age of blasters and technology.
Unosuke taunts Boba. “Very clever, but your gadgets won’t save you from the edge of a light saber!” Boba tosses the remote control unit to the ground, removes the monocle and tosses it at R2D2, who catches it and begins reinstalling it into C3PO’s head, which is tetchy and impatient as ever. “Can’t you work faster? I can’t see what’s going on!” Boba fires at Unosuke with Greedo’s blaster, but Unosuke deftly parries the blasts with his lightsaber as he advances, until the ominous click of the trigger divorced from any blast tells everyone that he is out of ammo. Boba then throws his remaining technological armaments, some improvised grenades at Unosuke, who deflects the blast with his force skills. At last Boba, frustratingly out of gadgets, pulls out a knife. It is ancient cutlery versus even more ancient cutlery.
Boba and Unosuke adopt dueling stances. Here, let’s borrow from the visual language of samurai duels, with slow alternating POV cuts between adversaries gradually picking up speed as they advance upon each other. During these cuts we can see that Boba’s mummy-like stiffness was a ruse. He is back up to full level of agility on par with that of his cloned adversary. In the rhythm of such cutting there is a natural moment for a climax, but here, let’s move in one beat too early, having Boba kicking a secondary arrow-like blade from his boot and surprising both Unosuke and the audience by hitting Unuosuke in the wrist with it causing his concentration and grip on the lightsaber to falter as Boba stabs him in the heart with his primary knife.
Unosuke’s eyes, till this point a sick yellow color reminiscent of other dark side apprentices, turns white as he falls to the ground. Boba then turns his attention to Watto, picking up a dead henchman’s blaster and using it to dramatically free the Toydarian from his shackles by shooting them off (versus, say, simply unshackling him). Watto’s beat-up corpse then falls to the ground as Greedo II catches him in the same coffin he used to transport Boba. Boba passes R2, removes his control bolt, as well as the treasure he has been hiding, some kind of crystal or whatever (remember this is the Maltese Macguffin that everyone has been chasing). As Boba walks by, he wordlessly places the crystal in Watto’s hands, payment in full for Watto’s services. At this point you have a choice -- if you think Watto’s corpse is too dark an image to leave in the audience’s minds, you can leave the hint of a flutter of the eyelid, or a creep of a grin. Perhaps Watto has been faking his death! If you do choose to do this, let it be ambiguous and subtle, two things that a swashbuckling adventure serial such as Star Wars does indeed need to keep things in balance. The irony of the venal Watto being enriched in death works better without it, though. If not, you can still leaven the moment by having Greedo II attempt to pry the crystal from Watto’s fingers to no avail, as rigor mortis in Toydarians sets in phenomenally quickly.
Turning our attention back to Unosuke, he should call to Boba.
“Bounty hunter, one request…”
Unosuke’s weak attempts to pull the lightsabre back causes it to wiggle.
“My lightsaber. I feel naked without it”
In Yojimbo, Unosuke, given back his “manhood”, threatens Yojimbo one last time with an empty cartridge before expiring. Let’s do something different: when a wounded Unosuke asks for his light saber, Boba makes as if to give it to him, but instead activates it and cuts off Unosuke’s head.
In effect, Boba shoots first.
One last bit of business: the young kid from the beginning, who has been hiding in Boba’s armor, not having fired a single shot during the battle, is advanced upon by the owner of his gear. Boba retrieves his helmet and jet pack with no resistance, and barks at him, in a little bit of fourth-wall breaking that, “the show’s over. Go home!” (At this point, the movie has not only absorbed material from Kurosawa, Sergio Leone, Noir and Monster movies, it is now cribbing from Ferris Bueller’s Day off. Can we suggest Quentin Tarantino as director, someone with great skill at working with pastiche?)
At the end of Yojimbo, we see the anti-hero walk off into the sunset away from the town. Since Boba Fett has a jet pack, let’s have him fly off into the sunset, using a dance remix of the Ewoks jub-jub tribal song at the end of Return of the Jedi as the triumphant soundtrack.
On second thought, let’s not do that.
Often, in these last shots, we see the anti-hero walk off with his back to the audience. Let’s see what happens if we reverse this. A small figure emerges from the background of a run-down town. We see Boba filling more and more of the frame until just his helmet is visible, then we enter into the inky black of his visor, a satisfying visual bookend to the beginning of the movie. Cue credits, John Williams theme reprise.
So there you have it. A story fully lifted from a great movie remains a great story when transplanted to a long time ago in a galaxy far, far away. By taking the creativity out of the tale itself, and into the telling of the tale, we have a far better strategy for making a satisfying movie.
A SPECIAL EDITION VERSION OF THIS BOOK IS FORTHCOMING, SURE
TO BE AS ESSENTIAL AND INDESPENSIBLE AS THE SPECIAL EDITION VERSIONS OF STAR WARS
What If the Star Wars Sequels Were Based on a Kurosawa Movie Just Like the Original Star Wars? Page 4